艾萨克•牛顿爵士：魔术师的智慧

Sir Isaac Newton
艾萨克•牛顿爵士

Magician’s brain
魔术师的智慧

The real Sir Isaac Newton was not first king of reason, but last of the magicians
真实的艾萨克•牛顿爵士并不是理性时代的开国君主，而是最后的魔术师

Jun 21st 2014 | From the print edition


Man of measure
数学大师

The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts. By Sarah Dry. Oxford University Press; 272 pages; $29.95. Buy from Amazon.com

《牛顿文稿：艾萨克•牛顿手稿奇特真实的经历》，萨拉•德里，牛津大学出版社；272页，29.95英镑。

FEW scientists have had the influence of Sir Isaac Newton, who largely built the edifice of modern science. He was the first to formulate the laws of motion. He discovered and explained the law of gravity, and provided the theoretical framework through which the observations of Galileo Galilei and the planetary laws of Johannes Kepler could be understood. His experiments with sunlight and glass prisms and mirrors helped him understand the origin of colours and create a new kind of telescope. He invented calculus, independently of Gottfried Leibniz, feuding with him over who was first. And he was the first to postulate that the laws of physics would be the same all over the universe.

很少有科学家有艾萨克•牛顿爵士这样的影响力，他打造了现代科学的主要体系，他是总结运动定律的第一人，他发现并解释了万有引力定律，他提供的理论架构让伽利略•伽利莱的观察结果和约翰尼斯•开普勒的行星定律被人理解。他利用阳光、玻璃棱镜和反射镜所做的实验，帮助他明白了色彩的由来，发明了全新的望远镜。他独立于莱布尼兹发明了微积分，为谁是创始人产生争执。他还是第一个假设全宇宙遵循相同物理定律的人。

Newton’s genius was recognised while he was a young scholar at Cambridge. At the age of 26, he was made Lucasian professor of mathematics. By the time he died in 1727, at the ripe old age of 84, he had become a national icon: President of the Royal Society, and warden and master of the Royal Mint. He was interred in Westminster Abbey.

牛顿还是剑桥大学的年轻学者时，他的天才就得到了世间的认可。在26岁的年纪，他成为卢卡斯数学教授。1727年以84岁的高龄去世时，牛顿已是全民偶像：他担任了英国皇家学会会长，皇家造币厂的督查和主管，最终安葬于威斯敏斯特大教堂。

As befits a man of such prodigious reputation, Newton left behind a voluminous trove of papers: more than 7m words filling hundreds of notebooks and loose sheets of paper. These included drafts of successive editions of his crowning achievement, “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, as well as his treatise on light, “Opticks”. There were also letters to scientists and other scholars, pages of derivations of mathematics and physics formulae, and copious writings on alchemy and religion. The solitary and eccentric Newton apparently saved everything he wrote; among his papers are recipes for ink that he scribbled as a scholar at Cambridge. But he was reticent about publishing his work, fearing controversy and criticism (his fight with Leibniz over calculus had made him extra-sensitive). At his death, more than half of his writings were unpublished, including all his thoughts on religion and alchemy.

作为荣誉等身的大师，牛顿身后留下卷帙浩繁的文稿：超过700万字的数百本笔记和散乱的手稿。这些文稿包括他最辉煌的成就，接连再版的《自然哲学的数学原理》的草稿，以及他的光学论文《光学》。包括写给科学家和其他学者的信件，推导数学和物理公式的纸页，炼金术和宗教的论著。显而易见，个性孤僻古怪的牛顿保留了他写下的所有东西；他的文稿中还有墨水的配方，这是他担任剑桥学者期间写下的草稿。但是他对于出版自己的著作颇为谨慎，担心外界的争议和批评（他与莱布尼茨关于微积分的争斗让他格外敏感）。离开人世之际，他的半数著作尚未出版，包括他关于宗教和炼金术的所有思想。

Sarah Dry’s engaging book, “The Newton Papers”, traces what happened to Newton’s unpublished manuscripts after his death. A lifelong bachelor, Newton died without leaving a will. His papers were inherited by John Conduitt, who had married Newton’s closest relative and housekeeper, his half-niece Catherine Barton. Conduitt started an effort to publish a biography of Newton, but in the end it was unsuccessful. As Ms Dry makes clear, Conduitt had a vested interest in guarding Newton’s reputation as a paragon of science. Conduitt probably recognised the explosive nature of Newton’s religious writings, which showed him to favour the doctrine of one God, denying the unity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Such anti-Trinitarianism would have been considered heretical by Newton’s contemporaries. It was common at the time for Cambridge faculty members (all of them men) to take holy orders in the Church of England; Newton, true to himself, refused.

萨拉•德里引人入胜的新书《牛顿文稿》追溯了牛顿未出版的手稿在他死后的遭遇。牛顿终身未娶，去世时没有留下遗嘱。他的文稿由约翰•康杜特继承，康杜特娶了牛顿的至亲和管家、他的外甥女凯瑟琳•巴顿。康杜特设法出版牛顿的传记，但是最终并未成功。正如德里阐明的那样，康杜特出于既得利益捍卫牛顿作为科学典范的声誉。康杜特可能认识到牛顿宗教著作的轰动本质，这些作品表明他信奉一个上帝的教义，拒绝承认圣父、圣子和圣灵的三位一体。这种反三位一体论被牛顿同时代的人视为异端学说。在那个时代，剑桥大学的教员（均为男性）通常会接受英国教会的圣职，牛顿却忠于自己，拒绝任圣职。

After Conduitt and his wife died, Newton’s papers passed to the family of the Earls of Portsmouth, and there they remained for the best part of 150 years. Ms Dry catalogues what happened to Newton’s manuscripts through three centuries, how they were sold, dispersed and then partially reunited through the efforts of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who developed a fascination with Newton’s alchemical writings, and Abraham Yahuda, a Jewish rabbinical scholar who was interested in Newton’s theological explanations. Ms Dry explains how 19th-century Cambridge luminaries, such as George Gabriel Stokes (who, like Newton, became the Lucasian professor) and John Couch Adams (who used Newtonian mechanics to predict the existence of the planet Neptune) struggled with Newton’s manuscripts, in the hope that they would yield further insight into the great man’s thinking. However, the vastness of the archive and its often abstruse nature thwarted easy categorisation.

康杜特和他的妻子去世后，牛顿的文稿传到了朴茨茅斯伯爵家族，此后150年的大部分时间里都保存在那里。德里列出了牛顿手稿在三个世纪的经历，这些手稿如何被出售、四处流散，后经约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯和亚伯拉罕•亚胡达的努力得以部分重聚，这位英国经济学家对牛顿的炼金术著作尤为着迷，而犹太拉比学者对牛顿的神学解释颇感兴趣。德里解释了19世纪的剑桥名人如何对待牛顿的手稿，比如乔治•加布里埃尔•斯托克斯（他像牛顿一样成为卢卡斯教授）和约翰•柯西•亚当斯（他利用牛顿力学原理预测海王星的存在），他们希望能够深入了解这位大师的思想而获益。但是，卷帙浩繁的文稿及其深奥难懂的特质，让人们难以简单地分门别类。

The Newton that emerges from the manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. The truth is that Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.

从这些手稿中浮现的牛顿形象并非深入人心的理性实践者，致力于冷酷而纯粹的理性。这位现代科学的缔造者本人没有多少现代色彩。他痴迷于炼金术，花几个小时抄写炼金配方，设法在实验室里重现炼金术。他相信圣经包含命理的密码。实际上，牛顿更多地是他那个时代的产物。凯恩斯在阅读牛顿未出版的手稿后写道，这位科学巨人不是理性时代的开国君主，而是“最后的魔术师”。
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萨拉•德里引人入胜的新书《牛顿文稿》追溯了牛顿未出版的手稿在他死后的遭遇。牛顿终身未娶，去世时没留下遗嘱。文稿由约翰•康杜特继承。他可能认识到牛顿宗教著作的轰动本质，这些作品表明他信奉一个上帝的教义，拒绝承认圣父、圣子和圣灵的三位一体。这种反三位一体论被牛顿同时代的人视为异端学说

2>牛顿还是剑桥的年轻学者时，其天才就得到了世间的认可。在26岁的年纪成为卢卡斯数学教授。以84岁的高龄去世时，牛顿已是全民偶像：他担任了英国皇家学会会长，皇家造币厂的督查和主管，最终安葬于威斯敏斯特大教堂。作为荣誉等身的大师，牛顿身后留下卷帙浩繁的文稿：超过700万字的数百本笔记和手稿