A Bodkin in the Eye

"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

            What is a 'bare bodkin' and would you put one in your eye socket?

            In Hamlet's meditation on whether life is worth living, he asks, "Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely [taunts], the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes [the insults that the worthy bear], when he himself might his quietus [release] take with a bare bodkin?"

            In other words, why suffer life's trials when an unsheathed dagger will end it all?

            Consider now the master mathematician and scientist Sir Isaac Newton. Why should he suffer the displeasures of remaining ignorant when he can end his dissatisfaction and find enlightenment by putting a "bodkine" in his eye?

            And that is what he did. No, he did not stab himself in the eye with a stiletto. A 'bodkine' in the parlance of the 1600s was also a large sewing needle. And, no, he did not poke himself in the eye with it. He inserted it between his eyeball and the bone of the eye socket as far to the rear of the eye as he could possibly make it go. Then he pressed it against his eyeball.

"Presse my eye…"

            As one of his notebooks recounts, "I tooke a bodkine…& put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature…in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles…. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the] bodkin."

            When he wasn't obsessively creating revolutionary theories about gravity and bodies in motion, Newton was also fascinated by the nature of light and color. The purpose of the experiment? To determine whether or not colors were produced within the eye or something outside the eye. The French philosopher Descartes had postulated that light was a kind of "pressure" pulsating through the ether, a mysterious substance which scientists then thought was necessary for the transmission of light.

            The results? Inconclusive. All Newton saw were gray spots.

            On another occasion, he went into a dark room and stared at the sun's reflection in a mirror with one eye, injuring it to such a degree that he had to spend the next three days in darkness and saw after-images for weeks and months afterwards.

            At the time people thought that clear white light (daylight) was one unified thing, but Newton later conducted other experiments with a prism and a mirror in a darkened room, conclusively finding that light was instead of a combination of seven colors, the visible spectrum of light. It was Newton who revealed that these colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.     

            "Light is a confused aggregate of Rays indued with all sorts of Colours," he wrote. He further believed that light was made of "corpuscles," writing "Are not the rays of light very small particles emitted from shining substances?" (These "corpuscles" are what 20th century physicists would call quanta or photons.)
            A color is a property of the light that is reflected from an object, Newton deduced. A color is not a property of the object in and of itself.

"What is hee good for?"

            Born propitiously on Christmas day, Newton was so tiny that he said his mother once told him he was "so little they could put him into a quart pot."

            Like other geniuses, he was a misfit, especially as a child. In his first year at school he ranked 78th of out 80 students. He was "very negligent" at his studies, according to one biographer.

            Instead he got saws and hammers and made a sundial, a four-foot tall water-powered wooden clock, and a mouse-powered wooden mill. A woman who knew him as a childhood playmate said he was "always a sober, silent, thinking lad," and instead of playing with other boys, he preferred to make little tables, cupboards, and utensils for girls.

            His teenage years were peculiar as well. He was incompetent shepherd who was once fined for "suffering his swine to trespass in the corn fields." On another occasion while leading a horse home, its bridle slipped off. So lost in thought was young Isaac that he arrived dragging the bridle in the dirt, unaware that the horse was long gone.

            When he was 16 he kept a notebook in which he translated English phrases into Late. Among them were "What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?"

            It turns out that what Newton was good for was conceiving a comprehensive scheme for understanding the nature of the universe.

            "I derive from the celestial phenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets," wrote Newton. "Then, from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, I deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon and the sea."  

            This is the key concept in his magnum opus Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), a 511-page leather-bound book whose first edition was 300 to 400 copies. Newton was a professor at Cambridge, and it is said that a student of his day once quipped, "There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor anyone else understands."

            Thanks to Newton, we know that all things in the universe are in relation to each other under the guidance of fixed mathematical laws. The wilderness is not wild. It is not chaotic. It is ruled by a universal force which he called gravity. "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction," he wrote, or put another way, the Moon exerts a gravitational force on the Earth just as the Earth exerts a force on the Moon, and the two are bound in each other's gravity until and unless another force intervenes.

            "The cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know," Newton once wrote. Yet he also wrote a friend that he believed that when the universe was created, God endowed every bit of matter "with an innate gravity towards the rest."

            Did his theory of gravity suddenly come to him when an apple bonked him on the head while sitting under a tree? Newton told friends and relatives that is exactly what happened, though, in truth, he developed his theory over many years. So while the apple story is, on some level, false, it does have a peel.

MORAL: Think (and work) hard enough, and the fruit of

your labor will fall in your lap.

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