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      "body": "But the toll dropped during the winter, and stayed low, with only 2,000 more deaths from the disease tallied through all of 1666. Then, just as it appeared that the epidemic was truly done, came the four days in September when the Great Fire of London destroyed most of what lay within the old city walls, along with some newer neighborhoods to the west. Four hundred and thirty-six acres burned; at least thirteen thousand homes were destroyed. So were 87 out of the city’s 109 churches, including old St. Paul’s Cathedral. When that giant building caught fire, the tons of lead in its roof melted, creating a river of liquid metal flowing into the Thames.\n<p class=\"para-p\">A new London began to rise almost immediately. The fire seemed to obliterate the plague, though that could well have been a coincidence in timing rather than the result of any lasting impact on the city’s rat population. Christopher Wren—often with the aid of his colleague in the nascent Royal Society, Robert Hooke—took the lead in restoring sacred London, building fifty-one parish churches along with his crowning monument: <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText45\"></span>the new St. Paul’s, with its glorious and technically sophisticated dome.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Life in the capital soon returned to an approximation of its preplague normal. The savants, Hooke and Wren among them, resumed weekly meetings at the Royal Society. Their conversations overflowed into the invisible university housed in the still-exotic coffeehouses and inns of the rebuilt city. Some of that talk was more enthusiastic than rigorous: at early meetings, the Society heard reports on “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText46\"></span>a Very Odd Monstrous Calf” and “Of the Way of Killing Rattle-Snakes,” presented alongside “A Spot in one of the Belts of Jupiter” and “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country.” Newton himself took no part in that eager, hungry, small “c” catholic pursuit of new knowledge. It would take him twenty years and more to organize the results of the plague years into a fully realized body of work. He did so mostly in silence. He had some contact with members of the nascent Royal Society in the early 1670s. But he soon disappeared from the view of learned Europe. That was partly because he resented challenges to his results, partly because of his determination never to share a discovery before he was certain, and partly because for many of those “missing” years <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText47\"></span>he pursued lines of inquiry that he actively wanted to keep secret: inquiry into heterodox religious beliefs and into the ancient pursuit of alchemy, which he saw as one more way to investigate change in nature. He wrote of his alchemical experiments to a handful of fellow searchers, but he rarely communicated in any public way with his fellow natural philosophers in London, and he visited the capital even less.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_20\" title=\"20\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">But such silence did not mean that he was unmoved by the same impulses driving the early Royal Society men, with their public commitment to knowledge for its own sake—and to the application of whatever could be discovered to practical uses. From the beginning, he too recognized that natural philosophy could comprehend daily life as well as the broad sweep of nature. As early as 1664, for example, before he plunged into the question of gravitation, he laid out a geometrical approach for calculating compound interest—his first contribution to the mathematics of money. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText48\"></span>A decade later, he turned his quantitative virtuosity to the service of his home institution, helping Trinity College’s bursar analyze how much rent he should charge for land—farms that the college owned. Newton could count and Newton could think, and his work here—pricing an asset that offered payments over time—already hinted at the possibility that those two skills could make a man rich.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">If that thought crossed his mind in his Cambridge years, he didn’t act on it. His full immersion into the world of money—on his own account as well as in service to the crown—would come a full three decades after his miracle year, when he took up new duties as an officer of the Royal Mint. Others, though, were beginning to recognize that there might be a connection between quantitative reasoning and wealth. They would pursue both riches and yet another new discipline: a science of change over time that took not the planets but people as its object. 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      "body": "Most important, this new quantitative approach to nature offered the gift of prophecy: calculate now, and you can find where the moon or Jupiter or whatever will be, days, years, centuries from now. Though Newton called what he did in that Lincolnshire farmhouse “natural philosophy,” this was science in its (early) modern form.\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<p class=\"para-sp\"><span class=\"char-first\">T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HERE WAS ONE </span></span>more move Newton made to complete this new approach to nature. A system of equations could yield a portrait of some aspect of the wide world, but any such model still needed reliable knowledge extracted from the natural world to make the connection between math and experience. 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He meticulously recorded his results, including defining the curve he induced in his eyeball (“ye curvature a b c d e f”) and noting that the colored circles grew brighter “when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye bodkin.” His sketch of what he did to himself is at once meticulous and stomach roiling, a measure of both the urgency of his hunger for data and his utter recklessness.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Such mad hunger would seize Newton over and over again—he would later pursue his alchemical experiments so relentlessly that he drove himself to the point of physical exhaustion and, at least once, in 1693, tipped all the way over the edge into true mental collapse, months of silence and paranoid misery. But such excess shouldn’t obscure his deeper and lifelong commitment to a cooler empiricism: the need to base any scientific speculation on the solid ground of rigorous and systematic observation.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_18\" title=\"18\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">That’s what occupied him in the last months of his plague exile: optical investigations that demanded hands-on effort in a series of organized, rigorous experiments with prisms and other apparatuses to tease apart the properties of color and light. The work ultimately produced <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText39\"></span>what he called the <i class=\"char-i\">experimentum crucis.</i>That was his crucial demonstration—that sunlight, so-called white light, is actually a blend of distinct individual colors, the rainbow spectrum from red to blue.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">The creation of new knowledge of the world required theories, ultimately mathematical accounts of the relationships between phenomena and events. It also needed <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText40\"></span>a careful, logically coherent approach to the collection of data, observations and experiments that could probe the material world. As his miraculous year unfolded, Newton found himself tracing this arc: through each particular advance, from pure mathematics to what he was able to deduce as he twisted a triangular piece of glass, he uncovered not just previously unknown facts but a whole new way of organizing that knowledge into what he would later call, accurately, <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText41\"></span>a “System of the World.”</p>\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<p class=\"para-sp\"><span class=\"char-first\">B<span class=\"smallcaps\">EYOND </span>W<span class=\"smallcaps\">OOLSTHORPE AND </span></span>its scenes of revolutionary intellectual transformation—all completely unknown outside the farmhouse walls—the rest of Newton’s world, haltingly, began to reassemble itself. By mid-March 1666 the city of Cambridge marked six weeks without a single plague death. The university reopened, and <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText42\"></span>Newton returned to his rooms on or around March 20. Then, <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText43\"></span>on Wednesday, June 6, Jane Ellingworth, a seamstress living on Penny Farthing Lane, felt poorly. Her father brought her a cup of ale and urged her to bed. She died the next day. The infection spread, with deaths reaching double digits in the city within two weeks. The colleges closed again, and Newton retreated to the countryside once more. The plague burned itself out over the summer, and by the end of the year Newton felt it safe enough to travel back to the university. 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      "body": "[Source of potential text plagiarism](https://books.google.pl/books/about/Money_for_Nothing.html?id=3L74DwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y) \n\nHello.\n\nThanks for being part of the community and publishing on Hive. \n[Plagiarism](https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism/) is the copying & pasting of others' work without giving credit to the original author or artist.  \nWe would appreciate it if you could avoid plagiarism of content (full or partial texts, videos, photography, art, etc.).\n\nWhile we love seeing new content, Hive really prioritizes original, human-created work to keep the ecosystem authentic. \n\nThank you.\n\nGuide: [Why and How People Abuse and Plagiarise](https://hivel.ink/hivewatchers/@hivewatchers/why-and-how-people-abuse-and-plagiarise) \n\n\nIf you believe this comment is in error, please contact us in [#appeals in Discord](https://discord.gg/eSwf8vzhWs).",
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      "body": "After his death, the original at Woolsthorpe was still known in the neighborhood as Sir Isaac’s tree. Every effort was made to preserve it as long as possible, until it finally collapsed in a windstorm in 1816. It rerooted itself and can still be seen at Woolsthorpe, while grafts from the tree have been used to propagate clones of Newton’s apples since the 1820s.\n<p class=\"para-p\"><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText35\"></span>But even if Newton watched the apple fall (and thought about gravity as it plummeted) it still took him decades to work out his ultimate theory. He used his newly gained mastery of the mathematics of circular motion to discover why things—including us—don’t simply fly off the surface of the earth, given the Copernican realization that the earth doesn’t sit still at the center of the cosmos but rather travels at an impressive speed, spinning on its axis as it tracks around its central sun. He calculated the strength of the so-called centrifugal force that should be hurling us into space. He put together that number with a rough approximation for the earth’s size—a number refined over the previous two centuries of European exploration by sea. Taken together, that was enough information to estimate the outward acceleration experienced at the surface of a revolving earth—how strongly any of us are being pushed out into space.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_15\" title=\"15\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Then he performed the other half of the analysis, considering the downward tug at the surface of the earth of what he called gravity in something like the modern sense of the term. Galileo had already observed the acceleration of falling bodies, but Newton trusted no measurement so well as one he made himself, so he reworked that earlier result by studying the motion of a pendulum—an experiment that brought him close to the modern value for the earth’s pull. He knew that his data were still imperfect, but, he wrote, <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText36\"></span>he “found them answer pretty nearly”—by which he meant that he was able to calculate a result that made sense of the evident reality. The gravitational force holding our feet to the ground is (clearly) more than strong enough to do the job—in his calculation, approximately three hundred times stronger than any centrifugal urge to launch us upwards.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">That result, at once imprecise and spectacular, would also have placed Newton in the vanguard of European natural philosophy if only anyone had heard about it. He was not yet fixed in his habit of silence, a determination reached a few years later, after a few bruising exchanges with other learned men. But isolated on his farm, he remained focused on the work at hand, applying his almost daily expanding mathematical skill to physical questions. Applying numbers to a concrete question—why stuff sticks to our planet’s surface—transformed the pure mathematical reasoning within his calculus into a literally down-to-earth experience. Newton’s work now became one of the early examples of what we would call a mathematical model, a representation of some aspect of nature abstracted into a form that could be manipulated, extended, and solved. Today we are utterly immersed in the Newtonian worldview, in which these models, systems of equations, are understood to be properties of the universe. During Newton’s miracle year, there was no such recognition, not yet. His next move, though, would push him ever closer to the ultimate triumph, his demonstration that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_16\" title=\"16\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">The fall of the apple had produced a breakthrough, but not a fully realized theory of gravity itself. In a leap of imagination that is still astounding, Newton realized that whatever pulled that piece of fruit toward the ground must have been the same phenomenon that held the moon in its orbit—tracing a path around the earth as our planet’s inward pull counteracted the moon’s urge to shoot off into space. At some distance from the earth, those two impulses must balance. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText37\"></span>Sitting there, an object would fall forever, tracing a (nearly) circular path around the center of the earth. Our moon is held to its course by the same phenomenon, the earth’s gravity, that drew Newton’s apple to the ground.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">The insight was there, but his first attempt to write down the mathematics of gravity wasn’t quite right; he would arrive at his famous “universal law of gravitation” only in the mid-1680s. 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      "body": "He wasn’t completely free of the older view as he pondered <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText28\"></span>the tricks that schoolmasters used to construct the canonical curves without bothering with any algebra: a string attached to a peg that could be used to generate a circle; the same string fitted to two pegs to trace out an ellipse; and so on. He thought about more elaborate “mechanical” ways complex curves can emerge—the cycloid, for example, a form traced by a point on the rim of a wheel that rolls in a straight line—and others, still more complicated.\n<figure class=\"figure figure_medium_caption\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze86\">\n</div>\n<figcaption class=\"figcaption dynamic_box\">\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">The making of a cycloid, from an eighteenth-century encyclopedia</p>\n</figcaption>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-p-alt\">In all those ways of ending up with a curving line on a page, there was one common theme: every curve was a map of motion, a mathematician’s travelogue. A point travels through space, and its trail, its trace, creates the stuff of geometry. Crucially, sometime during these months, Newton realized that this approach, <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText29\"></span>the “generation of figures by motion,” could apply not just to abstract travel, the path of points in Cartesian spaces, but to the real stuff of the real world. In other words, motion in the universe, and not just in the mind’s eye of the geometer, could be expressed in the mathematics he was inventing.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_13\" title=\"13\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p-alt\">Newton did not grasp the full implication of this work all at once. He understood at least the mathematical side of his breakthrough by as early as November 13, 1665. In the paper he wrote then, he described <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText30\"></span>the “infinitely little lines” that accumulated at each infinitely brief instant of time as his figures evolved. His breakthrough came when he realized that his two seemingly separate questions—how a curve bends and how much of the Cartesian plane it encloses—are actually twin faces of the same problem. Every change in the slope of a curve affects how much that shape encloses beneath it, and the same is true in reverse: the accumulation of territory under a curve reflects the shifting trace of that geometrical figure.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">With that insight Newton arrived at a discovery that, on its own, would have made him one of the most famous thinkers who ever lived. Figuring out how to characterize how the shape of a curve is changing at any point in time is the core of what is now called differential calculus, which he then extended to integral calculus, which addresses the questions relating to the areas bounded by such curves. Taken together, those two interrelated ideas, as developed and extended, remain the foundational mathematics of material experience.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Newton never underestimated his own powers. He had to have grasped the importance of his accomplishment in those few months of enforced seclusion on his farm. Yet for most of the next two decades, he kept this new mathematical insight almost entirely to himself.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Still, this was the inflection point, after which the way humankind understood its circumstances would be irreversibly altered from what had been known before. What is motion but change over time? And what is the world but matter in motion, an ever-transforming flux, continuously transforming as the instants pass into seconds, hours, years?</p>\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_14\" title=\"14\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-paft nospaceabove\"><span class=\"char-first\">T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HE INVENTION OF </span></span>the calculus, the mathematics of change, was one of the keys to what we now call the Newtonian revolution—and Newton in his miracle year put his breakthrough into almost immediate use. As 1666 began and the plague continued to rage, Newton turned from pure math to questions of material experience. At the heart of his inquiry lay the problem of gravity. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText31\"></span>As he told the story sixty years later, the essential clue to his ultimate theory came to him during the summer of 1666. One day he found himself in his garden “in a contemplative mood.” The tree in front of him was heavy with fruit. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText32\"></span>Suddenly, an apple fell—an utterly ordinary occurrence. And yet, it nagged at him. “Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?” he recalled asking himself. “Why should it not go sideways or upwards? but constantly to the earth’s center?”</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Why indeed? The myth of genius has asserted that this was all it took: in the not-quite-infinitesimal slice of time it took for the apple to drop to the ground, Newton grasped the ultimate prize, his theory of gravity. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText33\"></span>In the moment, so the story goes, he knew that matter attracts matter in proportion to the mass contained in each body divided by the square of the distance between them; that the tug is between the center of each mass; and—the ultimate prize—that the power “like that we here call gravity…extends its self thro’ the universe.”</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\"><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText34\"></span>This much is true: the tree itself was real. </p>",
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      "body": "Some of the works Newton had already read used infinite series to attack a variety of questions—for one, chasing down ever more precise values for that bane of middle school geometers, <span class=\"char-grk\">π</span>(the number used to calculate the circumference of circles). Newton, with his exceptional ability to speak both algebra and geometry, began to use infinite series to work out how curves behave. One of his favorite tricks was to think about the area under a curve—all that space on the graph between the curve and the x axis—and then build out a series that would add together smaller and smaller patches of that area until the sum of all those terms approached the entire territory and number being sought. Newton applied that idea to a wide range of different curves. He wrote out sequences. He plugged in numbers. He exhausted himself in calculation, cranking his exercises out to fifty decimal places and more.\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_10\" title=\"10\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">He totaled his sums—and then discovered what modern mathematics calls the generalized binomial theorem. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText21\"></span>This result allowed Newton to solve a wide range of specific algebraic equations, including, most significantly, the problem of the area beneath a curve (called quadrature), not just for one shape at a time, but for whole classes of curves. It was a discovery that became one of the pillars of modern mathematics.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p-alt\">As he played with his series, he noticed that in some of them each step in the calculation added a smaller and smaller amount to the total. Extending the operation by hand—row after row of numbers, a strangely beautiful triangle, growing across the page—produced a better and better fit to the ultimate answer. The endpoint, well beyond the stamina of even so heroic a numbers-cruncher as Newton, was obvious: the last terms in such series must dwindle toward nothing. Toward, but never all the way there, an infinitely small approach to zero.</p>\n<figure class=\"figure figure_medium_caption\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze76\">\n</div>\n<figcaption class=\"figcaption dynamic_box\">\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">Newton’s calculation of logarithms</p>\n</figcaption>\n</figure>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_11\" title=\"11\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Newton was not the first to ponder such infinitesimals. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText22\"></span>The Greek philosopher Zeno had played with the idea in his famous paradox: the race between the hero Achilles and a tortoise. With a fine sense of fair play, fleet-footed Achilles gave his opponent a head start. According to Zeno, that meant that no matter how much faster Achilles ran, he’d never overtake the tortoise. His reasoning was that in the time it took him to reach where the tortoise had just been, the reptile would move a little farther. When Achilles moved to that point, the tortoise would have moved again, and so on, forever. That increment of distance could get as small as you like, Zeno said, but it would never quite disappear. Hence, the tortoise would beat Achilles every time.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">That’s obviously absurd: in real life, an Achilles would charge past a tortoise, no matter how generous the head start. As early as Aristotle, logicians offered formal arguments to refute Zeno. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText23\"></span>But neither philosophical rigor nor common sense could erase the uneasiness produced by the idea of ever-smaller quantities. 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Here, he used infinitesimals to produce a straight line whose slope could be calculated and that touched the curve at just that one point and no other—what’s called a tangent.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_12\" title=\"12\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Such problems took Newton unequivocally beyond classical approaches, in which the curves he was trying to understand had been examined as whole, finished phenomena, parabolas or ellipses or anything else of interest as the object of study. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText27\"></span>But Newton’s thinking in the last months of 1665 employed his genuinely new way of seeing, in which the mathematical objects he analyzed emerged in the solutions to equations, point after point accumulating along the figure. </p>",
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      "body": "The study of curves was a central fascination of seventeenth-century mathematics, and Newton had plunged into the field when he read a translation of René Descartes’s <i class=\"char-i\">Geometry</i>a year before the plague hit. Descartes’s approach helped link together the approach of classical geometry, which explored shapes and their properties, and the ideas of algebra, with equations whose solutions could be mapped onto a particular curve.<sup>*</sup>\n<p class=\"para-p\">One of the key advances Newton encountered in his copy of <i class=\"char-i\">Geometry</i>—the Latin translation that spread Descartes’s ideas throughout learned Europe—was the coordinate system now known as Cartesian coordinates. It provided a way to map any point in two dimensions with just two numbers, corresponding to its horizontal and vertical positions. Using two lines perpendicular to each other—the familiar cross of every graph in grade school math classes—and a standard unit length applied to both axes, Descartes created a systematic way to measure and map any shape a geometer wanted to study—including the classical curves, circles, ellipses, and the rest.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_8\" title=\"8\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">When Newton came to study this work, and then more contemporary mathematics, he soon turned one of its approaches on its head. In classical geometry, the starting point for most European mathematicians, the curve or the shape is the object of inquiry. Even though Cartesian coordinates offered a new and powerful way of representing equations as shapes on his coordinate system, many of Newton’s contemporaries saw such equations as a property of a given figure, a line or a circle or some more complicated form. But it took Newton just a few months after encountering Descartes to realize, as his biographer, Richard Westfall reports, “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText20\"></span>The equation is more basic than the curve; the equation defines, or as Newton put it, expresses the nature of the curve.”</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">That sounds like a technical point, or even one of taste: some folks think in pictures and, if they are mathematical, dive into the relationships between shapes and volumes, while others play the game of manipulating those abstractions. But Newton’s insight—starting first with the equation, rather than the shape—was foundational because it would, first hesitantly and then through centuries of development, yield a new way of seeing the world through mathematics. For his predecessors, the classical geometers, the curve was there, complete, a synoptic view of the object. But in Newton’s work, in the early years of what is now known as analytic geometry, a curve is built up as a calculation reveals the solutions to the equations that generate any given geometrical object. The accumulation of specific answers to these calculations—points on a curve, plotted on the page to produce a geometric object—can be interpreted in various ways. The interpretation that Newton would develop focused on arguably the most important implication: equations describe the evolution of a system—how its solutions build a picture on a page. That picture is a map of the relationship of variables—things that can change. If one of those variables is the passage of one moment into the next, then the abstract play of symbols and shapes becomes a portrait of change in action.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Ultimately, this mathematical insight is at the heart of modern physics, the science that Newton, more than any other single thinker, would create. In its simplest form, the idea is this: the full picture, the complete geometrical representation of all the available solutions to a system of equations, can be understood as all the possible outcomes for a given phenomenon described by that mathematics. Each specific calculation, fed with observations of the current state of whatever you’re interested in, the flight of a cannonball, the motion of a planet, how a curveball swerves, how rapidly an outbreak of the plague might spread, makes a prediction for what will happen next. In his twenties, working on his own, with almost no systematic experience of the study of the real world, Newton did not yet grasp the full power of the ideas implied by the way he had begun to think about math. That would come in time. 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      "body": "There, he recorded in his diary, he found “all the towne almost going out of towne, the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country.” He stopped awhile at the Cross Keys tavern—long enough to enjoy the company of the barman’s wife—but by the next day he was ready to decide “whether to send my mother into the country today.” She didn’t want to go, but “because of the sicknesse in the towne, and my intentions of removing my wife,” he finally managed to put her on a coach that would take her east, toward Cambridgeshire.\n<p class=\"para-p\">London’s exodus had the predictable result: refugees from the capital carried the contagion into the countryside. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText12\"></span>Some towns barred their gates to keep the disease at bay. It didn’t work. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText13\"></span>In Cambridge, the blow fell on July 25. John Morley, five years old, was found dead at his home in the parish of the Holy Trinity. There were dark spots on his chest. When the plague inspectors came, they found Morley’s younger brother already showing black irruptions on his face. The child was taken to the pesthouse, where he died ten days later.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Ann Fisher, a child from All Saints Parish, died on the same day, confirming that the disease had spread beyond a single neighborhood. More cases followed, more deaths, and from there Cambridge followed London’s pattern. Businesses shuttered. Stourbridge Fair, one of the greatest open-air markets in Europe, was canceled. The university scattered. On August 7, the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity acknowledged the obvious and decided to pay its members an allowance whether or not they remained in residence after that date. No record for Isaac Newton appears in Trinity College’s accounts for the extra stipend. The newly passed bachelor of arts had already fled, traveling the sixty miles north and a little west to Woolsthorpe.</p>\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_6\" title=\"6\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-paft nospaceabove\"><span class=\"char-first\">T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HERE HE REMAINED </span></span>for almost two years, cut off from every other scholar or mathematician. The isolation suited him. “In those days,” he would recall half a century later, “I was in <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText14\"></span>the prime of my age for invention &amp; minded Mathematics &amp; Philosophy more than at any time since.”</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Those twenty months are now known as Newton’s <i class=\"char-i\">annus mirabilis</i>—his miracle year. In that brief time, he would solve several problems at the leading edge of contemporary mathematics. The decks thus cleared, he would go on to invent whole new ideas, laying the foundations of what we now call calculus, the mathematical tool used to analyze (among much else) change over time—where a cannonball might be at any instant, or a planet, for example. He then turned to what we now call physics, beginning with mechanics, the study of bodies in motion. Here too, before he could uncover specific results <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText15\"></span>he had to work out fundamental concepts, mastering the first modern understanding of inertia, for example, an idea he first encountered in Descartes’s work, and thinking deeply about what it means to be a force—two ideas so essential to the future development of our understanding of the physical world that he in large measure had to construct them himself before he could go any further. Then came the first glimpses of what would become his theory of gravity and all that flowed from that epiphany. And, still not done, he dove further into an investigation of light, color, and optics that would yield his first great public triumphs. The record does not reveal when—or whether—Isaac Newton slept.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">This seemingly superhuman accumulation of ideas during his plague-imposed exile has created a mythology of superhuman genius, conjuring worlds of thought out of country air. It’s not quite that simple, of course. Newton’s definitive biographer, Richard Westfall, points out that <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText16\"></span>the program for the work to come was laid down in 1664, when Newton, just twenty-one, was still enrolled at Trinity College. That’s when he first dove into the mathematical inquiries that would dominate his first several months back home, and when he produced <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText17\"></span>an extraordinary series of forty-five queries in which he grappled with fundamental issues of time, matter, motion, and much more. 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      "body": "\n\n<div class=\"page_top_padding\">\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_1\" title=\"1\"></span>\n<div class=\"figure figure_heading\">\n<div class=\"squeeze\">\n</div>\n</div>\n<h1 class=\"para-pn-part-pg\">P<span class=\"smallcaps\">ART </span>O<span class=\"smallcaps\">NE</span></h1>\n<h1 class=\"para-pt\">C<span class=\"smallcaps\">OUNT</span><span class=\"smallcaps\">ING AND </span>T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HINKING</span></h1>\n<div class=\"para-orn\">\n<span class=\"figure_inline\">\n</span></div>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"para-pepif-alt1\"><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText4\"></span>Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws,—establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the cause and effects of things.</p>\n<p class=\"para-peps\"><span class=\"smallcaps\">—</span>I<span class=\"smallcaps\">SAAC </span>N<span class=\"smallcaps\">EWTON</span></p>\n</blockquote>\n<div class=\"figure figure_heading\">\n<div class=\"squeeze\">\n</div>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n<div class=\"page_top_padding\">\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_3\" title=\"3\"></span>\n<h1 class=\"para-cn-chap-pg\">C<span class=\"smallcaps\">HAPTER </span>O<span class=\"smallcaps\">NE</span></h1>\n<h1 class=\"para-ct\">“The System of the World”</h1>\n<figure class=\"figure_dingbat\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze12\">\n</div>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-cda\">W<span class=\"smallcaps\">OOLSTHORPE, </span>L<span class=\"smallcaps\">INCOLNSHIRE, </span>M<span class=\"smallcaps\">IDSUMMER, 1665</span></p>\n<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText5\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-pf stickupcaps char-dropcap-DC cso_21-DC\" style=\"text-indent:0;\">He had walked for three days to escape a farmer’s life just four years before. There’d been no hint he’d ever return. Yet, here he was again, about to open the gate. Little had changed: the main house, stone-built, comfortable; the barn behind; and, just across the track from the front door, the little patch of garden with its stand of apple trees, warming in the early-summer sun. He’d been nineteen when he left, a country boy, awkward and unsociable, much given to scribbling in his notebook. He was twenty-three now and had a place in the world: a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, with rooms and a stipend and his own place at table. But now, smack in the middle of term, he was coming up the lane, crossing to the door, and stepping over the threshold, into the house.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Isaac Newton had come home.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Or rather, he had been chased back to Woolsthorpe’s quiet corner of the Lincolnshire countryside. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText6\"></span>Cambridge had been emptying since late spring, as each of its seven thousand or so residents who had anywhere to go desperately fled the approaching danger. That threat had been carried in its turn by those coming up the roads from London, on the run from the terror that had already reached the capital.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_4\" title=\"4\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">No one knows precisely how the plague reached London in the early months of 1665. Attentive observers had been nervous throughout 1664. The diarist and navy bureaucrat Samuel Pepys kept his eyes on Amsterdam, where a full-blown epidemic had begun in the previous fall. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText7\"></span>Pepys first took note of the danger in October, and then in November recorded in his diary that ships coming from infected ports now faced quarantine along the Thames. But some still arrived, smugglers carrying cloth, or, after the new year, with the start of the second Anglo-Dutch War, vessels bringing prisoners home. There were always rats on board, and rats carry fleas. Fleas host the <i class=\"char-i\">Yersinia pestis</i>bacterium.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\"><i class=\"char-i\">Y. pestis</i>causes the plague.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Winter came, the slowest season for infection. For a time, it appeared that England might escape the scourge suffered on the other side of the North Sea. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText8\"></span>A few cases were reported. The bill of mortality for the crowded parish of St. Giles in the Fields records one plague death on Christmas Eve, 1664—a “Goodwoman Phillips.” When she fell ill, Phillips, her husband, and their unnamed and unnumbered children were placed in quarantine, and their home was shuttered, guarded, and bedaubed with the plea “Lord Have Mercy on Us.” But the infection apparently stopped there, and the next weeks were quiet. Plague was endemic in England, and every year saw a few come down with the disease. This appeared to be just one more case, and not the first of a new tidal wave of infection.</p>\n<p class=\"para-p\">The winter ended, and spring began kindly. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText9\"></span>Two more plague deaths show up in London’s weekly bills of mortality in the last week of April, again in St. Giles in the Fields. The first week in May saw none…but then the numbers turned. Nine in the second week, three in the third. Fourteen for the week of May 23. Seventeen reported on the thirtieth. Forty-three on June 6—and the tally leapt from there. The official record topped a thousand on July 28, then doubled, and doubled again. By September, one thousand Londoners were dying each day. <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText10\"></span>By year’s end, the official toll would approach seventy thousand, as many as one in eight of the city’s residents.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_5\" title=\"5\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-p\">Everyone who could get out of town did. On June 21, the ubiquitous Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, had a meeting in Whitehall, trying to unravel King Charles II’s perpetual money troubles. Achieving nothing more than usual, <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText11\"></span>he set out across the city to Cripplegate, one of the ancient openings in London’s city wall. </p></div>",
      "title": "[religious brainwash]  Money for Nothing The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the... #3/177",
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      "body": "Alternatively, as the skeptical Defoe warned, the clever men of Exchange Alley had figured out a way to get rich off of the public interest: they were “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText2\"></span>ready, as Occasion offers, and Profit presents, to Stock-jobb [buy and sell] the Nation, couzen [trick] the Parliament, ruffle the Bank, run up and run down Stocks, and put the Dice upon the whole Town.”\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xiii\" title=\"xiii\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">“Stock-jobb the nation.” That was the crux of Defoe’s polemic: schemes like this transformed the national debt—a public necessity—into a form that could be manipulated for private profit. That was, he argued, if not treason itself, then <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText3\"></span>treachery’s nearest cousin: “Is not all that is taken from the Credit of the Publick, on such an Occasion…is not every Step that is taken in Prejudice of the King’s Interest…a plain constructive Treason in the Consequences of it?”</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">In the most straightforward account of the events that were to come—known to history as the South Sea Bubble—Defoe would be proved right. In the year 1720, every Briton with two shillings to rub together, it seemed, would hear of the South Sea Company, would buy into its promises, and would be dazzled, for a time, at the prospect of riches beyond imagining. Half of Europe would too, and for a very great many it would end in ruin.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xiv\" title=\"xiv\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmpaft\"><span class=\"char-first\">A<span class=\"smallcaps\">ND YET, SEEN </span></span>with enough distance (and a comfortable remove from those lost fortunes), it’s clear that Daniel Defoe was also wrong. What would happen in Exchange Alley over the next year wasn’t simply the work of “a Trade founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, and nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falshoods.” The South Sea Bubble—the headlong rise and the sudden collapse of London’s nascent stock market—wasn’t the original sin of early modern capitalism—or rather, it was never only that.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">Instead, as this book argues, if we are to understand the Bubble year, wider histories must come into play, ones that reach both backward and forward in time, from Defoe’s troubled days to our own. In this telling, the calamities of 1720 can be read as a watershed moment in the long, tangled process of creating the modern concept of money, and especially of money’s most dynamic incarnation, credit—which makes promises expressed in numbers that connect the future to the present. The Bubble is a part of the history of finance but is not confined to it. Rather, it opens a window on the circumstances from which later financial thinking emerged: the grand shift over the preceding century in the way human beings understood their experience of the material world, an intellectual transformation better known as the scientific revolution.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">The history of the scientific revolution is usually told as a sequence of discoveries, mostly in mathematics and physics. That picture leaves out a central human fact: those who solved problems of planetary motion or the flight of cannonballs did not confine themselves to natural philosophy. From the beginning, they used the same methods and habits of mind to tackle human questions, to guide the choices made by individuals and societies. In 1719, on the brink of the wild ride to come, the greatest revolutionary of them all worked just a few hundred yards to the southeast of Exchange Alley. There, in rooms built along the outer wall of the Tower of London, Sir Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, produced Britain’s supply of the “real” money: gold and silver bullion of precisely defined and authenticated purity, rolled and punched and stamped into disks of legally mandated weight, decorated with the head of the king. He’d been advising the crown on monetary matters since the mid-1690s, and by this time he was an experienced stock market player on his own account—which included, at this moment, a tidy sum in South Sea stock. The year to come would test him as much as anyone else—but his significance to the events of 1720 lies in the way he taught his contemporaries to think, not just about money, but about anything that could be observed, measured, and counted.</p>\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xv\" title=\"xv\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmsp\"><span class=\"char-first\">T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HE CATASTROPHE NOW </span></span>known as the South Sea Bubble is on record as the first and in many ways the archetypal stock market crash and fraud. What happened then and what the British state did in response both have a direct connection to what has occurred (and may soon come again) in the financial life of the twenty-first century. In the moment, it certainly proved Defoe’s point about the significant threat that arises when the motives and interests of the financial elite clash with those of national governments and the public. And certainly, pawing through the wreckage left after the Bubble burst uncovered an extraordinary catalog of corruption, a comprehensive guide to all the ways it’s possible to subvert the market for private gain.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">But to understand how the nation got itself into the Bubble, and to grasp what actually had occurred behind the surface of catastrophe, we must follow the story further back in time—to a garden, an orchard. There waits the young Isaac Newton, a man barely past boyhood. He can see an apple tree, laden at this midsummer moment with fruit—a variety called Flower of Kent.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">At any moment, one might fall.</p>",
      "title": "[religious brainwash]  Money for Nothing The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the... #2/177",
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      "body": "<div class=\"page_top_padding\">\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_ix\" title=\"ix\"></span>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xi\" title=\"xi\"></span>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmt-in-pg\"><span class=\"char-ccust1\">I<span class=\"smallcaps\">NTRODUCTION</span></span></h1>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmst\">“the great Follies of Life”</h1>\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze12\">\n</div>\n\n<p class=\"para-da1\">L<span class=\"smallcaps\">ONDON, 1719</span></p>\n<p class=\"para-fmpf stickupcaps char-dropcap-DC cso_21-DC\" style=\"text-indent:0;\">The year had begun well enough for London’s stock traders, working from their corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley. Buying and selling shares—dealing not in things but in numbers—was still new to the city. There was no fixed marketplace for traders in paper. So those who had mastered what was to many still a very dark art concentrated in a few taverns and inns, at Garraway’s, a coffeehouse that catered to the gentry, and more of them just around the corner at Jonathan’s, the rival coffeehouse that saw the most feverish trade in all the new ways in which it was possible to make—or <i class=\"char-i\">be—</i>money.</p>\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze43\">\n</div>\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">Exchange Alley in its early-eighteenth-century layout</p\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">For journalist, propagandist, and gadfly Daniel Defoe, Jonathan’s and the rest were familiar—and dangerous: dens of iniquity. Defoe had been warning his fellow Britons about the perils of the Alley for almost three decades. Now, near midsummer, he was ready with his most desperate alarm yet, a pamphlet titled <i class=\"char-i\">The Anatomy of Exchange Alley,</i><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText0\"></span>written in the voice of “a jobber,” or unlicensed dealer in stocks. In part, the pamphlet served as a kind of travel story, leading its readers on a journey to an exotic spot. Exchange Alley was an island in miniature. It could be walked in a minute or two: “Stepping out of Jonathan’s [Coffeehouse] into the Alley, you turn your Face full <i class=\"char-i\">South,</i>moving on a few Paces, and then turning Due <i class=\"char-i\">East,</i>you advance to <i class=\"char-i\">Garraway</i>’s; from thence going out at the other Door, you go on still <i class=\"char-i\">East</i>into <i class=\"char-i\">Birchin-Lane,</i>and then halting a little at the Sword-Blade Bank to do much Mischief in fewest Words, you immediately face to the <i class=\"char-i\">North,</i>enter <i class=\"char-i\">Cornhill,</i>visit two or three petty Provinces there in your way <i class=\"char-i\">West.</i>” There, a few hundred paces at most, and the visitor would be almost done: “Having Box’d your Compass, and sail’d round the whole Stock-jobbing Globe, you turn into <i class=\"char-i\">Jonathan</i>’s again.” Home again!—but not in safe harbor, for the jobber concludes that “as most of the great Follies of Life oblige us to do, you end just where you began.”</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xii\" title=\"xii\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">And what folly it was! Defoe painted the risk faced by any reckless soul foolish enough to wander into Jonathan’s, in the tale of a naïvely avaricious countryman who encounters a couple of con men. They ply him with rumors, urge him to trade on their insider’s knowledge, and surgically extract his entire fortune: “his Coach and Horses, his fine Seat and rich Furniture,” all sold “to make good the Deficiency.”</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">That was typical of Exchange Alley, Defoe warned his readers. It fostered “a compleat System of Knavery…a Trade founded in Fraud.” Its tricks were hardly new, of course. In some form, they’re as old as human desire, as the book of Proverbs attests: “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText1\"></span>The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death.” But this hopeful, nervous year of 1719 held something new, a scheme more ambitious than anything previous attempted by the devilish denizens of the Alley. The South Sea Company had opened for business in 1711. The firm had never really managed to do the work implied by its name, shipping goods and slaves to the Spanish ports of South America. Instead, it played in what was then just being born, a marketplace for credit, all the notes and bonds and much stranger inventions that the British government was using to build its ever-growing mountain of debt. For several years, the South Sea Company itself had nibbled around the edges of this market, completing a handful of minor deals, but its directors now aimed at a vastly more ambitious project—one that would, if it worked, solve Britain’s borrowing problem once and for all. They proposed a heroic attempt at what we would now call financial engineering—taking the whole of the national debt, accumulated over a seemingly endless series of wars, and turning it into shares of a private company—theirs—which could be traded back and forth at will in the nascent stock exchange. In its partisans’ view, that would be the saving of the nation. </p></div>",
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      "body": "This blog examines Scientology not as an eccentric belief system or a matter of private faith, but as a structured enterprise built on coercion, deception, and the systematic misuse of scientific language. Too often, criticism of Scientology is dismissed as prejudice, misunderstanding, or hostility toward religion. That dismissal relies on confusion—deliberate confusion—between belief and evidence, between personal conviction and demonstrable fact.\n\nHistory offers a useful lens for understanding such systems. Long before modern corporations, long before psychology and neuroscience, observers were already documenting how complex frauds operate: how insiders profit, how outsiders are enticed, and how moral language is repurposed to legitimize exploitation. The financial schemes of the eighteenth century, such as those described by Daniel Defoe in The Anatomy of Exchange Alley, were not merely economic failures; they were social technologies of persuasion. They thrived on insider claims, opaque mechanisms, and the promise of secret knowledge unavailable to the uninitiated. Participants often ended exactly where they began—except poorer, disillusioned, and blamed for their own ruin.\n\nScientology follows this same pattern, updated for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It presents itself as a science while rejecting the methodological constraints of science. It promises certainty, measurable gains, and exclusive insight, while insulating its core claims from independent verification. When harm occurs—financial, psychological, or familial—it is reframed as personal failure rather than systemic design.\n\nThe purpose of this blog is to document, analyze, and contextualize Scientology’s practices using primary sources, testimony, historical parallels, and scientific standards. The goal is not outrage, mockery, or sensationalism, but clarity. Fraud does not require stupidity in its victims; it requires asymmetry of information and authority. Pseudoscience does not fail because it lacks jargon; it fails because it cannot withstand scrutiny.\n\nIf there is a unifying theme here, it is this: systems that demand trust while resisting examination deserve neither.",
      "title": "Introduction to my Anti-Scientology-Blog",
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      "body": "<style>font-size:3.0em;\n}\n\n/* --------------- smallcaps --------------- */\n\nspan.smallcaps,\nspan.small-caps {\n\tfont-size:0.85em;\n}\nmargin: 1em 0 1em 0;\n\ttext-align:center;\n}\n\n/* ---------------- section breaks -------------- */\nhr.transition{\n\tdisplay:block;\n\tborder:none;\n\tmargin:0;\n}\ndiv.transition{\n    margin:1em 0;\n    text-align:center;\n}\nfont-size: 0.93em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-bottom: 1.5em;\n    text-indent: -7%;\n    margin-left: 14%;\n    margin-right: 7%;\n    text-align: left;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-fmp {\n    font-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-indent: 5.1%;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    }\n.char-first-i {\n    font-style: italic;\n    }\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-fmsp {\n    font-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    }\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-indent: 5.1%;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-fmpaft {\n    font-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }</style>\nAlternatively, as the skeptical Defoe warned, the clever men of Exchange Alley had figured out a way to get rich off of the public interest: they were “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText2\"></span>ready, as Occasion offers, and Profit presents, to Stock-jobb [buy and sell] the Nation, couzen [trick] the Parliament, ruffle the Bank, run up and run down Stocks, and put the Dice upon the whole Town.”\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xiii\" title=\"xiii\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">“Stock-jobb the nation.” That was the crux of Defoe’s polemic: schemes like this transformed the national debt—a public necessity—into a form that could be manipulated for private profit. That was, he argued, if not treason itself, then <span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText3\"></span>treachery’s nearest cousin: “Is not all that is taken from the Credit of the Publick, on such an Occasion…is not every Step that is taken in Prejudice of the King’s Interest…a plain constructive Treason in the Consequences of it?”</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">In the most straightforward account of the events that were to come—known to history as the South Sea Bubble—Defoe would be proved right. In the year 1720, every Briton with two shillings to rub together, it seemed, would hear of the South Sea Company, would buy into its promises, and would be dazzled, for a time, at the prospect of riches beyond imagining. Half of Europe would too, and for a very great many it would end in ruin.</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xiv\" title=\"xiv\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmpaft\"><span class=\"char-first\">A<span class=\"smallcaps\">ND YET, SEEN </span></span>with enough distance (and a comfortable remove from those lost fortunes), it’s clear that Daniel Defoe was also wrong. What would happen in Exchange Alley over the next year wasn’t simply the work of “a Trade founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, and nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falshoods.” The South Sea Bubble—the headlong rise and the sudden collapse of London’s nascent stock market—wasn’t the original sin of early modern capitalism—or rather, it was never only that.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">Instead, as this book argues, if we are to understand the Bubble year, wider histories must come into play, ones that reach both backward and forward in time, from Defoe’s troubled days to our own. In this telling, the calamities of 1720 can be read as a watershed moment in the long, tangled process of creating the modern concept of money, and especially of money’s most dynamic incarnation, credit—which makes promises expressed in numbers that connect the future to the present. The Bubble is a part of the history of finance but is not confined to it. Rather, it opens a window on the circumstances from which later financial thinking emerged: the grand shift over the preceding century in the way human beings understood their experience of the material world, an intellectual transformation better known as the scientific revolution.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">The history of the scientific revolution is usually told as a sequence of discoveries, mostly in mathematics and physics. That picture leaves out a central human fact: those who solved problems of planetary motion or the flight of cannonballs did not confine themselves to natural philosophy. From the beginning, they used the same methods and habits of mind to tackle human questions, to guide the choices made by individuals and societies. In 1719, on the brink of the wild ride to come, the greatest revolutionary of them all worked just a few hundred yards to the southeast of Exchange Alley. There, in rooms built along the outer wall of the Tower of London, Sir Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, produced Britain’s supply of the “real” money: gold and silver bullion of precisely defined and authenticated purity, rolled and punched and stamped into disks of legally mandated weight, decorated with the head of the king. He’d been advising the crown on monetary matters since the mid-1690s, and by this time he was an experienced stock market player on his own account—which included, at this moment, a tidy sum in South Sea stock. The year to come would test him as much as anyone else—but his significance to the events of 1720 lies in the way he taught his contemporaries to think, not just about money, but about anything that could be observed, measured, and counted.</p>\n<hr class=\"transition\"/>\n<div aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"transition\">—</div>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xv\" title=\"xv\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmsp\"><span class=\"char-first\">T<span class=\"smallcaps\">HE CATASTROPHE NOW </span></span>known as the South Sea Bubble is on record as the first and in many ways the archetypal stock market crash and fraud. What happened then and what the British state did in response both have a direct connection to what has occurred (and may soon come again) in the financial life of the twenty-first century. In the moment, it certainly proved Defoe’s point about the significant threat that arises when the motives and interests of the financial elite clash with those of national governments and the public. And certainly, pawing through the wreckage left after the Bubble burst uncovered an extraordinary catalog of corruption, a comprehensive guide to all the ways it’s possible to subvert the market for private gain.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">But to understand how the nation got itself into the Bubble, and to grasp what actually had occurred behind the surface of catastrophe, we must follow the story further back in time—to a garden, an orchard. There waits the young Isaac Newton, a man barely past boyhood. He can see an apple tree, laden at this midsummer moment with fruit—a variety called Flower of Kent.</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">At any moment, one might fall.</p>\n\n",
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*/\n\nspan.smallcaps,\nspan.small-caps {\n\tfont-size:0.85em;\n}\nmargin-top:0em;\n}\n.page_top_padding {\n\tmargin-top:10%;\n}\nfont-family:Courier, monospace;}\n\n\n/* --------------- stickupcaps --------------- */\n\np.stickupcaps::first-letter {\n    line-height:0;\n    padding-right:2px;\n}\n.stickupcaps::first-letter {\n    font-size:3.0em;\n}\nmargin-left:0;}/* LLS: 3/20/2019 used on li element for nested lists*/\n/* --------------- images --------------- */\n\nimg.image{width:100%;}\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    }\n.para-fmst {\n    font-size: 1.22em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-bottom: 0;\n    text-align: center;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\nfont-size: 0.93em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-bottom: 1.5em;\n    text-indent: -7%;\n    margin-left: 14%;\n    margin-right: 7%;\n    text-align: left;\n    margin-top: 0;\n   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text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-illcapf {\n    font-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 0.9em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    }\n.char-i {\n    font-style: italic;\n    }\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-fmpf {\n    font-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\nfont-style: italic;\n    }\n.char-dropcap-DC::first-letter {\n    font-size: 2.09em;\n    color: #929396;\n    }\nfont-size: 1.22em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-bottom: 0;\n    text-align: center;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\n.para-da1 {\n    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corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley. Buying and selling shares—dealing not in things but in numbers—was still new to the city. There was no fixed marketplace for traders in paper. So those who had mastered what was to many still a very dark art concentrated in a few taverns and inns, at Garraway’s, a coffeehouse that catered to the gentry, and more of them just around the corner at Jonathan’s, the rival coffeehouse that saw the most feverish trade in all the new ways in which it was possible to make—or <i class=\"char-i\">be—</i>money.</p>\n<figure class=\"figure figure_small_caption\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze43\">\n</div>\n<figcaption class=\"figcaption dynamic_box\">\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">Exchange Alley in its early-eighteenth-century layout</p>\n</figcaption>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">For journalist, propagandist, and gadfly Daniel Defoe, Jonathan’s and the rest were familiar—and dangerous: dens of iniquity. Defoe had been warning his fellow Britons about the perils of the Alley for almost three decades. Now, near midsummer, he was ready with his most desperate alarm yet, a pamphlet titled <i class=\"char-i\">The Anatomy of Exchange Alley,</i><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText0\"></span>written in the voice of “a jobber,” or unlicensed dealer in stocks. In part, the pamphlet served as a kind of travel story, leading its readers on a journey to an exotic spot. Exchange Alley was an island in miniature. It could be walked in a minute or two: “Stepping out of Jonathan’s [Coffeehouse] into the Alley, you turn your Face full <i class=\"char-i\">South,</i>moving on a few Paces, and then turning Due <i class=\"char-i\">East,</i>you advance to <i class=\"char-i\">Garraway</i>’s; from thence going out at the other Door, you go on still <i class=\"char-i\">East</i>into <i class=\"char-i\">Birchin-Lane,</i>and then halting a little at the Sword-Blade Bank to do much Mischief in fewest Words, you immediately face to the <i class=\"char-i\">North,</i>enter <i class=\"char-i\">Cornhill,</i>visit two or three petty Provinces there in your way <i class=\"char-i\">West.</i>” There, a few hundred paces at most, and the visitor would be almost done: “Having Box’d your Compass, and sail’d round the whole Stock-jobbing Globe, you turn into <i class=\"char-i\">Jonathan</i>’s again.” Home again!—but not in safe harbor, for the jobber concludes that “as most of the great Follies of Life oblige us to do, you end just where you began.”</p>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xii\" title=\"xii\"></span>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">And what folly it was! Defoe painted the risk faced by any reckless soul foolish enough to wander into Jonathan’s, in the tale of a naïvely avaricious countryman who encounters a couple of con men. They ply him with rumors, urge him to trade on their insider’s knowledge, and surgically extract his entire fortune: “his Coach and Horses, his fine Seat and rich Furniture,” all sold “to make good the Deficiency.”</p>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">That was typical of Exchange Alley, Defoe warned his readers. It fostered “a compleat System of Knavery…a Trade founded in Fraud.” Its tricks were hardly new, of course. In some form, they’re as old as human desire, as the book of Proverbs attests: “<span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText1\"></span>The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death.” But this hopeful, nervous year of 1719 held something new, a scheme more ambitious than anything previous attempted by the devilish denizens of the Alley. The South Sea Company had opened for business in 1711. The firm had never really managed to do the work implied by its name, shipping goods and slaves to the Spanish ports of South America. Instead, it played in what was then just being born, a marketplace for credit, all the notes and bonds and much stranger inventions that the British government was using to build its ever-growing mountain of debt. For several years, the South Sea Company itself had nibbled around the edges of this market, completing a handful of minor deals, but its directors now aimed at a vastly more ambitious project—one that would, if it worked, solve Britain’s borrowing problem once and for all. They proposed a heroic attempt at what we would now call financial engineering—taking the whole of the national debt, accumulated over a seemingly endless series of wars, and turning it into shares of a private company—theirs—which could be traded back and forth at will in the nascent stock exchange. In its partisans’ view, that would be the saving of the nation. </p></div>",
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}\nfont-weight: normal;\n    font-style: normal;\n    font-size: 1em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    text-align: justify;\n    margin-bottom: 0.2em;\n    }\n.para-fmst {\n    font-size: 1.22em;\n    line-height: inherit;\n    margin-bottom: 0;\n    text-align: center;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }</style>\n\n<div class=\"page_top_padding\">\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_ix\" title=\"ix\"></span>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xi\" title=\"xi\"></span>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmt-in-pg\"><span class=\"char-ccust1\">I<span class=\"smallcaps\">NTRODUCTION</span></span></h1>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmst\">“the great Follies of Life”</h1>\n<figure class=\"figure_dingbat\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze12\">\n<img alt=\"\" class=\"image\" id=\"page_xi_img1\" src=\"../images/042_Leve_9780812998467_all_art_r1.jpg\"/>\n</div>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-da1\">L<span class=\"smallcaps\">ONDON, 1719</span></p>\n<p class=\"para-fmpf stickupcaps char-dropcap-DC cso_21-DC\" style=\"text-indent:0;\">The year had begun well enough for London’s stock traders, working from their corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley. Buying and selling shares—dealing not in things but in numbers—was still new to the city. There was no fixed marketplace for traders in paper. So those who had mastered what was to many still a very dark art concentrated in a few taverns and inns, at Garraway’s, a coffeehouse that catered to the gentry, and more of them just around the corner at Jonathan’s, the rival coffeehouse that saw the most feverish trade in all the new ways in which it was possible to make—or <i class=\"char-i\">be—</i>money.</p>\n<figure class=\"figure figure_small_caption\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze43\">\n<img alt=\"\" class=\"image\" id=\"page_xi_img2\" src=\"../images/001_Leve_9780812998467_all_art_r3.jpg\"/>\n</div>\n<figcaption class=\"figcaption dynamic_box\">\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">Exchange Alley in its early-eighteenth-century layout</p>\n</figcaption>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">For journalist, propagandist, and gadfly Daniel Defoe, Jonathan’s and the rest were familiar—and dangerous: dens of iniquity. Defoe had been warning his fellow Britons about the perils of the Alley for almost three decades. 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In its partisans’ view, that would be the saving of the nation. </p></div>",
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1.39em;\n    text-align: left;\n    margin-top: 0;\n    }\nfont-size: 2.1em;\n    }\n.figure_dingbat {\n    text-align: center;\n    margin-top: 1em;\n    margin-bottom: 4em;\n    page-break-inside: avoid;\n    }\n.figure_dingbat-alt {\n    text-align: center;\n    margin-top: 1em;\n    margin-bottom: 4.85em;\n    page-break-inside: avoid;\n    }</style>\n\n<div class=\"page_top_padding\">\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_ix\" title=\"ix\"></span>\n<span epub:type=\"pagebreak\" id=\"page_xi\" title=\"xi\"></span>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmt-in-pg\"><span class=\"char-ccust1\">I<span class=\"smallcaps\">NTRODUCTION</span></span></h1>\n<h1 class=\"para-fmst\">“the great Follies of Life”</h1>\n<figure class=\"figure_dingbat\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze12\">\n<img alt=\"\" class=\"image\" id=\"page_xi_img1\" src=\"../images/042_Leve_9780812998467_all_art_r1.jpg\"/>\n</div>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-da1\">L<span class=\"smallcaps\">ONDON, 1719</span></p>\n<p class=\"para-fmpf stickupcaps char-dropcap-DC cso_21-DC\" style=\"text-indent:0;\">The year had begun well enough for London’s stock traders, working from their corner of the city, a narrow passage called Exchange Alley. Buying and selling shares—dealing not in things but in numbers—was still new to the city. There was no fixed marketplace for traders in paper. So those who had mastered what was to many still a very dark art concentrated in a few taverns and inns, at Garraway’s, a coffeehouse that catered to the gentry, and more of them just around the corner at Jonathan’s, the rival coffeehouse that saw the most feverish trade in all the new ways in which it was possible to make—or <i class=\"char-i\">be—</i>money.</p>\n<figure class=\"figure figure_small_caption\">\n<div class=\"squeeze squeeze43\">\n<img alt=\"\" class=\"image\" id=\"page_xi_img2\" src=\"../images/001_Leve_9780812998467_all_art_r3.jpg\"/>\n</div>\n<figcaption class=\"figcaption dynamic_box\">\n<p class=\"para-illcapf figcaption_para\">Exchange Alley in its early-eighteenth-century layout</p>\n</figcaption>\n</figure>\n<p class=\"para-fmp\">For journalist, propagandist, and gadfly Daniel Defoe, Jonathan’s and the rest were familiar—and dangerous: dens of iniquity. Defoe had been warning his fellow Britons about the perils of the Alley for almost three decades. Now, near midsummer, he was ready with his most desperate alarm yet, a pamphlet titled <i class=\"char-i\">The Anatomy of Exchange Alley,</i><span id=\"Y_d1-EndnotePhraseInText0\"></span>written in the voice of “a jobber,” or unlicensed dealer in stocks. In part, the pamphlet served as a kind of travel story, leading its readers on a journey to an exotic spot. Exchange Alley was an island in miniature. 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In its partisans’ view, that would be the saving of the nation. </p></div>",
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