Sky & Telescope October 2001 [antikvár]

My Hero, the TyrantOn my first trip to London 23 years ago, I was wandering through Westminster Abbey when I happened to look down at my feet. The large flagstone on which I stood was inscribed in Latin: Hie deposi-tutu est Quod Mar tale fuit Isaaci Newtotti. Below me the great master lay in eternal sleep. For one who had just graduated from college with a degree in physics, this was hallowed ground. Tears welled up in my eyes.A few years later my esteem for Isaac Newton was eroded a bit by astronomer-historian Owen Gingerich. During a lecture at Harvard University he touched on Newton's famous statement, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." I had always assumed this was in homage to the likes of Galileo and Kepler, who set the stage for Newton's development of the l^ws of motion and universal gravitation. But ttj^^uote comes from a letter to Robert Hooke, Jvlore likely, Newton was taking a mean-spirited jab at Hooke's own contributions to physics. Hooke, you see, was a hunchback.Could my hero really have been so nasty? According to a new book by David H. Clark and Stephen P. H. Clark, he sure could. Newton's Tyranny (2001, W. H. Freeman and Co.) is subtitled "The Suppressed Scientific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed." Fiamsteed's name I recognized he was Britain's first Astronomer Royal. Gray's name was new to me the book's jacket text said he did pioneering research in electricity.Newton's Tyranny makes plain that Hooke got off easier than others who dared challenge the most influential scientist of the age. Flamsteed devoted his entire career to measuring accurate positions of the Moon, planets, and bright stars. Newton knew these data would lend support to his new theory of gravitation. But Flamsteed, interested more in accuracy than in speed, was slow to publish his celestial positions. Through cunning and deceit, Newton (and an equally nasty Edmond Halley) wrested control of the catalog from Flamsteed and published a pirated version containing uncorrected errors. Nice, huh?Gray didn't fare any better. A century before Benjamin Franklin, he figured out that electrical charges come in two flavors (positive and negative) and that they propagate down a long wire almost instantaneously. But this pioneer in electrical communications was a friend of the hated Flamsteed, so Newton conspired to expunge all record of his discoveries from the minutes of the Royal Society of London. If Gray hadn't outlived Newton and managed to win some belated recognition for himself, we might never have heard of him.The moral of the story: scientists are people too. No matter how great their work, they have personal strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us. While we can hope their scientific judgment is objective, we would be fools to think they're beyond the pull of ego, emotion, and all the other things that make fife interesting