NEWTON / MAXWELL / MARX
Thomas K. Simpson
(forthcoming from Green Lion Press)
Newton, Maxwell, Marx: three pillars of our western intellectual inheritance, yet each
more celebrated in encyclopaedias and histories than read. It is the thesis of this new
volume forthcoming from the Green Lion Press that there is much to be gained from a
fresh reading of these authors. Three extensive essays are collected here, each reflecting a
re-reading of a work of one of these authors: respectively, Newton's Principia, Maxwell's
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, and Marx's Capital. A commentary has been
added, linking them and proposing a dialectical thread that begins in the 17th century,
and develops an unfolding vision of science still challenging in our own time.
The account begins with the recognition that Newton's Principia constitutes overall a
polemic against mechanism, and specifically a refutation of Descartes' vision of nature as
a mathematical machine. Newton embraces, certainly, the conviction that the natural
world is mathematical throughout, but he distinguishes from the outset what is inert—as
all nature is for Descartes—from a second principle that he calls active force. Newton in
this way opens spaces throughout the Cartesian plenum in which spirit, this second
principle, can operate. It is difficult today, in our world of universal engineering, to see
again with Newton's eyes the significance of this distinction, and to recognize that a law
of force, though strictly mathematical, is not thereby rendered mechanical. Newton
shapes his geometrical mathematics as a rhetorical instrument rich in meaning; in such a
world the statement that a system is mathematical throughout is by no means a reductive
proposition. This distinction is of first importance to Newton, as it may well be for us,
since it becomes clear that within the realm of nature the scope of the Principia is
altogether universal. Thus the justly celebrated System of the World, Newton's account of
the heavenly motions, becomes hardly more than an example, a first instance of the new
system. Force is exactly the domain of what alchemy calls spirit, and Newton as master
alchemist, as we now know him to have been, is surely on the track of the ultimate of the
spirits in nature, the vital force. We once approached the Principia as the founding work
of modern physics; now we see it as the culminating work of serious alchemy—a
mathematical biology of all natural functions, inclusive of the very cause of life itself—
and indeed, as Newton's book of life. The unity of Newton's thought may astound us, as
we ourselves try to piece together in our own time a coherent picture of the world; thus,
the Principia holds a central place in Newton's theology, since the concept of force
restores scope for God's active presence in the world, a presence crucial to Newton's
faith, for which mechanism had left no room.
Newton's successors have not of course understood his project in the terms he
intended. The term force soon became a mere tool in the engineering of the industrial
revolution, retaining nothing of Newton's sense of spirit. By the time James Clerk
Maxwell had embarked on the study of natural philosophy in the middle of the 19th
century, he was confronted at Cambridge University with a challenging but sterile mental
discipline, in which a Newtonian law of force appeared merely as the blank formalism of
an action-at-a-distance. Maxwell was at heart a Scotsman, curiously out of place at
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Cambridge for all his ironic skill at mastering the English ways, and his own revolution,
more fundamental perhaps than is often realized, began with a dramatic turn away from
this sterile system. Maxwell embraced in its place the apparently naïve insights of
Michael Faraday, who as a commoner with virtually no formal education, represented to
all appearances, and indeed in his own terms, the most unmathematical of natural
philosophers. Yet Maxwell maintained, publicly and to the end of his life, that of them all
it had been Faraday who was the real mathematician!
The nature of mathematics, and of mathematical physics, is seriously in question here.
Maxwell carefully shaped his own electromagnetic theory, and the symbolic structure of
the vector calculus, to reflect as fully as possible the patterns that Faraday was perceiving
in the magnetic lines of force traced by his iron filings. It was the field as a whole that
had become primary, caught in its totality by the intuitive mind, with symbolic
mathematics following behind. Maxwell was openly delighted when, well into his
scientific career, he first encountered Lagrange's equations of motion, which characterize,
in terms of energy rather than force, the motion of a connected system as a whole.
Maxwell retained a deep concern for metaphysics, and this primacy of the whole is
clearly a matter of first importance to him. He made certain to derive his own system of
equations by beginning with Lagrange's, and from them moving toward
electromagnetism by carefully specifying the values of the coefficients that would apply
in this case.
Maxwell's equations, which result from this process, speak to the field as a whole. The
individual bodies and the forces between them with which Newton had begun are for
Maxwell the last, and indeed most problematic, concepts to appear. By way of the field
and its patterns Maxwell makes electromagnetism intuitively accessible to every
inquiring mind; his entire approach constitutes an inversion of the concept of science
which undercuts at once both the primacy of mathematical symbols and the necessity of
an aristocratic formal education. It was surely meant as his gift to Faraday, and more
largely to what has been termed the democratic intellect. In our faltering efforts to
comprehend whole systems in their entireties, whether environmental systems or the
global human community, and in the austerity with which we still treat mathematics and
the sciences as matters reserved only for specialists, it is clear that we have not altogether
caught the significance of the revolution Maxwell was undertaking in our behalf. We
should note, incidentally, that Maxwell's revolution is against the specter of Newton, not
against Newton himself. For all their evident differences, in truth a deeper concern for the
unfolding human spirit unites them. Newton's notion of the human spirit, expressed in a
paradigm of law and obedience derived ultimately from the Old Testament, we might
think of as essentially feudal; Maxwell perhaps reflects the larger course of human
history when with equal concern he carries this same human spirit to the level of its
democratic manifestation. Newton describes a layered world, of command, and
obedience at a distance. Maxwell fills all the gaps. Each of his field equations applies
everywhere equally, and as a set, they speak to a coherent cosmos. They are, in a sense,
the very image of a restored and democratic social whole.
An understandable reaction to the title of this volume, Newton / Maxwell / Marx might
be, "Why Marx?", since, in this country at least, Marx is not often thought of as a serious
scientist. In truth, however, Capital in one giant step carries forward the very trajectory
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of the concept of science we have been tracing. If Faraday and Maxwell have made the
science of nature accessible to the democratic mind, Marx in effect invites his readers to
turn this new light upon the study of society itself. To an extent that is not often
remarked, Capital analyzes the system of capitalism in ways strikingly parallel to
Newton's analysis of the motions of the planets in the System of the World. Thus, as
Newton begins with mass as the measure of undifferentiated matter, so Marx with
extreme care defines a corresponding social quantity, the undifferentiated labor hour.
And Capital, similarly, builds upon a universal law of motion, the law of surplus value,
delineated with precision, whose operations Marx tracks scrupulously through the
phenomena of the system of capital—profit, interest, and rent. It is, of course, not a
system Marx loves, nor in his view one destined to endure. Surplus value, and with it
profit and the driving force of capitalism, arises only through the fact that labor is never
paid at its actual value. Further, since laborers sell what belongs most essentially to them,
their very power of free human activity, Marx sees this as a system based on a the
universal alienation of the human.
This perception, though it introduces a tone of moral judgment that is sustained
throughout the work, is never allowed to relax its strictly scientific character. In this
sense, Capital never descends into ideology. Instead, Marx reasons with scrupulous care
from the system that lies before him, to an analysis of its future trends. He demonstrates
the existence of certain secular tendencies that are fraught with consequence for the
system itself. Once again, it is striking that Newton in the Principia followed a similar
path. In one magnificent proposition, to which perhaps too little attention has been paid,
Newton directly confronts the fact that a universe that contains more than two bodies
cannot sustain the perfect order which he has so carefully described. This three-body
problem inherently defies solution, but, undaunted, Newton traces its consequences
through argument inevitably blending the qualitative with the quantitative. Out of it he
draws, almost magically, his theory of the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and
more largely, the prediction of an ultimate demise of the original order.
Marx, similarly, defines motions within capitalism that must work to undo its original
order. He has shown how the law of surplus value inexorably leads every manufacturer,
wherever possible, to substitute machinery for human labor. With real awe Marx has
depicted the growth of large industry and the development of machines which
ingeniously replicate human skills. The other side of this coin, however, is the fact that
labor, the sole source of surplus value, is everywhere extruded from the system. In the
long run, therefore, the rate of profit, and with it the life of the system, must tend to fail.
Both Newton and Marx have their eyes fixed on distant futures, therefore, and,
remarkably, for neither is this bad news. Newton foresees a time, not perhaps so distant,
when the Creator will once again exert His hand to reform the work. It is beyond the
scope of Capital, and of the present study as well, to ask what prospect the demise of
capitalism may hold for Marx. He realizes that the new machines might labor for us,
yielding to everyone resources to live freely in directions which the individual human
mind, released from alienation, could choose for itself. Yet though Capital delineates the
grounds for this possibility, in this scientific work it appears as no more than a path
which lies ahead, and the briefest glimpse of what Marx perceives as a light beyond.
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Taken together, these readings constitute three windows on the evolution of the
concept of science as we know it today, yet any suggestion of a single, linear progression
would be misleading. These are complex works, each of lasting value in its own right,
and their relationship is surely dialectical rather than simply linear. Thus though few
today might be comfortable with Newton's own account of theology, nonetheless the
breathtaking scope and unity of his work still reminds us that the human mind is
ultimately one. That department of human activity we now attempt to isolate as science
cannot finally exist in separation from the universe of our broader concepts and concerns.
Similarly, Newton's sense of the rhetorical role of mathematics, worthy in his view to
serve as a vehicle of spirit and human understanding, might startle us into a new line of
thought about mathematics today. If after all mathematics is neither mechanical nor
reductive, this insight may reassure us as we now tread so closely upon the full
realization of Newton's original vision, the mathematization of all nature, not excluding
ourselves in our natural being, and perhaps even of the very source of life itself.
In such a dialectical unfolding, the past is never left behind, but always incorporated in
the new. Thus these overriding insights of Newton's do not dim as we approach that very
different vision of Maxwell, that inversion contained in the idea of the field, in which the
whole, whether social or natural, becomes primary and coherent. The idea of causality
remains, even as the overall pattern becomes explanatory, and Newton's force becomes,
literally, only a derivative concept. With this transformation, science itself becomes a
significantly new concept, an instrument of intelligent, critical thinking intuitively
accessible to all, and a crucial bond of any democratic society. Yet we are speaking of a
vision of science which, though new a century ago, today exists in our society as no more
than an unfulfilled goal. People in our time on the whole avoid the study of science and
think of it still as a remote domain, reserved for experts. We have not yet risen in practice
to the challenges of Maxwell's insight; we have not even quite caught the significance of
our failure.
Finally, what are we to make of Marx? It is almost as if we had read Capital until now
only as ideology, failing to confront the vastly expanded concept of science which Marx
is proposing, in which society itself, its institutions and its practices, become objects of
serious scientific thought. We apply, it is true, seemingly endless quantitative measures to
society, proliferating sophisticated methods of descriptive mathematics, but we do not
follow Marx in developing a causal theory comparable to that of the Principia,
explaining how and why capitalism and its institutions work. It may be hard to deny
outright the possibility of developing such a theory, if indeed we have in Capital a
paradigm of the completed project. The issue is surely critical to the idea of science and
its role in modern society, for it directly affects our social behavior. In matters concerning
nature and technology, which belong to the world of what we do call science, we reason
together dispassionately and submit disagreements to the forum of evidence and reason.
In the social domain, by contrast, concerning matters which we say lie outside of science,
we substitute opinion for truth, veil issues in obscurity, act in conflict rather than
cooperation, and resolve disagreement through levels of violence worthy only of a
barbaric age. Marx extends the scope of science, and would have us reason as a
community, intelligently and cooperatively, in matters belonging to the social domain as
we do in those of nature and technology.
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Newton / Maxwell / Marx, in exploring these and other aspects of the concept of
science, constitutes an invitation to fresh thought about these matters; it aims in particular
to bring light to bear upon the most deeply underlying questions. This book shows a way
in which serious study of the history of science can contribute importantly to our thinking
Thus, I believe that religion and science are closely linked.I am kiddingly calling these facts "Law of Life and Death!"Most famous scientists and politians have the same birthday/year or death day/year.For examples:Jesus and Sir Newton have the same birthday (12/25) based on old style calenderGalilei's death year is the same as Newton's birth year(1642).James Clerk Maxwell's death year is the same as Einstein's birth year(1879).:Einstein is thought the follower of Maxwell;Newton is the follower of Galilei.Einstein's birthday is the same as Karl Marx's death day(3/14):the pi day.:Both of them are important Jewish thinkers.Louis Pateur's birthday and Kepler's birthday is the same(12/27)Leeuwenhoek's(Father of biology) death day is the same as Lavoisier's(Father of chemistry) birthday(8/26)Gregior Mendel's(Father of Genetic) death day is the same as Benjamin Franklin's(Father of electricity) birthday(1/6)Adam Smith's birthday is the same as Ronald Reagan's death day.:Reagan leads captalism to defeat communism.FD Roosevelt's birthday is the same as Mohandas Gandhi's death day(1/30).:They promote world peace and fight against impiralismMarie Curie's death day is the same as Thomas Jefferson's death day(7/4)By using FRS calendar, Erwin Schrodinger and Sir Newton have the same birthday(1/4)Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln have exactly the same birthday(Feb12,1809)Charles Darwin's death day is 4/19.The two most famous recent physcists: Richard Feynman's death day is the same as Galilei's birthdayStephen Hawking's birthday is the same as Galilei's death dayMuhammad's birthay is 4/19 or 4/20.We assume 4/19 and 12/25 are holy-days. And, some most evil politians' date is one day next to the holy-days.Mao Zedong's birthday is 12/26.Adolf Hitler's birthday is 4/20. :Hitler's birthday is one day next to Darwin's death day. Hitler belived Social Darwinism for expending his empire.:Lincoln is against racism in his whole life(against Social Darwinism)It is highly probable that these dates are selected by God, Buddha, Adonai,or Allah.Thus, religion should be linked to science and politics!These famous scientist's or politians' birthday or deathday were selected.It is not happened by chance!Please pick a religion to believe in even you are a scientist!Please believe paradise and hell because every religion says so!You may go to wikipedia to check by yourself!
about ourselves and about our world today
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