Creak—
The clattering of the carriage as it came to a stop quickly drew the attention of everyone beneath the trees. William's expression grew increasingly grave as well.
A moment later.
Whoosh—
With a gust of wind as the carriage curtain was lifted, a figure slowly stepped down from the carriage.
The newcomer was a man in his early thirties. He was somewhat short and hunched over, wore a powdered wig made of horsehair, and was dressed in a gray, floor-length robe.
What stood out was that the robe was made of silk, an exceedingly rare fabric. Though seventeenth-century Gaul had already established a complete silk-production system, and Lyon had even become the center of Europe's silk weaving and design industries, before the spinning jenny appeared, silk was still a luxury at the very top of the market.
If tea in this era was on the level of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, then silk was about on par with a Bentley Continental.
Judging by the map of Britain as it was now, the newcomer was at least the son of a wealthy borough-level family, or a powerful and capable merchant.
Watching the man walk toward them, William furrowed his brow slightly and cautiously moved in front of Elula and Lilani to shield them. Mrs. William instinctively stepped in front of Andrea.
Lisa, meanwhile, was left to one side. In this era, given the same circumstances, an adult woman was actually safer than a child.
The details of this topic are too sensitive to discuss further.
But beside Lisa, Little Ox had quietly picked up his Holy Book, ready to use reason to persuade anyone who seemed suspicious.
Gulp—
As the man drew closer, William's Adam's apple bobbed a few times. Before the man's intentions were clear, he maintained a measure of courtesy in his tone.
"Sir, may I ask what brings you here?"
The newcomer glanced at him, the corners of his mouth lifting in a faint smile. He raised a hand and pressed it down, signaling for William not to be nervous.
"Please relax, sir. I'm probably not the sort of person you think I am."
Then he walked up to Little Ox and looked him over, pausing for a few seconds at the crest of Trinity College on his Cambridge University uniform.
"Cambridge University, Trinity College?"
Perhaps because he was used to being in a position of authority, the newcomer's tone carried a hint of interrogation, which inexplicably irritated Little Ox.
But Little Ox was still only a younger version of the hot-tempered man he would become. Lacking status and standing, he didn't yet have the confidence to speak his mind, so he simply replied stiffly:
"That's right."
"Then you're a student of Isaac Barrow?"
"That's right."
At this, the newcomer suddenly gave a cold snort.
"What's your name?"
A shadow flashed across Little Ox's eyes. Only after a few seconds did he answer:
"Isaac Newton."
The newcomer narrowed his eyes slightly, seeming to notice Little Ox's irritation.
"Isaac Newton? A fine name.
"Allow me to introduce myself. Robert Hooke, current professor of geometry at Gresham College."
Before Little Ox or William's family had time to react, Xu Yun's heart gave a hard lurch. He nearly crushed the bread in his Leaf Bag!
It was him?!
Anyone who knows a little about Little Ox's life should know this.
In Little Ox's eighty-five years, there was one man who was both his mentor and his rival, and whose life was inseparable from his.
Whenever Newton is mentioned, this man must be mentioned too.
He was Robert
Hooke!
Hooke was born in July 1635, seven and a half years before Little Ox. He had been an outstanding student from a young age, and later gained admission to the renowned Oxford University.
For various reasons, Hooke never graduated with a degree. But he was fortunate enough to become Robert Boyle's research assistant.
Thanks to his outstanding scientific insight, in 1662 this gifted young scientist was appointed director of experiments at the Royal Society of London. He soon became a fellow of the Royal Society as well.
And given that he and Little Ox would later spend decades as bitter rivals, there was no question of Hooke's ability.
In mechanics, Hooke proposed Hooke's Law, a fundamental principle of elasticity and materials science with wide-ranging applications.
In the TV series Prison Break, Wentworth Miller's character used Hooke's Law to smash through a reinforced concrete prison wall with an eggbeater.
In optics, Hooke was an early proponent of wave theory, earning a reputation to rival Huygens, the head of the Gallic Academy of Sciences.
Hooke was also a DIY enthusiast. With his remarkable hands, he expanded humanity's view of both the vast and the tiny:
He improved the telescope and was the first to observe Jupiter's Great Red Spot and the craters on the moon. He improved the microscope and discovered and named the cell. (Leeuwenhoek, another figure, discovered bacteria.) His great work, Micrographia, became a bestseller overnight.
But in a dramatic turn of events, just as Hooke was at the height of his fame, Little Ox arrived on the scene.
In 1668, the young Newton placed the first reflecting telescope on the Royal Society's desk, directly provoking Hooke.
Reflecting telescopes were the most advanced telescope design of the time, and they encroached directly on the two fields Hooke knew best at the Society:
optics and instrument design.
When this small, exquisite model appeared, outperforming every refracting telescope that had come before it, Hooke felt his position was under threat. Instead of joining the chorus praising the reflecting telescope, he loudly declared that he was the first to make a practical one.
At a meeting, Hooke stressed that he had made a reflecting telescope only three centimeters long, seven years before Little Ox, and that it outperformed other telescopes as long as fifteen meters.
He even had a design for a smaller one that could fit inside a pocket watch. But the spread of the Black Death and the reconstruction work after the Great Fire of London had delayed further research.
The dispute caused Little Ox great distress. It brought back memories of being bullied as a boy, and for a time he even threatened to leave the Royal Society.
In the end, the Royal Society's secretary, Henry Oldenburg, mediated, and the two reached a "reconciliation."
But after that, Little Ox began to "hide away" in Cambridge and stopped publishing his academic work.
The feud between Little Ox and Hooke was far from over, though. In 1679, Hooke wrote Newton a letter.
After a lengthy discussion of mechanics, Hooke told Newton that he believed any two objects exerted a force of attraction on each other, and that this force was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This was the so-called inverse square law.
Put simply, Hooke generously pointed out where Little Ox had gone wrong, without keeping quiet and letting him go down the wrong path.
But, with the same smug air, he added that working out the calculations required a new kind of tool. So, Newton, you know where you're wrong, but you can't work it out. Nyah-nyah!
That tool was calculus, which Little Ox called fluxions. By then, it was already close to being fully developed.
But Little Ox was a sly one. He didn't tell Hooke about it. Instead, he quietly worked out the Universal Gravitation Formula on his own.
In 1687, with funding from the British astronomer Halley, Little Ox published one of the greatest works in the history of science, Principia Mathematica. Later generations shortened its name to Principia.
In the book, Little Ox proposed the famous Newton's Laws of Motion and the Law of Universal Gravitation. Using the calculus he had invented, he also proved that Kepler's Three Laws could be derived from the inverse square law of gravity.
The book made Little Ox famous around the world. It not only solved one of the great problems of the day, but also gave the world calculus, one of the most powerful tools in the history of mathematics.
As Halley put it, Little Ox had become "the person closest to God in the world." Apart from being single, his life was complete.
And then Hooke wrote Little Ox another letter, demanding that he revise Principia and acknowledge Hooke as the discoverer of the inverse square law.
The demand enraged Little Ox. He wrote back, saying that the law had not been proposed by Hooke at all, but was common knowledge.
In the heat of the moment, Little Ox also deleted every reference to Hooke from Principia, hoping to erase him from history.
Speaking of Little Ox and Hooke, there's another truly little-known story worth mentioning.
Earlier, we brought up the story of Tao Yuanming refusing to bow for five pecks of rice. The letter also involved another line that might ruin your childhood.
Many people know that Little Ox once said:
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Many people think Little Ox said this as an inspiring expression of humility. In reality, it was a jab at Hooke.
You see, Hooke himself was short and had a hunchback.
So Little Ox's reply wasn't meant to be inspiring at all. The subtext was: "My achievements have nothing to do with you, you short, hunchbacked Hooke!"
Of course.
The context was a letter in which Little Ox discussed the colors of thin plates, and Henry Oldenburg also fanned the flames—yes, the same old man who mediated their first dispute.
So the details weren't quite as dramatic as people make them out to be. At least, the remark had nothing to do with universal gravitation. But it was indeed a sarcastic jab.
After Hooke's death, Little Ox was elected the new president of the Royal Society of London. In his first year in office, Hooke's laboratory and library were disbanded on the spot, and his scientific instruments were either scattered or destroyed.
When the Royal Society moved its headquarters in 1710, even Hooke's only portrait was "accidentally lost" in the relocation. To this day, no one knows what Hooke really looked like.
So there's no need to qualify it with "in a sense"—from beginning to end, the dispute between Little Ox and Hooke was a life-and-death struggle between academic power brokers.
What puzzled Xu Yun, though, was this:
Setting aside how Hooke had ended up here, the dispute between him and Little Ox should have taken place thirteen years later. So why were the two of them already trading barbs the moment they met?
Before you continue