John Mitchinson - The Book of the Dead

Despite these personal failures, the public man was a notable success. He was the first natural philosopher to be knighted and was for many years president of the Royal Society despite achieving nothing of great scientific worth after 1696. In that year, he accepted the post of warden of the Royal Mint. Instead of accepting this as the purely honorific position it was meant to be, Newton took his new role very seriously and attacked it with his customary fanaticism. He spent his days reforming the currency to save the British economy from collapse. In the evenings he lurked in bars and brothels tracking down counterfeiters—whom he then personally arranged to have hanged, drawn, and quartered. He was twice elected MP for Cambridge University but the job held no interest for him; the only comment he made during his entire political career was a request for someone to open the window.

But Newton also had a second, secret life. He was a practicing alchemist. Of the 270 books in his library, more than half were about alchemy, mysticism, and magic. In the seventeenth century, alchemy was considered heresy and a hanging offense. In conditions of utmost secrecy, he spent the bulk of his working life trying to calculate the date of the end of the world as encoded in the Book of Revelation, unravel the meaning of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, and relate the chronology of human history to the population cycle of the locust. Rather like Freud assuming he would be feted as a great scientist, Newton believed that it would be for his religious theories, rather than for his work on optics or motion, that he would be remembered. After his death, Newton’s family discovered vast trunks of these religious and mystical writings containing more than a thousand pages covered with 1.5 million words of notes, as well as two completed books. They were so embarrassed about them that they either destroyed them or kept them hidden without admitting to their existence. A huge cache came to light as recently as 1936.

It would be easy to dismiss Newton’s mystical writings as the ravings of a man who had lost his intellectual bearings. In fact, it was his belief in a creator-god that “governs all things and knows all that is or can be done” that drove his scientific breakthroughs as well as his biblical and alchemical studies. Had he not been open to the notion of an unseen mystical force controlling the universe, he might not have made his most famous discovery: the mathematical proof of the existence of gravity.

If Newton paid for his lonely, fatherless childhood with a debilitating social awkwardness, it also left him peculiarly equipped for intense, solitary work. The mathematician and engineer Oliver Heaviside(1850–1925) provides an even more extreme example of this. While not quite in the Newtonian league in terms of scientific achievement, without Heaviside we would have no long-distance telephones and a much less precise understanding of the behavior of electrical and magnetic fields. Though he isn’t a household name, Heaviside did for electromagnetism what Newton did for gravity: describing observable physical phenomena using mathematical equations.

Heaviside was born into poverty in Camden Town, London. His father was a gifted engraver, producing the woodcuts that illustrated the serialization of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in the Strand magazine, but the house was poky, cold, and dark, with most of the windows boarded up because of the window tax. Thomas Heaviside was prone to violent outbursts and tended to pick on Oliver, the youngest of his four sons, because he refused to behave like other children. Some of this was due to Oliver’s partial deafness, caused by catching scarlet fever as a toddler, but the following heartbreakingly short school essay by the young Heaviside paints a dismal picture of life at home:

The following story is true—There was a little boy, and his father said, “Do try to be like other people, don’t frown.” And he tried and tried but he could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions.

His deafness also meant it was hard for him to play easily with other children, so he attended the all-girls school run by his mother. He disliked most academic subjects but was encouraged in a love of science by his uncle, Charles Wheatstone, one of the inventors of the telegraph. As a result, he was regularly at the top in the natural sciences but near the bottom in geometry, which he hated because it only involved learning proofs: There was no room for innovation. Even as a child, Heaviside preferred to work on his own and his faith in his ability to solve problems alone often appeared boastful to his classmates. This was to cost him dearly later in his life.

He left school at sixteen but continued to study hard, teaching himself Morse code, German, and Danish. Through his uncle, he got a job at the newly formed Great Northern Telegraph Company based first in Denmark and then at Newcastle. It was to be the first and last paid job Heaviside ever had.

He started well enough, devising a clever system for locating the precise damage in a telegraph wire using mathematical formulas. But then he overdid it by asking for a huge pay raise. When this was refused, his response was to announce his retirement—at the age of just twenty-four. His family and colleagues were horrified, but this was to be the pattern of his life from then on—people admired his dazzling intellect but found him touchy and hard to read. Just as Newton had retreated to the fens at the same age, Heaviside moved back to the family home in London, barricaded himself in a gloomy upstairs room, and dedicated himself to private study. His subject was the brilliant but impenetrable work of the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, whose Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism had just been published:

I saw that it was great, greater, and greatest, with prodigious possibilities in its power. I was determined to master the book. I was very ignorant. I had no knowledge of mathematical analysis (having learned only school algebra and trigonometry which I had largely forgotten) and thus my work was laid out for me. It took me several years before I could understand as much as I possibly could. Then I set Maxwell aside and followed my own course. And I progressed much more quickly.

Heaviside emerged with something extraordinary. He had reduced the twenty equations in which Maxwell described how electric and magnetic fields behave down to just four. These, perhaps rather unfairly, are known as Maxwell’s equations and are one of the cornerstones of modern physics. They inspired Einstein to call Maxwell the greatest physicist since Newton, but it was Heaviside’s work that had made them intelligible.

Heaviside spent most of the next thirty years locked in his room, surfacing only for long solitary walks. His family would leave trays of food outside his door, but when he was deeply immersed in work he could survive for days on nothing more than bowls of milk. His deafness worsened and he suffered from a condition he called hot and cold disease, in which a fear of hypothermia led him to wrap himself in several layers of blankets and wear a tea cozy on his head. He also kept the temperature of his room so high that most visitors started to feel faint after a few minutes in his company.

Despite these eccentricities, the work he produced continued to amaze and baffle. He devised a new form of calculus that is now considered one of the three most important mathematical discoveries of the late nineteenth century. He solved the problem of how to send and receive messages down the same telegraph line, and how to transmit an electromagnetic signal over a long distance without distortion. This was patented in the United States by AT&T in 1904 and long-distance telephone calls became a reality. In an article for Encyclopedia Britannica in 1902, Heaviside predicted the existence of a conducting layer in the earth’s atmosphere that would allow radio waves to follow the curve of the earth. It was eventually discovered in 1923 and named the Heaviside layer in his honor.