The Clockwork Universe Read online

  London was so disease-ridden that deaths outnumbered births; only the constant influx of newcomers disguised that melancholy fact. Medical knowledge was almost nonexistent, and doctors were more likely to harm their patients than to heal them. Those who fell ill could do little more than choose from a reeking cupboard of quack remedies. One treatment for gout called for “puppy boiled up with cucumber, rue and juniper.” As late as 1699 the Royal Society was still debating the health benefits from “cows piss drank to about a pint.”

  The main alternative was woeful resignation. “I have had the misfortune of losing my dear child Johney he died last week of a feaver,” a woman named Sarah Smyter wrote in a letter in 1717. “It tis a great trouble to me but these misfortunes we must submit to.”

  The mighty had no better options than the lowly. Many times they were worse off, because they were more likely to face a doctor’s attentions. When Charles II suffered a stroke in 1685, his doctors “tortured him,” one historian later wrote, “like an Indian at a stake.” First the royal physicians drained the king of two cups of blood. Next they administered an enema, a purgative, and a dose of sneezing powder. They drained another cup of blood, still to no effect. They rubbed an ointment of pigeon dung and powdered pearls onto the royal feet. They seared the king’s shaved skull and bare feet with red-hot irons. Nothing helped, and the king fell into convulsions. Doctors prepared a potion whose principal ingredient was “forty drops of extract of human skull.” After four days Charles died.

  Two killers inspired more fear than any others. One was plague, the other fire. Both killed swiftly and in huge numbers, but in different manners. Plague leaped stealthily from victim to victim. Its mystery made for its horror. “For what is the cause that this pestilence is so greatly in one part of the land, and not another?” one panicky writer had asked during an earlier epidemic. “And in the same citie and towne why is it in one part, or in one house, and not in another? and in the same house, why is it upon one, and not upon all the rest?”

  Dance of the Skeletons (1493)

  Fire had scarcely any mystery about it. It terrified precisely because it killed spectacularly, mercilessly, and in plain view. In crowded, cramped cities built of wood and lit by flame, it was all but inevitable that somewhere a hot coal would fall from a stove or a furnace, or a candle would tumble against a curtain or onto a pile of straw. Once escaped, even a small fire could blaze up into an inferno that sped along like a leaping, crackling tsunami. Its desperate victims raced for their lives down one twisting alley after another, fleeing round this corner and down that street, trying to outrun a pursuer that grew ever more powerful as the chase continued.

  The dread that these ancient enemies inspired never died away, for everyone knew that no lull could be counted on to last. Nor did anyone think of fire and plague as natural calamities, the way we think of earthquakes and volcanoes. The seventeenth century was God-fearing in the most literal sense. Natural disasters were divine messages, warnings to sinful mankind to change its ways lest an angry and impatient God unleash still further rounds of punishment. Even today insurance claims refer to earthquakes and floods as “acts of God.” In the 1600s and long beyond, our ancestors invoked the same phrase, but they spoke of God’s mysterious will with fright and cowering awe.

  * * *

  In that harsh age religion focused far more on damnation than on consolation. For scientists and intellectuals pondering the course of the universe and for the common man as well, fear of God shaped every aspect of thought. To study the world was to ponder God’s plan, and that was daunting work.

  Today damn and hell are the mildest of oaths, suitable responses to a stubbed toe or a spilled drink. For our forebears, the prospect of being damned to hell was vivid and horrifying. “People lived in continual terror of what they were told awaited them after death,” wrote the historian Morris Kline. “Priests and ministers affirmed that nearly everyone went to hell after death, and described in greatest detail the hideous, unbearable tortures that awaited the eternally damned. Boiling brimstone and intense flames burned victims who, nevertheless, were not consumed but continued to suffer these unabating tortures. God was presented not as the savior but as the scourge of mankind, the power who had fashioned hell and the tortures herein and who consigned people to it, confining His affection to only a small section of His flock. Christians were urged to spend their time meditating upon eternal damnation in order to prepare themselves for life after death.”

  God, who knew all the details of how the future would unroll, had decided already who would be saved and who punished. He would not be bartered with. Whether a person led a good life or a depraved one would do nothing to alter God’s verdict; to say otherwise would imply that lowly man could direct all-powerful God.

  A book called The Day of Doom appeared in 1662, the same year the Royal Society received its formal charter, and explained such doctrines in verse. A huge success (it became the first best-seller in America), it dealt curtly with such matters as infants condemned to the flames of hell:

  But get away without delay

  Christ pities not your cry:

  Depart to Hell, there may you yell,

  And roar eternally.

  Children learned these poems by heart. Eventually such views would prove too grim to prevail, but they lasted well into the 1700s. Jonathan Edwards lambasted New England congregations with his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” as late as 1741. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

  This was standard doctrine. Worship of God began with acknowledging His might in contrast with human puniness. “Those are my best days when I shake with fear,” John Donne declared. Few sins were too small to bring down God’s wrath and to stir up soul-wrenching guilt. At age nineteen, in that same Royal Society year of 1662, Isaac Newton compiled a list of the sins he had committed in his life thus far. The tally, supposedly complete, listed fifty-eight items. Thoughts and acts were jumbled together, the one as bad as the other. One or two entries catch the eye—“Threatening my father and mother Smith [i.e., Newton’s mother and stepfather] to burne them and the house over them”—but nearly all the list is mundane. “Making a mousetrap on Thy day.” “Punching my sister.” “Using Wilford’s towel to spare my owne.” “Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.” “Making pies on Sunday night.” These sins may strike us as minor and commonplace. In Newton’s eyes, they were deeply shameful betrayals of himself and his God.

  In this self-lacerating respect, at least, Newton was far from unique. The writer and theologian Isaac Watts, who would grow up to compose such hymns as “Joy to the World,” first revealed his talent in an acrostic he composed as a young boy, in the late seventeenth century. It began:

  I am a vile polluted lump of earth

  So I’ve continued ever since my birth,

  Although Jehovah grace does daily give me,

  As sure this monster Satan will deceive me,

  Come therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me.

  A second verse spelled out similar thoughts for the name Watts.

  Chapter Three

  The End of the World

  In the 1650s and ’60s the long-simmering fear of God’s wrath grew acute. Every Christian knew his Bible, and everyone knew that the Bible talked of a day of judgment. The question was not whether the world would end but how soon the end would come. The answer, it seemed, was very soon.

  Almost no one believed in the idea of progress. (The very scientists whose discoveries would create the modern world did not believe in it.) On the contrary, the nearly universal belief was that
the world had been falling apart since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. Now, it seemed, the fall had accelerated. From high and low, in learned sermons and shrieking pamphlets, men pointed out the signs that the apocalypse was near.

  At some moment, at any moment, in one historian’s summary, “The trumpet would sound, motion would cease, the moon turn to blood, the stars fall like withered leaves, and the earth would burn to the accompaniment of horrible thunders and lightnings.” In the midst of this chaos, the dead would rise, and saint and sinner alike would receive a sentence that permitted no appeal and no pardon. In the minds of our ancestors, this was not rhetoric but fact. God had ordained it, and it would be so.

  The debate about the timing of the end was intense and widespread. Today warnings that “the end is nigh!” are the stuff of television preachers and New Yorker cartoons. In the seventeenth century this was urgent business. Deciphering biblical prophecies was as much a mainstream, high-stakes concern then as poring over stock market figures is now. Similar waves of fear had arisen before, for no clear reason, and then died down just as mysteriously. That was no consolation. “Books on the Second Coming were written by the score during this period,” one eminent historian observes, “and members of the Royal Society were preoccupied with dating the event.” They proceeded methodically, looking for hidden meanings in biblical texts or manipulating numbers cited in one sacred passage or another.3

  Many scholars and scientists pointed with alarm to a particular figure—1,260 years—that popped up at several different places in the Bible.4 At some point in the past, they believed, the clock had started ticking. Twelve hundred and sixty years from that moment, the world would end. The question that obsessed the most powerful minds of the Royal Society was, when had the countdown begun? One frequently cited date—400 A.D., a time of “great apostasy” when true Christianity had been subverted. It did not demand the mathematical talent of Isaac Newton to see that 1,260 years from 400 A.D. brought one to the year 1660.

  Jesus himself had talked of the signs that would announce the final days. At the Mount of Olives the disciples had asked him, “What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”

  War and misery on Earth, Jesus had replied, and chaos in the heavens. “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes.” And then, after still more afflictions, “Shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven.”

  Now, both on Earth and in the heavens, danger signs abounded. Adulterers, blasphemers, and disbelievers had transformed London into a modern-day Babylon. Such carryings-on were nearly inevitable, for a long, dour Puritan interlude had only recently ended. Following Charles I’s execution in 1649, theaters had been closed, celebrations of Christmas banned, dancing at weddings outlawed.

  After the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, the mood changed utterly, at court and throughout the nation. Charles I had been earnest, stubborn, hidebound. Charles II was witty and restless, always ready to play another set of tennis, gamble on another hand of cards, chase after yet another beauty. Life at court was notoriously indulgent, with everyone from the king on down “engaged in an endless game of sexual musical chairs.” (The “Merrie Monarch” kept mistresses by the score, but in these early years of his reign he observed a sort of fidelity, restricting himself to one mistress at a time.) For the wealthy and the well connected generally, the tone of the era was one of cynicism and self-indulgence.

  Inevitably, many people ignored the prophets of doom or scoffed at their warnings and lamentations. But like distant sounds of shouting at a party, the signals of something amiss tainted the festive mood. God would not be mocked. In 1662, terrified onlookers in the English countryside reported that several women had given birth to monstrously deformed babies. At the same time a brilliant star had mysteriously appeared in the night sky. From Buckinghamshire, in southern England, came reports that blood had rained from the sky. The heavens were all askew, just as Jesus had warned.

  Then, in the fall of 1664, Europe and England saw a comet ablaze in the heavens. To the seventeenth-century mind, this was bad news. (The word disaster comes from dis, as in disgrace or disfavor, and astrum, Latin for star or comet.) The sky, unlike the Earth, was a domain of order and harmony. Comets were ominous intruders, and they had been feared for millennia. “So horrible was it, so terrible, so great a fright did it engender in the populace,” one eyewitness had written, about a comet in 1528, “that some died of fear; others fell sick . . . this comet was the color of blood; at its extremity we saw the shape of an arm holding a great sword as if about to strike us down. At the end of the blade there were three stars. On either side of the rays of this comet were seen great numbers of axes, knives, bloody swords, amongst which were a great number of hideous human faces, with beards and hair all awry.”

  Comets were cosmic warnings, signs of God’s displeasure akin to lightning bolts but longer lasting. “The thick smoke of human sins, rising every day, every hour, every moment . . . [grow] gradually so thick as to form a comet,” explained one follower of Martin Luther, “. . . which at last is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge.”

  Unsettlingly, comets hung overhead for days before they disappeared. Where they went, or why, no one knew. Night after night, all one could do was check the sky to see if the dreaded visitor had appeared again and guess at what calamity it might foretell.

  This newest comet refused to disappear. The fearsome sightings of 1664 persisted into November and then into December. On December 17, King Charles II and Queen Catherine waited late into the night to witness the spectacle for themselves. The public mood grew ever darker. In January, word came of an apparition near the comet—“a Coffin,” floating in the sky, “which causes great anxiety of thought amongst the people.”

  An astrologer and member of the Royal Society, John Gadbury, warned that “this comet portends pestiferous and horrible winds and tempests.” Another astrologer foresaw “a MORTALITY which will bring MANY to their Graves.”

  In March 1665, a second comet appeared.

  Closer to home, the natural world seemed just as unsettled. Rumors and omens started with worrisome sightings—clouds of flies swarmed inside houses; ants smothered the roads; frogs clogged the ditches—and grew ever more lurid. Like Egypt in ancient days, England had angered God. Even the well educated passed along the latest news in horrified whispers, as frightened and fascinated as the most superstitious countrymen. “A deformed monster” had been born in London, the Spanish ambassador reported, “horrible in shape and color. Part of him was fiery red and part of him yellow. On his chest was a human face. He had the legs of a bull, the feet of a man, the tail of a wolf, the breasts of a goat, the shoulders of a camel, a long body and in place of a head a kind of tumor with the ears of a horse. Such monstrous prodigies are permitted by God to appear to mankind as harbingers of calamities.”

  The greatest scientists of the age, Isaac Newton chief among them, believed as fervently as everyone else that they lived in the shadow of the apocalypse. Every era lives with contradictions that it manages to ignore. The Greeks talked of justice and kept slaves. The Crusaders preached the gospel of the Prince of Peace and rode off to annihilate the infidels. The seventeenth century believed in a universe that ran like clockwork, entirely in accord with natural law, and also in a God who reached down into the world to perform miracles and punish sinners.

  Many of the early scientists tended not to pay much heed to monsters and bloody rains, but they pored over their Bibles in an urgent quest to determine how much time remained. Robert Boyle, renowned today as the father of chemistry, studied the Bible not only in English but in Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean, to ferret out hidden meanings. Newton himself owned some thirty Bibles in various translations and languages that he endlessly perused and compared one against another.

  Every word in the Bible w
as meaningful, just as every twig and sparrow in the natural world offered up a clue to God’s intent. The Bible was not a literary work to be interpreted according to one’s taste, but a cipher with a single meaning that could be decoded by a meticulous and brilliant analyst. Newton devoted thousands of hours—as much time as he spent on the secrets of gravity or light—in looking for concealed messages in the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon and trying to match the prophecies in Revelation with the battles and revolutions of later days. “The fourth beast [in the book of Revelation] . . . was exceeding dreadful and terrible, and had great iron teeth, and devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet,” wrote Newton, “and such was the Roman empire.”

  * * *

  With nearly everyone in agreement that the end had drawn near, the debate turned to just how the end would come. One faction maintained that the world would drown in a global flood, as it had in Noah’s day; others held out for an all-consuming fire. The tide of fear rose ever higher as the ominous year 1666 appeared, because of the satanic associations of the number 666. Fear turned to panic when plague swooped down on England in 1665, a year ahead of schedule, and death carts began spilling their cargo into mass graves.

  Chapter Four

  “When Spotted Death Ran Arm’d Through Every Street”

  For a thousand years, whenever God lost patience with his creation, plague had swept across Europe. For a few hundred years, those waves of disease had taken on a fearsome rhythm, appearing and vanishing at intervals of roughly ten or twenty years. In the deadliest assault, from 1347 through 1350, plague killed twenty million people. Somewhere between one-third and one-half of all Europeans died in that three-year span.