Simple Nature - Light and Matter

Chapter 8Atoms and Electromagnetism8.1 The Electric GlueWhere the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the twohas the grander view?Victor HugoHis father died during his mother’s pregnancy. Rejected by heras a boy, he was packed off to boarding school when she remarried.He himself never married, but in middle age he formed an intenserelationship with a much younger man, a relationship that he terminatedwhen he underwent a psychotic break. Following his earlyscientific successes, he spent the rest of his professional life mostlyin frustration over his inability to unlock the secrets of alchemy.The man being described is Isaac Newton, but not the triumphantNewton of the standard textbook hagiography. Why dwell on thesad side of his life? To the modern science educator, Newton’s lifelongobsession with alchemy may seem an embarrassment, a distractionfrom his main achievement, the creation the modern science ofmechanics. To Newton, however, his alchemical researches were naturallyrelated to his investigations of force and motion. What wasradical about Newton’s analysis of motion was its universality: itsucceeded in describing both the heavens and the earth with thesame equations, whereas previously it had been assumed that the453