Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)

by Neal Stephenson

Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

“And see to it that mathematics is brought to his attention.” “I do not think that he has the temperament to be a mere computer,” Clarke warned. “Sitting at his pages day after day, drudging out tables of logarithms, cube roots, cosines—” “Thanks to Descartes, there are other uses for mathematics now,” Enoch said. “Tell your brother to show the boy Euclid and let him find his own way.”

Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

Isaac hadn’t studied Euclid that much, and hadn’t cared enough to study him well. If he wanted to work with a curve he would instinctively write it down, not as an intersection of planes and cones, but as a series of numbers and letters: an algebraic expression. That only worked if there was a language, or at least an alphabet, that had the power of expressing shapes without literally depicting them, a problem that Monsieur Descartes had lately solved by (first) conceiving of curves, lines, et cetera, as being collections of individual points and (then) devising a way to express a point by giving its coordinates—two numbers, or letters representing numbers, or (best of all) algebraic expressions that could in principle be evaluated to generate numbers. This translated all geometry to a new language with its own set of rules: algebra. The construction of equations was an exercise in translation. By following those rules, one could create new statements that were true, without even having to think about what the symbols referred to in any physical universe. It was this seemingly occult power that scared the hell out of some Puritans at the time, and even seemed to scare Isaac a bit.

And speaking of winged objects, Daniel now felt himself being tickled, and glanced down to find half a dozen honeybees had alighted on each one of his hands. As Daniel watched in empirical horror, one of them drove its stinger into the fleshy place between his thumb and index finger. He bit his lip and looked up to see whether letting go the ladder would lead to the immediate death of Wilkins. The answer: yes.

“Latin.” “Latin!? But Latin is—” “I know, the universal language of scholars and divines, et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds so lovely, doesn’t it. You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”

“Your master taught you well—” “The ass taught me nothing,” Hooke said. “Anyone who is not a half-wit can learn all there is to know of painting, by standing in front of paintings and looking at them.

“Logic,” Leibniz said. “Logic has a dismal reputation among the higher primates in the Royal Society—” “Because they associate it with the Scholastic pedants who tormented them in university,” Leibniz said agreeably. “I’m not talking about that sort of thing! When I say logic, I mean Euclidean.” “Begin with certain axioms and combine them according to definite rules—” “Yes—and build up a system of laws that is as provable, and as internally consistent, as the theory of conic sections.”

In other words, he thinks that these creatures are no more rational than a trap, where an animal seizing a piece of bait pulls a string that fires a gun. A savage watching the trap kill the animal might suppose it to be rational. But the trap is not rational—the man who contrived the trap is. Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking—is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?” “You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?” “Suppose I had asked it, Doctor—what would your answer be?” “My answer, sir, is both.” “Both? But that’s impossible. It has to be one or the other.” “I do not agree with you, Mr. Waterhouse.” “If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking.” “But Mr. Waterhouse, you were raised by Puritans, who believe in predestination.” “Raised by them, yes…” Daniel said, and let it hang in the air for a while. “You no longer accept predestination?” “It does not resonate sweetly with my observations of the world, as a good hypothesis ought to.” Daniel sighed. “Now I see why Newton has chosen the path of Alchemy.” “When you say he chose that path, you imply that he must have rejected another. Are you saying that your friend Newton explored the idea of a mechanically determined brain, and rejected it?” “It may be he explored it, if only in his dreams and nightmares.” Leibniz raised his ...