Cosmic Religion: How Science
Does God
Follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost
bounds of human thought, beyond the sunset, and the
baths of all the western stars.
Alfred, Lord TennysonIf you think of Isaac Newton, what image comes to mind? Is
it an upright man with Restoration curls who, prism in hand,
calmly explains the splitting of light to an attentive audience? Is
it a dishevelled sage with tatty cuffs who, lost in thought under
a tree, is hit by a falling apple and – eureka!? Is it a desiccated
don who, prowling the cloisters like a wild beast, has reduced
everything to an equation in his masterpiece, the Principia? Or
is it a sulphur-soiled alchemist who, half mad with mercury poi-
soning, distills reason as a mere by-product of the true search
for the elixir of life?
The empiricist philosopher, David Hume, preferred some-
thing like the fi rst: ‘In Newton this island may boast of having
produced the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the
ornament and instruction of the species,’ he wrote in his History
of England. The romantic idea of genius is represented by the
second image. It sees the apple as emblematic of the sudden
moment of radical breakthrough: ‘A ripe fruit fall from some
immortal tree/ Of knowledge ... ’, wrote the poet Alfred Noyes.
The third, more ambivalent image is perhaps more like Keats’,
when he sighed, ‘Do not all charms fl y/ At the mere touch of
cold philosophy?’
And fi nally, there is Newton the alchemist, the man who
worried more about crucibles and symbols than calculus and
science. ‘Newton was not the fi rst of the age of reason. He