Isaac Newton
Authors: James Gleick
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Science & Technology
Acclaim for James Gleick’s
ISAAC NEWTON
“An elegantly written, insightful work that brings Newton to life and does him justice.… Gleick proves to be not only a sound explicator of Newton’s science but also a capable literary stylist, whose understated empathy with his subject lets us almost see through Newton’s eyes.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“The biography of choice for the interested layman.… [Gleick] makes this multifaceted life remarkably accessible.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“For the casual reader with a serious interest in Newton’s life and work, I recommend Gleick’s biography as an excellent place to start. It has three important virtues. It is accurate, it is readable, and it is short. Gleick has gone back to the original notebooks and brought [Newton] to life.”
—Freeman Dyson,
The New York Review of Books
“The best short life of science’s most perplexing figure.”
—New Scientist
“Written with enormous enthusiasm and verve and in a style that is often closer to poetry than prose. [Gleick] explains the fundamentals with clarity and grace. His ease with the science is the key to the book’s delight.”
—The Economist
“[Gleick is] one of the best science writers of our time.… He has exhumed from mountains of historical documents and letters a compelling portrait of a man who held the cards of his genius and near madness close to his chest. Gleick’s book [is] hard to put down.”
—
The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)
“Marvelously rich, elegant and poetic.… [Gleick’s] great talent is the ability to unravel complex ideas without talking down. Books on Newton abound, but Gleick’s fresh, intimate and beautifully composed account succeeds where many fail, in eloquently dramatizing the strange power of his subject’s vision.”
—The Times
(London)
“Gleick … has transformed mainstream academic research into an exciting story. Gleick has done a marvelous job of recreating intellectual life in Britain around the end of the seventeenth century. He excels at translating esoteric discussions into clear, simple explanations that make sense to modern people.”
—
Science
“Brilliant.… The great scientist is brought into sharp focus and made more accessible. Highly recommended.”
—The Tucson Citizen
“James Gleick … makes the most of his extraordinary material, providing us with a deftly crafted vision of the great mathematician as a creator, and victim, of his age.
…
[
Isaac Newton
] is a perfect antidote to the many vast, bloated scientific biographies that currently flood the market—and also acts as a superb starting point for anyone interested in the life of one of the world’s few undisputed geniuses.”
—
The Observer
“Gleick … brings to bear on Newton’s life and thought the same clarity of understanding and expression that brought order to chaos in his first volume [
Chaos: Making a New Science
].”
—The Daily Herald
“Moving … [Gleick’s] biography is perhaps the most accessible to date. He is an elegant writer, brisk without being shallow, excellent on the essence of the work, and revealing in his account of Newton’s dealings with the times.”
—Financial Times
James Gleick
ISAAC NEWTON
James Gleick is an author, reporter, and essayist. His writing on science and technology—including
Chaos
,
Genius
,
Faster
, and
What Just Happened
—has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in New York.
ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK
Chaos: Making a New Science
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
Isaac Newton at forty-six, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1689
(illustration credit Frontispiece)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2004
Copyright © 2003 by James Gleick
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Gleick, James.
Isaac Newton / James Gleick
p. cm.
1. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642–1727.
2. Physicists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.
QC16.N7 .G55 2003
530’.092—dc21 [B] 2002192696
Vintage eISBN: 978-0-307-42643-7
Author’s Web site address:
www.around.com
v3.1_r1
To Toby, Caleb, Asher, and Will
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.…
Contents
1. What Imployment Is He Fit For?
2. Some Philosophical Questions
3. To Resolve Problems by Motion
6. The Oddest If Not the Most Considerable Detection
8. In the Midst of a Whirlwind
10. Heresy, Blasphemy, Idolatry
14. No Man Is a Witness in His Own Cause
15. The Marble Index of a Mind
List of Illustrations
Frontispiece
Isaac Newton at forty-six, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1689.
By kind permission of the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estates.
Photographed by Jeremy Whitaker.
2.1
Descartes’ vortices.
Gilbert-Charles le Gendre,
Traite de l’opinion ou memoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’esprit humain
(Paris, 1733).
2.2
Violent motion.
Newton’s
Questiones
, Add MS 3996, f. 98r.
*
3.1
Drawing of apparatus.
Add MS 3965, f. 35v.
*
3.2
Infinite series to square the hyperbola.
Add MS 4004, f. 81v.
*
5.1
The bodkin in his eye.
Add MS 3975, f. 15.
*
6.1
Newton’s reflecting telescope.
Philosophical Transactions
, No. 81, March 25, 1672.
7.1
The
Experimentum Crucis.
Correspondence I,
p. 107.
7.2
Eye and prism.
Add MS 3996, f. 122r.
*
11.1
Dueling diagrams, Newton and Hooke.
Correspondence
II, pp. 301, 305, and 307.
11.2
Force toward the focus of an elliptical orbit.
Principia
, Book I, Proposition XI.
12.1
Comet of 1680.
Principia
, Book III, Proposition XLI.
14.1
Key to the cryptogram.
Add MS 4004, f. 81v.
*
15.1
William Blake’s Newton, 1795.
© Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, N.Y.
15.2
Newton’s death mask.
By John Michael Rysbrack. Keynes Collection, King’s College, Cambridge.
*
By permission of the syndics of Cambridge University.
ISAAC NEWTON
I
SAAC NEWTON SAID
he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.
Solitude was the essential part of his genius. As a youth he assimilated or rediscovered most of the mathematics known to humankind and then invented the calculus—the machinery by which the modern world understands change and flow—but kept this treasure to himself. He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself
to the most secret of sciences, alchemy. He feared the light of exposure, shrank from criticism and controversy, and seldom published his work at all. Striving to decipher the riddles of the universe, he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw them encoded. He stood aloof from other philosophers even after becoming a national icon—Sir Isaac, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society, his likeness engraved on medals, his discoveries exalted in verse.
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” he said before he died, “but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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An evocative simile, much quoted in the centuries that followed, but Newton never played at the seashore, boy or man. Born in a remote country village, the son of an illiterate farmer, he lived in an island nation and explained how the moon and sun tug at the seas to create tides, but he probably never set eyes on the ocean. He understood the sea by abstraction and computation.
His life’s path across the earth’s surface covered barely 150 miles: from a hamlet of rural Lincolnshire southward to the university town of Cambridge and thence to London. He was born in the bedchamber of a stone farmhouse on Christmas 1642 (as the calendar was reckoned in England—but the calendar was drifting out of step with the sun). His father, Isaac Newton, yeoman, had married at thirty-five, fallen ill, and died before his son’s birth. English had a word for that: the child was posthumous, thought unlikely to resemble the father.
This first Isaac Newton left little trace: some sheep, barley, and simple furniture. He endorsed his will with his X, for like most of his countrymen he could neither read nor write. He had worked the land of Woolsthorpe, a place of woods, open heaths, brooks, and springs, where underneath the thin soil lay a gray limestone, from which a few dwellings were built to last longer than the common huts of timber and clay. A road of the Roman Empire passed nearby, running south and north, a reminder of ancient technology still unsurpassed. Sometimes children unearthed antique coins or remains of a villa or wall.
2