THE WOOLESTHORP PROJECT

   The 1690 visit of Edmund Halley to Isaac Newton left Newton feeling very guilty about his untidy ways.  Halley had noted that the comet they had both seen (along with the rest of the world) in 1686 had an orbit which was almost exactly matched by comets in 1611 and 1536.  Since the traditional view of comets was that they were a one time thing, Halley wanted his long time friend, and the author of the standard work on calculating orbits, to check over his work.  Newton admitted to Halley that he had come up with the same results already, but, in his usual disorder, could not find them.  

 

   Vowing to himself to do better, Newton reapplied himself to a vexing current problem.  It was well established that prisms allowed to pass sunlight would create a rainbow.  Newton had noticed two curiosities about this rainbow, which he had been prepared to note for the record and move on.  Now, however, realizing from Halley's comments that sometimes this tactic meant important data would be ignored, Newton searched for the source of curious dark lines crossing the Sun's rainbow.  Particularly noticeable were a pair of closely packed lines in the yellow part of the rainbow, and a complex of lines in the red.  The other curiosity was that objects placed just beyond either end of the rainbow, i.e. just beyond red and violet, became heated as though sunlight were reaching them, although the eye saw nothing there but darkness.

  It was a matter of months before Newton determined that the dark lines in the yellow matched lines created when sodium was heated, while the red lines seemed to be produced by some component of water.  Never before had anyone suggested water was anything other than elemental.  Newton was pleased with the discovery, despite the time it took.

   The dark heating, as Newton thought of it, clearly meant that the Sun was creating some form of light which the human eye could not see.  Remembering that some conservatives had denounced Galileo's discovery of more stars that the human eye could see, asking "Why would God create that which humans cannot experience?" he was mightily amused at what this newest finding might elicit in the way of comment.

   However, it was the finding that different elements created different dark lines in the Sun's rainbow that excited Newton the most, because it suggested a way of identifying all the elements, both known and hitherto unknown.  Taking rock and soil samples from many areas, Newton set to work finding out just how many elements there really were.  Gradually he built up a picture in his mind of atoms not as the ultimate irreducible minimum that they had been regarded as since the times Lucretius and Aristotle, but as having some sort of internal structure which related in a predictable, if inexplicable, way with the rainbow lines.

  The crucial piece of information came from a rock sample collected by a correspondent in a remote area of the Hapsburg's far flung empire on the continent.  The place, whose name consisted of an uncouth collection of mostly consonants that Newton made no effort to pronounce, showed a unique ability to produce two extremely similar but definitely different sets of lines.  Did we have here two different but similar elements, or could some elements come in slightly different versions?  Newton's initial report to the Royal Society set off many speculations.

   Newton followed up his 1687 Principia Mathematica with a new work on his studies of atoms, 1715's Principia Naturae.  At least seventy true elements were identified, including the two of which the hitherto incorrectly identified water was actually made.  But Newton's most shocking announcement was that atoms were in fact divisible, and this fact was somehow related to the fact that some elements had two or more extremely similar versions of their elements.  Of these, Newton found mercury to be one of the worst, with at least half a dozen versions barely but definitely distinguishable.

    Newton died in 1727, leaving unfinished a planned work which would unify his Mathematica and Naturae theories.  But others persevered.  In 1750 a theory was developed that large amounts of explosive energy were released if certain versions of atoms were broken apart.  The Army took an interest in this as a possible weapon.  It took fifteen years for the best magnets to separate enough of the required type of atom.  To preserve secrecy from the French or other possible enemies, the name for the work was the Woolesthorp Project, and a cursory glance made it look like no more than some sort of historical restoration and homage to Newton.

   In 1767, with war between Great Britain and France raging in North America, India, and elsewhere, one of the newtonian weapons was smuggled across the Channel on a fishing boat, and trundled into Paris on an ox cart.

 

   There was no overall surrender, there being no surviving French government.  Colonial troops were used for much of the occupation, with the Royal Virginia Regiment under Lt. Col. George Washington occupying Lyon and its surroundings.  Regular army troops marched into Spain and Italy, following ox carts headed for Madrid and Rome.