Thammasat University students who are not Christians enjoy celebrating Christmas because it is a holiday with parties and pretty decorations and music.

Of course, Thammasat University students who are Christians also value the holiday for its deep religious significance, celebrating the birthday of Jesus.

In the West, some scientists jokingly consider that too much is done to celebrate Christmas, so they suggest in a light hearted way that December 25 should be celebrated as Newtonmas, the birthday of the great physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who lived in the 1600s and 1700s.

The Thammasat University Library has many books by and about Sir Isaac Newton.

As students at the Thammasat University Faculty of Science and Technology (SCI-TU) know, these books discuss the famous story that Newton told that when he was a boy, he saw an apple fall from a tree. This made him wonder why apples always fall straight to the ground, rather than sideways or upward, and helped him to develop a law of universal gravitation.

Some versions of the story even have the apple hitting Newton on the head, but this does not appear to be true.

Scientists who celebrate Newtonmas adapt the traditional decorations on Christmas trees to include apples to better remember this story from Newton’s childhood.

Instead of sending each other cards with the message Season’s Greetings, they send out cards with Reason’s Greetings! printed in them; in this way, they are stating that they value reason or thinking, more than belief.

Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He made essential discoveries in classical mechanics, optics, and calculus.

He described laws of motion and universal gravitation that were the accepted scientific approach under Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity centuries later.

Newton’s study of gravity led to better understanding of laws of planetary motion, tides, comets, equinoxes and provide that the sun is at the center of our solar system.

He also provided convincing arguments about the shape of the earth.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color through the use of prisms.

In addition to his work on light, he also worked on a law about cooling, the speed of sound, and the behavior of fluids. In mathematics, apart from calculus, he also advanced the understanding of power series, the binomial theorem, approximating the roots of a function, and cubic plane curves.

Given all of this wide range of major achievements, Newton was understandably admired during his own time and ever since.

He was also a Christian who also studied alchemy and the Bible.

For many years he directed the Royal Mint, the government-owned organization that produces coins for the United Kingdom.

Many research efforts have tried to understand his achievements, including The Newton Project, based at Oxford University, the United Kingdom. Even research experts find it difficult to understand Newton’s personal life.

When Newton was 19 years old, he made a list of all the sins he had committed during his life. These featured such minor deeds as “making pies on Sunday night,” since Sunday is considered a day of worship by very religious Christians, rather than for work, even cooking. Other misdeeds which he noted down included arguing with a boy over a “piece of bread and butter” and “punching my sister.”

So in some ways, we can understand Newton’s behavior as he was growing up, but not the extent of what he managed to accomplish later on.

Siam and Newton

The Newton Project has posted online many texts and documents involving Newton’s life, and one of the them includes a reference to Siam.

In the 1690s, Richard Bentley, a friend of Newton’s developed a lecture for a scientific society based on conversations with Newton.

The lecture was intended to prove that Newton’s theories and religion work well together, so just because Newton had discovered many aspects of the way science worked, this was not necessarily a reason to become an atheist.

The title of Bentley’s argument was The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism Demonstrated from The Advantage and Pleasure of a Religious Life, the Faculties of Human Souls, The Structure of Animate Bodies, & The Origin and Frame of the World.

Bentley proposed that without the presence of a God to create human life once and for all, new types of human beings would suddenly appear in “Ethiopia and Siam,” places far from England where conditions were good for supporting life. So there was no sense in being an atheist, according to Newton and Bentley.

Thoughts of Newton

Some of Newton’s comments seem modest to readers today:

• If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

• Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.
• To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age…

• Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

• God created everything by number, weight and measure.

• The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.

About Newton

• His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen it through.

John Maynard Keynes

• Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians…

John Maynard Keynes

• Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

Fritz Leiber

• Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night/ God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light.

Alexander Pope

• Newton and Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.

John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams (29 October 1775)

• Newton said that he made his discoveries by ‘intending’ his mind on the subject; no doubt truly. But to equal his success one must have the mind which he ‘intended.’ Forty lesser men might have intended their minds till they cracked, without any like result. It would be idle either to affirm or to deny that the last half-century has produced men of science of the calibre of Newton. It is sufficient that it can show a few capacities of the first rank, competent not only to deal profitably with the inheritance bequeathed by their scientific forefathers, but to pass on to their successors physical truths of a higher order than any yet reached by the human race. And if they have succeeded as Newton succeeded, it is because they have sought truth as he sought it, with no other object than the finding it.

Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century (1889)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)