In the Dark

The story of the famous 1919 expeditions to measure the bending of light by the Sun as a test of general relativity has featured many times on this blog (e.g. here). I ahve also written elsewhere about it, e.g. here. One way this is often presented is whether the measurements preferred the “Einstein” prediction or one consistent with “Newton”, there being a famous factor of two between the two.

In fact the earliest published calculation of the deflection of light by the Sun was not by Isaac Newton but by Johann Georg von Soldner (Uber die Ablenkung eines Lichstrals von seiner geradlinigen Bewegung, durch die Attraktion eines Weltk¨orpers, and welchem er nahe vorbei geht. Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch, 1801: 161-172). This calculation does use Newtonian theory, but as far as I know there is no record tof any calculation of this sort by Newton himself.

There is, however, something very tantalizing in Newton’s 1704 book Opticks, published almost 20 years after his Principia outlined the laws of mechanics and of universal gravitation. Opticks which (unlike the Principia) was written in English, ends with a series of rhetorical questions called “Queries” which present speculative ideas about light and its interactions with matter. The first of these reads:

Query 1. Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this action (caeteris paribus) strongest at the least distance?

This looks very much like a speculation about the bending of light by gravitation. But if that’s what it is, he could have done exactly what Soldner did about a century later. Why then did he never publish the result and why was it never found among his unpublished papers?

I’ve spoken to several people about this and there are three main ideas. One is that Newton actual did the Soldner calculation, and that the manuscript was accidentally destroyed in a fire caused by his dog, Diamond. The other is that he just never got round to it, which seems unlikely because it’s not a difficult calculation and Newton lived over 20 years after the publication of the Opticks. The third possibility is that Query 1 wasn’t about gravity at all. If it had been, wouldn’t he have used the word and wouldn’t he have mentioned the inverse-square law specifically? Perhaps what he had in mind was some kind of refraction. This interpretation is consistent with other Queries where he talks about the “aetherial Medium” through which he supposed light to propagate being distorted by the presence of massive bodies and thus causing refraction. For example, from Query 21,

Is not this Medium much rarer within the dense Bodies of the Sun, Stars, Planets and Comets, than in the empty celestial Spaces between them?

I suppose we’ll never know what Newton had in mind. I am split between the first and third explanations above.

It’s worth mentioning that some of the other Queries are very prescient. Take Query 5, for example:

Do not Bodies and Light act mutually upon one another; that is to say, Bodies upon Light in emitting, reflecting, refracting and inflecting it, and Light upon Bodies for heating them, and putting their parts into a vibrating motion wherein heat consists?

Clever chap, Newton!