There were two major conflicts between Newton and Hooke - over light, and over gravity. Hooke had been experimenting with light during his work with constructing better and better lenses and telescopes, and came up with a brilliant explanation for why light going through a prism refracts into different colors. He thought that the medium interacting with the light created the colors from nothing. Then Newton, who was previously unknown to the Royal Society where Hooke was a central member, sent in HIS ideas about light, and particularly his experiments which he felt concluded definitively that the colors were already part of the white light to begin with. In the same paper, he ventured the proposition that light was made of particles by way of a second train of thought. Hooke felt threatened, and pounced on the younger man's paper, mocking it pretty savagely, mistakenly tying the particle theory to the separation theory, so that discrediting the one, he thought, would discredit the latter. Newton wrote back in an understandable huff, saying that the particle theory had nothing really to do with his results for white light, and even offering an improvement to Hooke's wave theory that Hooke later incorporated (the idea of wavelength being tied to color). It was a harsh introduction to the Royal Society, and Newton kept his distance from it for another twenty years after that, while Hooke went on to have equally distinguished arguments with Hevelius, Huygens, and Leibniz.

They eventually reconciled, as much as two such bitterly sensitive men could, and we shouldn't forget that Newton's statement about Standing On The Shoulders of Giants was written to Hooke, by way of acknowledging the work that he did.

The gravity story is a bit more twisted, with honest misunderstandings being fed by less than honest hangers-on on both sides. The facts are that Newton discovered the Inverse Square Law before Hooke did, but kept it secret, and in fact in his letters to Hooke and others pretended that Gravity worked on a simple inverse relation just to hold onto the secret. But, he felt that planetary motion was the result of centrifugal forces proposed by Huygens, and did not change his view until Hooke published his work hypothesizing that the motion of planets was due to linear movement being deflected inwards by a constantly acting centripetal force. He sat on that for a while, too, and didn't start acting upon it until Halley asked Wren, Hooke, and Newton separately whether they could prove that elliptical orbits resulted from gravity being taken as an inverse square law. Hooke and Newton both said they had the proof (neither did) and then feverishly set about proving it. Hooke did a few experiments that he thought settled the matter, and moved on to other things, as Hooke always did, and Newton sat down and invented Calculus and then Modern Physics in the space of two years, culminating in 1686 with the Principia.

As soon as the Principia was read aloud to the Royal Society, Hooke started protesting that Newton got both the inverse square law and the notion of centripetally acting forces from him. He was wrong about the inverse square law, and unfortunately for himself, that is what he focused on in all of his future protestations. Hooke's enemies in the Society communicated and exaggerated these claims of Hooke to Newton, who then struck the older scientist's name from the third volume of the Principia in frustration. Hooke took many opportunities from then on out to reassert his claim to primacy with the laws of gravity, but nobody paid him much heed on this front. But it would be an exaggeration to say that Hooke was consumed by jealousy for Newton - he had too much other stuff to do to be weighted down for long by the Newton squabble. Hooke was right in asserting that Newton should have given him fair credit for the notion of centripetally acting forces. Newton was right in having come up with the inverse square law independently, but he was so secretive that Hooke can't be blamed for thinking himself the originator of that law. And Newton was right that, no matter who came up with the idea of centripetal force or the inverse square law, it was his painstaking mathematical analysis that made the Principia the world-shattering event it was.

But you have to feel sorry for Hooke - this happened to him So Many Times. People were claiming his inventions for their own constantly, and most of the time he was right in his protestations, but nobody believed him because, after all, how could one man have invented so much? But he did - his own supernatural ability and fecundity worked against him, and so, instead of being given credit every once in a while, he was written off as a credit-seeking hack. But the man had talents, as we shall see NEXT WEEK!!!

- Count Dolby von Luckner