Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664-1753) was a Swiss mathematician and polymath, who for a time in the 1680s and 1690s, was a close friend of Isaac Newton. After coming to London in 1687, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society (on 15.5.1688), as later did his brother Jean-Christophe (on 3.4.1706). He played a major part in Newton's feud with Leibniz over who had invented the differential calculus, and was a protagonist all his life for Newton's thought and ideas. Newton and Fatio were particularly close friends in the period leading up to Newton's nervous breakdown in 1693 (Manuel 1980), and some have speculated that Newton's relationship with Fatio was somehow the cause of the breakdown. However, the two seemed to have remained on good, although not close, terms subsequently, and no doubt Jean-Christophe Fatio could not have become an FRS in 1706 without the approval of Newton, who was President of the Royal Society at the time. Among Fatio's many activities, he co-developed a technique for drilling holes in rubies, a procedure of importance to precision watch-making through the 18th century.

In the first decade of the 18th century, Fatio become involved with a Millenarian sect which arose among the French Protestant Huguenot refugee community in London, the so-called Camisards or Prophets of Cevennes (Schwartz 1980). Despite legal repression and public humiliation of him and the sect leaders by the English authorities, he continued to support this movement for the remaining four decades of his life. The conventional wisdom among scientists of the period and subsequently was that this religious fervour was evidence of a sudden descent into madness. Charles Domson (1972/1981) has argued persuasively that Fatio had held religious beliefs since at least 1693, when he was still a close friend of Newton, and so any adoption of belief was not sudden. Moreover, he continued to undertake scientific work before and after his period of public association with the sect. Domson argues that, like Newton's scientific, alchemic and scriptural activities, Fatio's life was all of a piece. It is only a very condescending (and particularly modernist and Western) viewpoint that sees scientific activities and religious beliefs as being incompatible. (See Stephen Toulmin's wonderful book on the pernicious effects of this viewpoint over the last three centuries.) This arrogant condescension has perhaps extended to Newton's biographers: Manuel (1980) calls Fatio "the ape of Newton", as if all he did was imitate the Great Man and then not very well (since Fatio got religion), while Gleick's recent biography (Gleick 2003) tries very hard, if unsuccessfully, to not mention him at all. (Gleick does not appear to have read Domson's book, for example.) In contrast, White (1998) writes at length, but scathingly, of Fatio; his vituperation is matched only by his ignorance of science, not understanding, for example, the difference between prediction and explanation.

Newton's theory of gravitation was a predictive theory but not an explanatory one: it presented a mathematical model (the inverse square law) to predict the extent of influence which bodies of mass, such as planets, have on one another, but Newton's model provided no causal explanation as to why this influence occurred. Fatio sought an explanatory theory of gravitation and was the first to propose a so-called "push theory" of gravity: objects of mass emit particles which create pushing forces on other objects (van Lunteren 2002). Although ridiculed at the time and since by physicists, push theories are now being taken seriously in physics (Edwards 2002). It seems that Nicolas Fatio de Duillier may at last receive some recognition for his contributions to science 250 years after his death, despite Newton's biographers. I wonder when Fatio will himself get a biographer worthy of his or her subject, i.e. a biographer with knowledge of the calculus, of science at the beginning of the scientific age, of politics at the time of the Glorious Revolution, and sympathetic to millenarian religious impulses. This seems to be a rare combination of qualities, which only proves to me Fatio de Duillier's distinction.

References:

Charles A. Domson [1972/1981]: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and the Prophets of London: An Essay in the Historical Interaction of Natural Philosophy and Millenial Belief in the Age of Newton. New York, NY, USA: Arno Press, 1981. Originally presented as a PhD Thesis at Yale University in 1972.

Matthew R. Edwards (Editor) [2002]: Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation. Montreal, Canada: Apeiron.

James Gleick [2003]: Isaac Newton. London, UK: Fourth Estate.

Frans van Lunteren [2002]: "Nicolas Fatio de Duillier on the mechanical cause of universal gravitation," in: Edwards [2002].

Frank E. Manuel [1980]: A Portrait of Isaac Newton. London, UK: Muller.

Hillel Schwartz [1980]: The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth Century England. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.

Stephen E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Michael White [1998]: Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Fourth Estate.