Time and Time Again

49

ISAAC NEWTON STARED at the spinning wheel.

It was nearly midnight and he was utterly exhausted, having spent many hours in a coach returning from his trip to Cambridge.

Now he was home in his niece’s house and she had prepared him hot milk because he professed himself too preoccupied to sleep. And so they sat together, she spinning thread on her wheel and Newton staring into it. Round and round it went, returning after each revolution to the place it started and then spinning around again.

Newton saw space and time in that wheel. He saw it spinning round and round but never progressing. In constant motion but also stationary. Never moving beyond its fixed course.

Was he right to have arranged to pass on the benefits of his insight? Was it always better to know? That had been the guiding principle of his life. Better to know. To shed light on the mysteries of the universe.

But this time? To offer men yet unborn the chance to cheat fate? To shape a different destiny to the one God had created for them?

Isaac Newton was a Christian man. He had spent a lifetime trying to understand God but he had never desired to be God.

He decided that he had made a mistake. Sometimes it was better to simply leave well alone.

Time was not the spinning wheel.

Time was the thread it made.

In the morning he would go back to Cambridge and demand that Master Bentley return his box. Having made the decision, Newton felt that he would sleep more easily.

And he did, for when his niece shook him gently to usher him to bed she discovered that the old man was dead.