Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)

by Neal Stephenson

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations…may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —ROGER COTES, PREFACE TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S Principia Mathematica, SECOND EDITION, 1713

“Now the lads are torn every direction at once, like a prisoner being quartered. Or eighthed, or sixteenthed. I can already see it happening to young Ben out there, and soon it’ll happen to my own boy. ‘Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?’

Oh no!!

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

If this book weren’t so long, I would have my Ways of Knowing students read it as it truly makes you understand how knowledge is constructed…that sometimes creating a new way of describing something (that today we take for granted) allows another person (or multiple people) to think about the world in a different way. Insights are built on insights. I can tell them that, but discovering it for themselves is even better. And, of course, seeing how multiple people are thinking about the same thing and interacting with others who influence them…new thoughts don’t happen in a vacuum and they can occur almost simultaneously in multiple people. This book captures that excitement.

Drake would have said that merely to set foot in such people’s houses and show them common courtesy was to be complicit in their whole system of power.

Something we are struggling with today is a major theme in this book.

The force exerted on Saturn by the Sun was no different from that exerted by Titan. In the end, the two forces were added together to make a vector, a combined resultant force bearing no trace of its origins. It was a powerful kind of alchemy because it took the motions of heavenly bodies down from inaccessible realms and brought them within reach of men who had mastered the occult arts of geometry and algebra.

“The calculus is just a convenience, a short-hand way of doing geometry.”

Only small minds want always to be right. —LOUIS XIV