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“A BOOK NOBODY UNDERSTANDS” (5)

It was a fortunate choice. No sooner had Newton presented his first installment than Robert Hooke raised his all-too-familiar cry of theft. He claimed to have formulated the inverse square law six years earlier, which he had communicated in a letter to Newton. While it is true that Hooke had corrected a rare blunder Newton made regarding the path of a falling body, this was a far stretch from proving that the greater the distance between a planet and the sun the less intense the gravitational attraction between them. In addressing Hooke’s claim that Newton had stolen from him, the eighteenth- century French scientist Alexis Claude Clairaut later observed, “what a distance there is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated.”

Newton was predictably outraged when word of Hooke’s charge reached him in Cambridge. He immediately dashed off an angry letter to Halley in which he threatened to withhold the rest of the Principia. “Philosophy is such an impertinently litigous Lady,” he wrote, “that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do with her. I found it so formerly, and now I am no sooner come near to her again, but she gives me warning.”

Tall, dark-eyed, soft of face and manner, Halley was a presence pleasing to almost everyone. Despite many frustrations, his treatment of Newton was unwavering, ever polite and respectful from their first meeting to their last letter, a relationship destined to endure forty more years. He moved swiftly to calm the troubled waters. All Hooke desired, Halley wrote Newton, was to be mentioned in the preface of the Principia. It would be a fine gesture on Newton’s part, and one that would cost him nothing. A still infuriated Newton reacted by going over his manuscript and crossing
out every reference to Hooke. With that the storm passed and Newton agreed to go ahead with publication.

The Principia was not an easy book to read in Newton’s day, nor is it now. After it was published, Newton was passed on the street by a student who is said to have remarked, “There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.”The same would be said of Einstein when his papers on the theory of relativity were published some 250 years later.

Taken From : Isaac Newton