Oh, Hooke. His spine started to curve in adolescence, and got progressively worse. This, put together with the fact that he was Always Doing Science (or rebuilding London with Wren after the Great Fire), did not make him much for the dating scene. His solution to this was to bed pretty much every maid he took in, and when those were lacking he took in his niece, waited until she was 15 or so, and then started in on her too. Yeah. It’s in his diary, so it’s not like some story spread by followers of Huygens or Newton or Leibniz or Hevelius or Oldenburg or any of the other Rest of the Scientific Community whom Hooke had pissed off at some point or another. So, that’s an interesting biographical fact right there…
Theda Bara… When I was in college I started writing a novella in which God or the Devil (I can’t recall which) hired a man to round up various entertainers from the 20s and 30s to bring them to Heaven / Hell before they died so that the other side wouldn’t get them. Yeah, I’m a little sketchy on the plot details, but the lineup was I think Caruso, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Theda Bara, Buster Keaton, Fanny Brice, and Houdini. As usual, I spent a couple of months researching it all in my spare bits of time, and never wrote the full story, but nothing is wasted in life, and here Theda Bara has returned in all of her glory.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
First of all, I added a Hooke biography and a general Royal Society And Its Predecessors book to the science section of our Good Reads page, so swing on by!
Second, if the cashing of checks is any indication, it looks like our application for Emerald City 2012 has been accepted! We had an absolutely phenomenal time at the 2011 show – I think all I did the second day there was sketch and eat handfuls of specialty flavored popcorn that Art would bring over by way of nourishment. Best time ever. Of course, if you can’t wait that long, we’ll be at APE in San Francisco on October 1st and 2nd – just two short months away!
Last time, we focused on a lot of the things Hooke totally discovered or perfected. It is a substantial and impressive list that entirely qualifies him, I think, to at least be in the running for the title he has given himself in today’s comic of the Greatest Experimental Philosopher of all time. There are some pretty strong contenders in the field though, so I can’t say whether he’d win it. I figure I’ll open a discussion over on Facebook and we can thrash it out there. But, suffice to say, there was a bunch of stuff that he said he had invented that he didn’t. This included “hundreds of approaches” to the secret of flight, a parallax proof of the motion of the Earth, the proof that inverse square laws necessitate elliptical motion, and the solution to the longitude problem.
For those looking to take a break from seventeenth century scientific one-upsmanship, I have been finding the rap battle between Ludwig van Beethoven and Justin Bieber eminently satisfying.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
There were two major conflicts between Newton and Hooke – over light, and over gravity. Hooke had been experimenting with light during his work with constructing better and better lenses and telescopes, and came up with a brilliant explanation for why light going through a prism refracts into different colors. He thought that the medium interacting with the light created the colors from nothing. Then Newton, who was previously unknown to the Royal Society where Hooke was a central member, sent in HIS ideas about light, and particularly his experiments which he felt concluded definitively that the colors were already part of the white light to begin with. In the same paper, he ventured the proposition that light was made of particles by way of a second train of thought. Hooke felt threatened, and pounced on the younger man’s paper, mocking it pretty savagely, mistakenly tying the particle theory to the separation theory, so that discrediting the one, he thought, would discredit the latter. Newton wrote back in an understandable huff, saying that the particle theory had nothing really to do with his results for white light, and even offering an improvement to Hooke’s wave theory that Hooke later incorporated (the idea of wavelength being tied to color). It was a harsh introduction to the Royal Society, and Newton kept his distance from it for another twenty years after that, while Hooke went on to have equally distinguished arguments with Hevelius, Huygens, and Leibniz.
They eventually reconciled, as much as two such bitterly sensitive men could, and we shouldn’t forget that Newton’s statement about Standing On The Shoulders of Giants was written to Hooke, by way of acknowledging the work that he did.
The gravity story is a bit more twisted, with honest misunderstandings being fed by less than honest hangers-on on both sides. The facts are that Newton discovered the Inverse Square Law before Hooke did, but kept it secret, and in fact in his letters to Hooke and others pretended that Gravity worked on a simple inverse relation just to hold onto the secret. But, he felt that planetary motion was the result of centrifugal forces proposed by Huygens, and did not change his view until Hooke published his work hypothesizing that the motion of planets was due to linear movement being deflected inwards by a constantly acting centripetal force. He sat on that for a while, too, and didn’t start acting upon it until Halley asked Wren, Hooke, and Newton separately whether they could prove that elliptical orbits resulted from gravity being taken as an inverse square law. Hooke and Newton both said they had the proof (neither did) and then feverishly set about proving it. Hooke did a few experiments that he thought settled the matter, and moved on to other things, as Hooke always did, and Newton sat down and invented Calculus and then Modern Physics in the space of two years, culminating in 1686 with the Principia.
As soon as the Principia was read aloud to the Royal Society, Hooke started protesting that Newton got both the inverse square law and the notion of centripetally acting forces from him. He was wrong about the inverse square law, and unfortunately for himself, that is what he focused on in all of his future protestations. Hooke’s enemies in the Society communicated and exaggerated these claims of Hooke to Newton, who then struck the older scientist’s name from the third volume of the Principia in frustration. Hooke took many opportunities from then on out to reassert his claim to primacy with the laws of gravity, but nobody paid him much heed on this front. But it would be an exaggeration to say that Hooke was consumed by jealousy for Newton – he had too much other stuff to do to be weighted down for long by the Newton squabble. Hooke was right in asserting that Newton should have given him fair credit for the notion of centripetally acting forces. Newton was right in having come up with the inverse square law independently, but he was so secretive that Hooke can’t be blamed for thinking himself the originator of that law. And Newton was right that, no matter who came up with the idea of centripetal force or the inverse square law, it was his painstaking mathematical analysis that made the Principia the world-shattering event it was.
But you have to feel sorry for Hooke – this happened to him So Many Times. People were claiming his inventions for their own constantly, and most of the time he was right in his protestations, but nobody believed him because, after all, how could one man have invented so much? But he did – his own supernatural ability and fecundity worked against him, and so, instead of being given credit every once in a while, he was written off as a credit-seeking hack. But the man had talents, as we shall see NEXT WEEK!!!
– Count Dolby von Luckner