Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton ranks among history's greatest geniuses. For inventing modern physics. For overturning Aristotle's hegemony upon thought. For co-inventing calculus (as an introduction to physics). For being more into theology and alchemy than physics.

His treasure-trove of personal writings - kept hidden until near the middle of the twentieth century - show this man to be, like Luther before him, the last of the great medievalists who birthed the movement of modernity. With Newton came the Industrial Revolution and a rigid system that Einsteinianism had to loosen. He obsessed over thought after thought, most based on alchemy and Arian/Gnostic theology (not orthodox Trinitarianism), until modern physics was birthed, and with it a show more deductive mechanism from first "principles."

He was born the son of an illiterate father whom he never knew. He seemed destined to become a farmer, but instead, privately reckoned physics into being at Cambridge. He never married. He was haunted by lust. He became rich by overseeing the conversion of Britain's Mint. He left no will, was close to none, was a recluse, and wrote brilliantly.

He was a magician, an alchemist, and a heretical theologian. He dabbled in unreason to give birth to reason. He later became an authoritarian over scientific thought. He feuded with Leibnitz, a feud which in some senses persists to this day. (They both are right in their claims, and humanity is the big loser of the argument. They should be seen as independent co-founders of calculus.)

His Principia removed Aristotle's impulsivity and set gravity as the central cause of all of motion. He derived calculus to explain its movement in a universal language. He made mathematics the foundational language of humanity.

It wasn't until Einstein that science returned to solving problems as its fundamental method. Even Darwin proposed a universal system, not a solution. With Einstein, relativity (which was the popular version of the physical laws Einstein proposed, much as mechanism was the popular import of Newtonianism) became in imbibed by Western consciousness. Now, scientists see things through a team spirit relative to one's position in work. Few claim to be systemic masters any longer, as if there were a system to master in the first place.

The rigid system of Newtonianism stays with us on the outskirts. Every time someone exerts a will to claim overarching knowledge (which is, in Newton's world, power), they claim Newton's authoritarian dark side. Trump, old-school Calvinism, old-school capitalism, moralism. There is right and wrong for Newton. Again, it took an Einstein to relativize everything.

I think the real Isaac Newton would have liked to know that sage of Princeton Albert Einstein. It's unfortunate that I also dream that Newton would have found much reason to argue with him, much as Newton privately argued with Leibnitz in his own day and Einstein argued with Quantum Mechanics for the second-half of his life. At least Newton was private in his argumentation. He preferred not to argue publicly. That's a character trait we can all learn from, especially in a post-Newtonian, post-Einsteinian world. show less

Isaac Newton was one of the most important scientists in history, almost single-handedly dragging civilisation away from pure superstition, or at least idle conjecture, and emphasising the importance of mathematical rigour and experimentation. He lived in incredibly turbulent times, with the civil war and puritanical non-royalist period of English history happening throughout his youth, and the main religion switching back and forth between Anglicanism and Catholicism. There was a thirst for exploration and progress here, which Newton was a part of - and with his dogged determination to solve scientific mysteries and his incredible intellect, he made monumental progress in solving many of physics' fundamental puzzles. Yet he reflected show more the religious and barely scientific culture he lived in, by adhering to his own version of Christianity, practising alchemy obsessively and speculating at times rather more wildly than he should.

Gleick has a very difficult task to capture a secretive person, who lived so long ago. It is therefore difficult to blame him entirely for what I feel is a rather flawed biography. The biography is rather slim, and almost feels rushed at times. It constantly seems as if Gleick is skimming the surface of a life, rather than giving us its depths. This isn't helped by a slightly old-fashioned style, focusing heavily on quotes and the incidental poems and other little nuggets of text by contemporaries, some of whom don't seem all that relevant. Very rarely does he commit to giving his own opinion on contentious issues, such as who came up with the main components of the theory of gravity (Hooke definitely had some original ideas). I would have very much appreciated Gleick to stick his neck out here, rather than hint at conclusions.

Gleick's capturing of Newton's science is also unsatisfying - it almost seems as if within a few months almost all component's of Newton's Principia turn up as if by magic, rather than accumulating piece by piece over many years. I was fascinated to learn of Newton's speculations on fields and other modern concepts at the end of the book. But such speculations were earlier levelled at Hooke for not developing his ideas further, so it was difficult to know exactly how much to read into this. Also fascinating were just how many puzzles Newton had no clue about, but urged the community on as questions, hoping someone else would eventually find solutions. It's almost as if this framing of important questions is another key component of the scientific method, which Newton understood all too well, and also understood just how little he knew after his long life.

But it was Newton's personal life and character that I wanted to know the most about, but felt even more of a fog within the words of this book. Was he at all homosexual? What was his relationship exactly to his niece who lived with him for many years? Did he ever slip seriously into mental illness or even paranoid delusions? What exactly was Newton like as a person? It's clear that in the first half of his life he was largely a loner. But later on he seemed to take the opposite direction, being very social, attending most Royal Society meetings, collecting the finer things in life, along with a vast fortune. Did he have close friends then? How did they view him? Surely some of this can be inferred from his letters? Or at least speculated on by someone who is far more of an expert than the readers. I only ever felt I had the merest glimpses to some of these questions in this biography.

As if to confirm my constant impression that this novel was rushed, it just ends by saying he left no will. Okay why? And where did his fortune go to then? Surely there are answers to these questions. Well, not in this book. I therefore hope and will look for a more thorough authoritative, even opinionated biography of Newton, if it exists. show less

This is a clever book by Gleick.

Biographies come in a variety of forms, and often, for science subjects, they tend to be a chronology of facts linked by anecdotes and observation – from contemporaries, the author, and other observers. Here Gleick embeds us in Newton’s world; in particular, with its limitations and Newton’s personal difficulties.

As a result, the cause for Newton’s challenging personality and his remoteness and seclusion become comprehensible. As does, the lack of a compendium of mathematics, which Newton provided while simultaneously discovering much (for him) low-hanging fruit – and not so low-hanging, because Newton was curious, patient, and meticulous. As Gleick puts it, “… he had made tools”, which show more riffs off the epigraph from John Conduitt (Newton’s relative) of Newton building the first reflecting telescope:

"I asked him where he had it made, he said he made it himself, & when I asked him where he got his tools said he made them himself & laughing added if I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me, I had never made anything…”

It’s fascinating how for centuries, millennia even, that what we call science was debated in words; that mathematics, though it existed, was a sideshow. It took the combination of Bacon’s vision and marketing, the creation of the Royal Society, and Newton’s mathematics and experimentation to move from “philosophy (of science)” to “natural philosophy”.

Historically, Newton's work caused, in effect, philosophy to become philosophy and physics.

The science is covered in historical and narrative contexts without any technical detail. If you are after an understanding of Newton’s work itself, then this is probably not the best read. show less

An absolutely first-rate biography of Isaac Newton by a wonderful science writer. I appreciated this book even more a couple of months ago when I got to hold a first edition of The Principia in my hands at the Crawford Library at the University of Edinburgh. What an experience to open the book and see Newton's own drawing of the limit. The hairs on the back of my neck still tingle to think of it. And my appreciation was so much enhanced by Glick's ability to make Newton come to life on the pages.

This s a very brief biography of Isaac Newton. It's a good starting point for understanding Newton, with a broad overview of his life, how and when he made his major discoveries and theories, and his impact on science. However, it doesn't go into great detail about any of these topics because it's a very short book, and it left me wanting more.

Gleick provides basic details about Newton's life: where he grew up, the trajectory of his career, when and how he formulated his theories and discoveries, and a little bit about his difficult personality, but these details are fairly scant.

Gleick is known for writing about science, so it's not surprising that he focuses a lot on Newton's theories of optics, his discovery of calculus, his disputes show more with Hooke and Leibnitz, and the impact of his work. I think he could have gone into even more depth here, especially in analyzing how quickly or slowly contemporaries adopted his ideas.

The book glosses over Newton's interest in alchemy, and completely skips his prophetical writings, so this seems like an incomplete portrait. There also isn't much analysis of how Newton's place in science has shifted over the centuries.

All in all, this is a decent starting place, but really left me wanting more information about a lot of topics. show less

We live in the world Isaac Newton made -- or, to be more precise, we understand basic facts about our world because Newton explained it. James Gleick lays out the man's life and work in a clean, lean fashion (it helps that Newton had almost no life outside of work). There's a smattering of math here, just enough to make my head hurt and marvel at it. The rest is fascinating factoids and insight into Newton's achievement. For instance, Gleick points out that if Newton had not spent so much time on the non-scientific pursuit of alchemy, he might not have been willing to postulate and prove the existence of gravity (which is, after all, an invisible force). And did you know that Newton was Master of the Mint, overseeing the British show more treasury? That he ruthlessly sent counterfeiters to the gallows, and used all of his considerable influence to ruin other scientists? That he could plot the patterns of the solar system, but forgot to write a will? Nifty stuff, well worth enduring a little calculus. show less

Brief and insightful biography of a singular man:

James Gleick certainly never lets you get bored. This biography of Sir Isaac Newton - a man who lived an improbable eighty four years and in that time invented much of mathematics, classical physics and optics, postulated gravity, ran the Royal Mint, relentlessly persecuted forgers and secretly devoted a fair bit of his life to alchemy - is done and dusted in under 200 generously margined pages, so being of a short attention span is no barrier.

This is a great book: Gleick's prose, while undeniably efficient, is nonetheless possessed of a disarming elegance and his analysis is insightful and engaging: I found myself lowering the book and staring into space pondering its implications a show more good deal.

We tend to think of Newton as the father of the modern enlightenment without concluding that, ergo, the times he inhabited were QED un-enlightened. This makes the amount and scope of a single man's achievement all the more stunning: parameters we take absolutely for granted - such as the measurable and consistent passage of time - for most purposes, just didn't exist: it was by Newton's singular and cantankerous will that we became "enlightened" at all. Science, mathematics philosophy and religion were simply not the carefully compartmentalised and ontologically parsed disciplines they are today: they were merely different aspects of the same tangled skein.

Gleick also records how indebted our now "untangled" skein is to Newton's ministrations: were the programmes of Robert Hooke or Gottfried Leibniz - great antagonists of Newton's in their day - to have prevailed, the uncomfortable suspicion is that our scientific landscape now might look very different. Newton's famous deference to the shoulders of giants was in reality uttered in false modesty with reference to a competitor, Hooke, whom he despised. That fact alone ought to trouble the more revisionist historians of science. Indeed, "a slightly naughty thought" occurs to Hermann Bondi: "we may still be so much under the impression of the particular turn he took ... We cannot get it out of our system".

Quite. This is a deft and elegant biography. Well recommended. show less