January 6, 1989

THE NEW FEDERALIST

Page 7

Behind the News

On the 'Confession' of Sir Isaac Newton

PHILOSOPHY
by Robert L. Gallagher

Sir Isaac Newton, from the frontispiece to his Principia Mathematica, first
published in 1686. The geometrical construction shown here comes from
Book I of the Principia Mathematica, "The Motion of Bodies," Proposition LV,
Theorem XIX. In the drawing, BKL is a curved surface and T is a body (or,
as Newton calls it, a weight) revolving in the surface.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) admitted in his correspondence that the

reason his "system of the world" is organized like a clock that is running
down, is because of the choice of mathematics he made in devising it. This
statement contains the hint that use of another type of mathematics would
not have yielded a universe that appears to be dying. It also raises some

questions about the foundations of mathematical analysis. Let's take a look

at Newton's "system of the world," specifically his Law of Gravitation, and
evaluate just what sort of assumptions it makes about the nature of the
world.
In Principia Mathematica, Sir Isaac freely admits that the empirical basis of
his work is the laws of planetary motion discovered by Johannes Kepler;
they are:
1) All planets travel about the Sun in ellipses which all share one focus
located at the position of the Sun.
2) A straight line from a planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas of the
ellipse per unit time in the planet's motion about the Sun, no matter where
the planet is in its orbit, nor how fast it is traveling (dA/dt = 0).
3) The ratio of the three-halves power of the average distance of a planet
from the Sun, to the time it takes to make a complete orbit, is equal to a
constant that is the same for all planets [(R3/2)/T = k]. This is called Kepler's
"harmonic law."
Newton vs. Kepler
Now, these statements appear to be straightforward, descriptive characterizations of planetary orbits. There appears to be nothing imbedded in them that
would imply that the universe is running down. What's all the fuss?
Kepler's harmonic law shows that the positions of the planetary orbits and
the time the planets take to orbit the Sun, are not arbitrary, but are determined together harmonically. The planets had to have been formed in the
positions at which they are located, with the angular velocities each one has,
etc. Together with Kepler's notion that the Solar System originated from a
vortex of fluid, his harmonic law was a significant step in developing man's
comprehension of the order of creation.
Newton rejected the notion that creation is coherent; he held instead that it
must descend into disorder, from which God rescues it. The papers Newton
and his associate Samuel Clarke produced in response to criticisms from
Gottfried Leibniz state: "The present frame of the Solar System, according
to the present laws of motion, will in time fall into confusion, and will
perhaps, after that, be amended and put into a new form."

Despite Newton's beliefs, however, Kepler's descriptive laws held true. How
could Newton transform them to produce "laws" that would describe a
universe heading towards disorder?
A series of well-known mathematical transformations produce Newton's law
of gravitation from Kepler's laws (see, for example, Peter van der Kamp,
Elements of Astromechanics). Newton took the constant k in Kepler's third
lawwhich is nothing but the harmonic invariance of the "vortex" of the
solar system and named it "mass." Since the Newtonian system assumes
that nature only exhibits two-body interactions, it breaks Kepler's harmonic
law down into two masses, the mass of a central body M and the mass of a
satellite m [so that Kepler's law becomes (R3/2) / T = R (M + m)]. From
this and other gobbledygook comes Newton's law of gravitation: F = - G (M
+ m) / R2.
Phony Causality
Unlike Kepler's laws, which are purely descriptive, Newton's laws are
framed so that they appear to express something about the causes of things.
They imply that the "cause" for the revolution of a planet about the Sun, is
the gravitational interaction of the planet's mass with that of the Sun. In this
way, Newton turned Kepler's world harmony into an "it" and vested transient
matter or "mass" with a metaphysical power, gravitational "force." He made
mere creatures the first causes of thingsreducing the order of the universe
to the level of their mortality and corruptibility.
Leibniz showed that the disorder in Newton's system comes from Newton's
materialist notion of God. He ridicules Newton in papers written to the
Princess of Wales: "Sir Isaac and his followers have a very odd opinion
concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty
wants (i.e., needs) to wind up His watch from time to time; otherwise, it [the
universe] would cease to move. . . . I maintain it to be a watch that goes
without needing to be mended by Him. . . . God has foreseen everything. He
has provided a remedy for everything beforehand. There is in His work, a
harmony, a beauty, already pre-established."
Newton's system is unharmonious. Not only does it wind down, but because
he has vested a mere creatureplanetary and terrestrial masswith determining powers, his mathematics predicts infinite gravitational force to be in
the vicinity of a localized mass. Newton's system is fundamentally unintelligible.

What's the Mathematics?

This calls into question the soundness of the mathematics by which Newtonian physics is derived from Kepler's laws. This mathematics consists of
analytical transformations that reshape descriptive statements into causal
statements about forces, mass, etc.; it represents the bulk of what is regarded as mathematics today, under the euphemistic title of "real analysis."
Maxwell used the same sort of mathematics in putting together his electrodynamics. Its most outrageous use, however, is in thermodynamics, which
pretends to be able to measure the quantity of "disorder" in the universe.
The 19th-century Gttingen mathematician Lejeune Dirichlet appropriately
dismissed such use of mathematics as "a return to the nature philosophy" of
the German Romantics.
Such mathematics is not rigorous; it is without foundation. It inspires us to
prefer the geometrical physics of Kepler and Gaspard Monge, to the fantasies of mathematicians.
Some may say, "That's very interesting, but these formulas seem to work,
and to be very helpful to engineers. They must be right!" But engineers
would be well advised to return to the method of geometrical physics
developed by the founders of their workLeonardo da Vinci, Monge, and
Carnot; (see Monge's "Statics," translated into English under the sponsorship of the U.S. Coast Guard during the 19th century when rigorous thinking
was not frowned on).
Second, if in the very narrow range of physical phenomena that lie within
our experience, some algebraic formula that expresses a metaphysical
principle (such as the "law" of the conservation of energy), appears to hold
true, this is only evidence of a peculiar statistical correlation among
variables, and is neither science, nor physics, but more akin to sociology.
The kind of reasoning that underlies such "laws," guided Hegel in his
famous proof that there can be no planetary body between Mars and Jupiter.
He submitted this for his Ph.D. thesis some months after the asteroid Ceres,
unbeknownst to him, had been discovered whence the meaning of
"Ph.D.": Piled Higher and Deeper.