Had Newton Not Been There, Could Einstein Have Been?

 

Had Newton Not Been There, Could Einstein Have Been?

This is a write-up, indeed a counterfactual rumination; Isaac Newton did exist and so did Albert Einstein.

This post is the direct result of what I read in an article in the Times of India many months ago. It said Mohammed could not have started the religion of Islam without the rise of the Roman Catholic Church and its head, the Pope.

So, I thought, how about Newton without Ptolemy and his epicycles ... Einstein without Newton.

I listened to Prof. Richard Feynman in an invited lecture delivered at Cornell University when he was a professor at California Institute of Technology. He started out with how the ancients thought the Earth was going round the Sun−a large number of angels flapping their wings furiously behind the Earth along its orbit around the Sun and moving it.

The clincher was when Feynman claimed that it could as well have been that way; the only error in that thinking was the direction the angels were pushing the Earth; this happened to be perpendicular to the direction in which the Earth was moving at any instant. The direction was radial inwards and not tangential; that is, over one full revolution the direction would change continuously, feeding on the information from the previous instant and the Earth would occupy the position in space where it was one year ago.

Just think on the above. Isn’t this the way of calculus, keep moving incrementally through a distance (or a time interval) till you reach the point (or the instant in the future) you wished to be.  Let me ask the question: which one did Newton expound on first, gravity or calculus? I cannot say, you cannot say, a historian might be able to say but I doubt it.

A historian could give you the date on a calendar on which Newton proclaimed the theory of gravity, and another one for calculus. But, she could not claim to have been privy to his mental processes that gave rise to the two, which came first, and at which point and in which order the last piece snapped into the jigsaw puzzle.

That was a slight detour, but I believe necessary in the context of this write-up. Many apples must have fallen on the head of many over the eons till Newton came and sat under the apple tree on that fateful day. Do we credit the apple tree for Newton finding out the mechanism for the fruit to fall? No.

Had the apple not fallen on Newton’s head that evening, could Einstein have come out with the Special Theory of Relativity? An unanswerable question, if ever there was one.

Between Newton and Einstein there were numerous scientist of high calibre, if not with his dare. In fact Newton was big on the corpuscular theory of light. Given that he was a bigger name than Huygens who said light is a wave, no wonder Newton’s theory took hold. Einstein put paid to that: Michelson and Morley with their experiment and the surprising conclusion helped pave the way.

Now, I come to what Newton was supposed to have said: paraphrasing, he stood upon the shoulders of giants who came before him that let him see farther than they could. This is a surprising statement from Newton in the light of what we know about his character, egotism (self-importance and arrogance). I doubt very much he would have given any credit to his scientific forebears, including astronomers.

Einstein actually seems to have ignored particles as carriers of light energy. That is, he did not stand on the shoulders of Newton. One could say that Michelson, Morley, Boltzman, Lorentz, Poincare, Planck, all of them gave a hand, without their knowing, in lifting Einstein. While I have no beef with Einstein riding in the palanquin, the other scientists were not palanquin bearers. They had their own palanquins. Where was Newton, in Einstein’s horizon? I do not know.

I read in my elementary school that Emperor Asoka planted trees on roadsides. I did not think much on this then, merely a point to be remembered. But, the meaning I give to that deed now is very different. The emperor, even while riding a chariot with an umbrella over arcing over him could see that the other travellers needed shade. This was to his credit.

History, of anything, including the arts, more often than not should be narrated through incremental changes. It is OK to stand someone up as the person who shifted the paradigm, but the new paradigm itself should be remembered as a collective effort, with credit spread around.

One last memory test−who was the third astronaut on Apollo 11 who merely orbited the moon as Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon? You do not know? Good, that anchors the point I am trying to make. Without Michel Collins, Apollo 11 would not have blasted off from Cape Canaveral.  

I end with the following: history is not a compilation of disconnected events, as taught in high school history classes. It is a continuum, high school students, already academically overloaded cannot be taught the continuum. Yet, a balance can be achieved to an appropriate level of curiosity of a few students, mentioning in the class, that the history of science is not merely who found out/discovered/hypothesized what, when they wrote about it (though there are a few instances of Eureka type of realizations, such as X-Ray and Marie Curie) but how things came to be discovered.

Raghuram Ekambaram