You never see waves that mysteriously start in unison at the bank of the pond, converge on its centre, and eject a stone that lands in your hand — although the laws of hydrodynamics and mechanics are perfectly compatible with the possibility.
Julian Barbour – The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time
Way back in 1705 a couple of great thinkers of the day got into somewhat of a kerfuffle over who was the first to invent calculus. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in 1646, in what is now Germany, and was a mathematician, linguist, philosopher, scientist, and diplomat. Leibniz’s father died when he was just six years old, but that didn’t impede his intellectual growth. He entered the University of Leipzig at the age of 14, and had his dissertation, Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum accepted and published by 18. He then decided to give Law a try, and by November 1666 earned his Doctorate in Law from the University of Altdorf. In 1672, Leibniz met the physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens, and soon gained a mastery of these subjects as well. His journals from 1675 contain the first uses of calculus, and by 1677 he had systematized it. He did not publish it until 1684.
However brilliant Leibniz may have been, he is overshadowed in history books by his rival in this kerfuffle, Sir Isaac Newton. Born in England in 1642, Newton’s father had actually died three months before the baby’s birth. Newton attended The King’s School, Grantham until 1661 when he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1665 he began developing a mathematical theory that became calculus.
Although Newton’s papers from 1666 make note of some ideas of calculus, he really didn’t publish anything on it until 1693, nearly a decade after Leibniz began publishing his ideas. Apparently, most modern scholars believe that the two men developed their theories independently, and through different approaches. From 1705 the animosity extended beyond the single topic of calculus and led to accusations from both men accusing the other of plagiarism and trying to defame one another.
The controversy is recorded in correspondences between Leibniz and Samuel Clark, who was a supporter of Newton. The correspondence began with Leibniz warning Caroline, Princess of Wales, that Newton’s philosophies were damaging to the souls of anyone who accepted them. The main point of contention was the nature of space and time, with Leibniz criticizing Newton’s description of space as ‘the sensorium of God’. Subsequent correspondence focuses on Leibniz questioning Newton’s descriptions of gravity and vacuums. Unfortunately, Leibniz died in 1716, and with his passing, Newtonians were able to take control of the narrative, and The Correspondence was published the following year. Many more students certainly will know of Sir Isaac Newton, than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (who often added a title of nobility before his surname, but never was actually given one by the court).
The kerfuffle surrounding the origins of calculus are interesting, and to a historian of science, they may be the source of a popular monograph. However, the points about which Newton and Leibniz were actually arguing may have more significance than we think. Newton and Leibniz’s disagreement of the nature of space and time set the stage for some very significant discoveries much later.
Heartily rejecting Newton’s ideas of space and time as absolute, Leibniz instead argued that they were relational to substances he called monads. In Leibniz’s third paper of The Correspondence, he makes the following statement: As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together; without enquiring into their manner of existing. And when many things are seen together, one perceives that order of things among themselves. It is this thought that two centuries later would break Newtonian physics.
Einstein labeled himself as a Leibnizian and believed that, of the two thinkers Leibniz had the greater insight, but lacked the scientific tools to support his assertions. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity followed the progression of Leibniz’s thinking and showed the relative nature of time and space. Special Relativity replaced the conventional notion of an absolute universal time with the notion of a time that is dependent on reference frame and spatial position. The combination of time and space is referred to as spacetime. This leads to the situation where events happening at one time for an observer may happen at a different time for another observer.
From the perspective of the historian, it is interesting to see the controversy between Newton and Leibniz. The connections to Einstein and Special Relativity add a pinch of spice to the intriguing narrative. However, questions of how we look at time and space seem to be something historians should address beyond the chronological narratives used today. As historians we are conditioned to see the world as the Newtonians depicted. We have events which happen in specific spaces on specific points on a timeline. Could we even move beyond Special Relativity to something like the string theory, which seems crazily similar to monadism, and look at the relationships as the constant of history. Maybe this would cause Ranke to turn over in his grave and Hegel to claim victory, but it might provide for some interesting history if anyone is willing to jump down that rabbit hole.
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