The Clockwork Universe Read Online Free PDF

disease spread, but the local rector persuaded the villagers it would be futile to leave and dangerous to others besides. Outsiders left provisions at the village outskirts. The plague took a year to burn its way through Eyam. In the end, 267 of the village’s 350 residents lay dead. (The rector who refused to flee, Reverend Mompesson, survived, but his wife did not.)
    Nearly always, though, plague seemed to rise out of nowhere, like some ghostly poison. The university town of Cambridge, which had weathered several epidemics through the centuries, had a long-established policy in place. (Builders would one day unearth mass graves beneath the idyllic grounds.) When plague settled onto the town, the university shut down and sent its stu dents and faculty away, to wait for a time when it would be safe to gather in groups again. In June 1665 plague struck Cambridge, and the university closed.
    A young student named Isaac Newton gathered up his books and retreated to his mother’s farm to think in solitude.

Chapter Six
Fire
    In the fateful year of 1666, a second calamity struck London. Perhaps God had not forgiven sinful mankind, after all. Perhaps those who had prophesied that the world would end in all-consuming fire had been right all along. Plague had been insidious and creeping; the new disaster was impossible to miss. But the Great Plague and the Great Fire had one similarity that outweighed the differences between them. Both were the work of an outraged God whose patience was plainly drawing to a close.
    The fire burned out of control for four days, starting in the slums near London Bridge and quickly threatening great swaths of the city. One hundred thousand people were left homeless. Scores of churches burned to the ground. Iron bars in prison cells melted. The stunned survivors stumbled through the ruins of their smoldering capital and gazed in horror. Where a great city had stood just days before, one eyewitness lamented, “there is nothing to be seen but heaps of stones.”
    As for who had started the fire, everyone had a theory. Catho lics had burned the city down, to weaken the Protestant hold on power. Foreigners had done it, out of envy and malice. The Dutch had done it, because Holland and England were at war, or the French had, because the French and the Dutch were allies. The king himself even figured in the rumors—he was, people whispered, a monarch filled with hatred for London (which had clamored for his father’s execution) and obsessed with building monuments to himself. What vengeance could compare with destroying the home of his enemies and then rebuilding it to suit his own taste?
    But all such explanations were, in a sense, beside the point. To focus on who had set the fire was a mistake akin to confusing the symptoms of a disease with the illness itself. Any such calamity reflected the will of God. The proper question was not what tool God had seen fit to employ, but what had stirred his wrath. In any case, even the best of investigations would yield merely what Robert Boyle called “second causes.” God remained the inscrutable “first cause” of everything. He had imposed laws on nature when he had created heaven and Earth, and ever afterward he had been free to change those laws or suspend them or to intervene in the world however he saw fit.
    The fire began in the early hours of Sunday, September 2, 1666, in one of London’s countless bakeshops. Thomas Farriner owned a bakery on Pudding Lane, deep in one of the mazes that made up London’s crowded slums. He had a contract to supply ship’s biscuits for the sailors fighting the Dutch. On Saturday night Farriner raked the coals in his ovens and went to bed. He woke to flames and smoke, his staircase afire.
    Someone woke the lord mayor and told him that a blaze had started up near London Bridge. He made his way to the scene, reluctantly, and cast a disdainful eye at the puny flames. “Pish!”