Author: E.

John Maynard Keynes: Newton, the Man (1946)

It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you today is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.*

One other preliminary matter. I believe that Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more extraordinary, than the nineteenth century cared to make him out. Geniuses are very peculiar. Let no one here suppose that my object today is to lessen, by describing, Cambridge’s greatest son. I am trying rather to see him as his own friends and contemporaries saw him. And they without exception regarded him as one of the greatest of men.

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.

I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

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Observation of the sunspots: history

The earliest record of sunspots is found in the Chinese I Ching, completed before 800 BC. The text describes that a dou and mei were observed in the sun, where both words refer to a small obscuration.

The earliest record of a deliberate sunspot observation also comes from China, and dates to 364 BC, based on comments by astronomer Gan De (甘德) in a star catalogue. By 28 BC, Chinese astronomers were regularly recording sunspot observations in official imperial records.

The first clear mention of a sunspot in Western literature is circa 300 BC, by ancient Greek scholar Theophrastus, student of Plato and Aristotle and successor to the latter.

The earliest known drawings of sunspots were made by English monk John of Worcester in December 1128. However, these observations were also misinterpreted as planetary transits:

“In the third year of Lothar, emperor of the Romans, in the twenty-eighth year of King Henry of the English…on Saturday, 8 December, there appeared from the morning right up to the evening two black spheres against the sun“. –  John of Worcester.

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Sunspots were first observed telescopically in December 1610 by English astronomer Thomas Harriot. His observations were recorded in his notebooks and were followed in March 1611 by observations and reports by Frisian astronomers Johannes and David Fabricius. After Johannes Fabricius’ death at the age of 29, his reports remained obscure and were eclipsed by the independent discoveries of and publications about sunspots by Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei. Galileo likely began telescopic sunspot observations around the same time as Harriot; however, Galileo’s records did not start until 1612.

In the early 19th Century, William Herschel was one of the first to equate sunspots with heating and cooling on Earth and believed that certain features of sunspots would indicate increased heating on Earth. During his recognition of solar behavior and hypothesized solar structure, he inadvertently picked up the relative absence of sunspots from July 1795 to January 1800 and was perhaps the first to construct a past record of observed or missing sunspots. From this he found that the absence of sunspots coincided with high wheat prices in England. The president of the Royal Society commented that the upward trend in wheat prices was due to monetary inflation. Years later scientists such as Richard Carrington in 1865 and John Henry Poynting in 1884 tried and failed to find a connection between wheat prices and sunspots, and modern analysis finds that there is no statistically significant correlation between wheat prices and sunspot numbers.