Page 43 - The Secret Museum

drawing. I loved looking at Newton’s sketch, complete with an eye looking down

into the telescope. Then I was able to put my own eye to his telescope, just as he
would have done. All I could see was the wall of the basement, but I got the idea.
Amazingly, centuries later, the Hubble space telescope was built using essentially the
same design.

The Royal Society owns many of the letters Newton sent over the years,
explaining what he was up to. Some were expanded upon and turned into
publications. The original manuscripts of these texts are here in the archive.

We looked at the original copy of the Principia (Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica) that Newton sent away to be published. This first copy was

written up by his secretary and has marginalia in Newton’s hand and in the writing of
his friend Edmund Halley – of Halley’s Comet fame who paid for it to be published.

The Royal Society was planning to cover the costs, but the publication of A
History of Fishes, by Francis Willughby and John Ray, had left them out of pocket.
Samuel Pepys was the Society’s president at the time and is named on the title pages
of both the Principia and A History of Fishes (his diary wasn’t published until 123
years after he died).

Willughby had been Ray’s student and the two travelled together studying and
collecting birds and fish. When Willughby suddenly died, Ray saw his three books –
about birds, fish and games – through the press. The twosome’s collection of birds

and fish is stored at Willughby’s family home, Wollaton Hall, which, incidentally,
starred as Wayne Manor in the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.

Back in 2010, Keith had the pleasure of showing Newton’s Principia to some
Apollo astronauts – Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell – when they
visited the Royal Society. He really enjoyed their visit. ‘I am a child of the sixties;
that is why I got into all of this,’ he told me.

As they turned the pages of the tome, Gene Cernan talked about how he had
experienced Newton’s third law of motion – that every action has an equal and
opposite reaction – first hand, in space. When he flew on Gemini 9, he had to

assemble a backpack in zero gravity, with little light, outside the spacecraft. Nothing
was holding him anywhere, so as he tightened a valve, his entire body span in the
opposite direction. Everything he touched would touch him back and send him
tumbling back out into space. When he touched the spacecraft, it repelled him. He had
trouble getting back inside and when he finally made it his boots were filled with
sweat.

From then on, NASA put hand and footholds on its space capsules so that the
astronauts could anchor themselves in space. The astronauts were also trained in

water so they could experience weightlessness. By the time Cernan flew to the moon
with Harrison Schmitt, on Apollo 17, he knew how to get around without gravity.
When the Royal Society lent their fragment of Newton’s apple tree to NASA