32 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2019
instant hit. On January 20, 1665,
Samuel Pepys, clerk of the Royal Navy
and future president of the Royal
Society, sat up reading his new copy
until 2 A.M. Pepys declared Hooke’s
work “the most ingenious book that
ever I read in my life.”
But Hooke also tried to take on the
great Newton. In the early 1670s, Hooke
proposed the idea that the planets were
held in place by a force inversely propor-
tional to their distance from the Sun.
Newton apparently had the same idea as
early as 1666, but hadn’t published his
work. In the summer of 1684, Hooke,
Halley, and the English architect and
astronomer Christopher Wren discussed
the inverse square law over strong coffee
without satisfactory results. Halley went
up to Cambridge to see if Newton had
any ideas. The resulting meeting lit a fire
under Newton, culminating in the publi-
cation of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica in 1687.
Hooke was every bit as obstinate
as Newton. When the manuscript of
Principia made its appearance at a meet-
ing of the Royal Society on April 28,
1686, Hooke had a lot to say. After a con-
tentious meeting, the members removed
to a local coffee house. There Hooke
stated that he had discovered the inverse
square law and had hinted at this discov-
ery in a letter to Newton. Hooke wanted
credit for the idea. Halley wrote to
Newton to find out the truth. In his
reply, Newton claimed that Hooke had
stolen this idea by way of letters sent
from Newton to the Dutch scientist
Christiaan Huygens.
The war of words became increas-
ingly bitter when they argued over color
and the nature of light. Newton, how-
ever, struck the final blow. Hooke died
in 1703. Later that same year, Newton
became president of the Royal Society.
One of his first acts was having the only
portrait of Hooke destroyed. He also had
a great deal of Hooke’s archived papers
and research removed from the society.
Fortunately, much of Hooke’s work was
eventually recovered.
Newton turned on or argued with
nearly everyone in the scientific commu-
nity of the time. Most famous were his
efforts to prove his discovery of calculus.
The German mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz published his work on calculusOn this page from Newton’s essay on color vision, “Of Colours,” he describes an experiment in which
he deformed the shape of his own eye using a blunt needle, to observe the effects on his sight.
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