For Mermaids, Not For Whales Poem by gershon hepner

“Hypotheses non fingo, ” said Descartes.
I, too, observe and can’t experiment,
because your body is so far apart
that I cannot deduce your true intent.

Less helped by literati than a muse,
I’ve sold my head for mermaids, not for whales,
and don’t complain, like Portnoy, why we Jews
so often lose our heads because of tails.


This is a revision of a poem inspired by an article by Theodore K. Rabb, Professor of history at Princeton University, who reviews The Newtonian Movement: Isaac Newton and the Making of the Modern Culture, by Mordechai Feingold (OUP) in the LA Times Book Review, February 9,2005. The revision was inspired by a brief recorded comment by Philip Roth on KUSC this morning, describing how he came to understand that it was important that he should write about places he knew, like Columbus and Newark, just as Isak Dinesen wrote about Africa. Rabb writes:

But how did Newton get there? What induced poet Alexander Pope to claim that nature's laws had been hid in night until God said, 'Let Newton be' and all was light? This is the basic question that 'The Newtonian Moment, ' which accompanies and expands upon a New York Public Library exhibition (open through Feb.6) , seeks to answer. The author and curator, Mordechai Feingold, makes it clear that despite the retrospective reverence for the 'Principia, ' Newton's work faced three formidable obstacles before it could reign supreme in European thought.

The first was the incomprehensibility of the 'Principia.' Not only was it the last major scientific treatise to be written in Latin — a help to scholars, though not to a wider public — but its exposition was also deliberately difficult. Newton said he wanted to put off mere 'smatterers' in mathematics and offered neither an explanation of gravity nor an overall metaphysical scheme to give context to his findings. The second was the antagonism of the followers of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German scientist with whom Newton had a nasty fight when both men claimed to have invented calculus. The third was the hostility of the disciples of French scientist René Descartes, who were influential in much of Europe and resented Newton's dismissal of the Cartesian deductive approach to truth with the famous phrase 'hypotheses non fingo' — 'I do not posit hypotheses.' Induction, observation and experiment were to be the new watchwords of the scientist; not surprisingly, the adherents of deduction and the power of clear thought resisted the rise of this alternative view of the scientist's métier……

More significant — and lavishly documented here — were the 'Newtonian Women.' As Feingold shows, the struggle of Cartesians and Leibnizians against Newtonians extended to the increasingly sophisticated 'salonières, ' readers, muses, teachers and scientists such as professor Laura Bassi of the University of Bologna. Despite male resentment — before meeting the learned science lecturer Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a fearful Frenchman complained, 'She knows too much for me, ' though he finally admitted, 'I have never heard anything that gave me greater pleasure' — a series of female lecturers, patrons and literati proved to be significant advocates, once won over, for Newtonian ideas. Perhaps the most famous, the Marquise du Châtelet, a friend of Voltaire, not only published her own treatise on physics but also translated the 'Principia' into French.

Thus Newton's ultimate ascendancy is not a story of irresistible victory but a colorful saga of national prejudice, simple jealousy, ingenious technology and intellectual debate. Feingold's lucid and cogent account proves that even where one of its chief heroes is concerned, science involves far more than a disinterested pursuit of certainty and truth.

1/15/05,7/21/08