Prologue
In reconstructing history, as historians tend to do, it became quite obvious that Newton knew. At the time that the comet passed, in 1682, he was deeply ensconced at Trinity College—not yet Master of the Mint, not yet even Sir Isaac—and as he worked on mathematics and how it mirrored the God of Nature, he was also obsessed with the study of the chimerical art of alchemy. In his writings, in the few published letters that survived, in the Waste Book that scholars were able to peruse after his death, it is clear that the effects of the 1682 transit were much on his mind.
Halley knew as well, or at least suspected; in an addendum to his seminal 1705 work, sometimes included in the published edition and most times not, he warned of the ill effects of what the vulgar called the “broom star.” He speculated—again, many editions of the Synopsis did not include this disturbing, rambling afterword—that the 1682 passage had fundamentally affected many people, making them more sensitive to the effects of the æther. The afterword was the source of much derision in the Royal Society; one reason it was so frequently omitted. In a rare act of human courtesy, Sir Isaac (for he had been so honored by that time) simply excised it from future editions and never spoke of it again. But as Halley lay on his deathbed at Greenwich, he told a story to his future biographer concerning a discussion he and Sir Isaac had had, in private, away from prying eyes and mocking lips, many years before. He feared what might happen when the comet returned, its orbit ever so slightly perturbed by its passage through the Solar System, a nudge from Jupiter here, a nudge from Saturn there. But that was still in the future when Edmund Halley traversed the gates of the infinite in 1742.
If others knew of the effect of the comet’s passage, or feared its next return, they did not speak or write of it. This was God’s work, and God allocated to each man only three score and ten years, be he John Plowman or Sir Isaac Newton. From the lowest to the highest, every man dies, and leaves worries and concerns to those who come after.
And as for doomsayers: every event and every phenomenon brings them out, armies of them, so that no one expected anything more to come from it in 1759.
After all, there were many far more mundane things to worry about.