I just finished Isaac Newton, by James Gleick. Gleick writes with exceptional grace; the book is small; the notes are entertaining and unobtrusive; and the subject is fascinating: all that commends the book.
There’s never been anyone like Isaac Newton. He claimed, famously, insincerely, in language that Gleick shows most entertainingly to have been plagiarized from one of several contemporary sources, that if he saw farther than other men, it is because he “stood on the shoulders of giants”. But the truth is that lots of Newton’s predecessors and contemporaries had climbed onto those same shoulders, and none saw what Newton saw. They couldn’t have, because it wasn’t there until Newton put it there. He didn’t “discover” gravity; he invented it. He invented the term and the concept that the term referred to, and to make the concept work, he had to invent the concepts of “space”, and “mass”, and “time” (at least in our modern sense of the term—a precisely, minutely measureable succession of moments), along with the method of the calculus to do the necessary math.
Newton was obsessively secretive; he did his work in isolation, revised and rewrote compulsively, and resisted publication of his discoveries, for decades in some cases. Much of his work might not ever have been published without the psychologically manipulative intervention of such illustrious contemporaries as Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley, who played skillfully on Newton’s fear that someone else would claim credit for his own inventions and discoveries. Newton quarrelled, fiercely and over long periods of time, with many of the greatest figures of his age—Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, and, most nobably, Gottfried Liebniz.
Newton was not alone in his secrecy and his obsessive desire to retain credit for his work—it was part of the culture in which “natural philosophers” worked in the Seventeenth Century. Huygens, to take just one example, was in the habit of encrypting work in progress, so that, when he was ready to publish, he could prove the originality of the idea (Newton used the same technique in his correspondence with Liebniz regarding the calculus).
Ironically, the eventual publication of Newton’s great works, the Principia and the Optics, heralded a new age of scientific openness. The Royal Society, which published them (and which Newton led as its President during the final years of his life) gained enormously in power and authority, and the growth of scientific knowledge which followed their publication established the principle that science could only flourish in an environment in which scientific discoveries were open to testing and criticism by all. That has been the environment in which science (no longer “natural philosophy”) has been carried on through the centuries since Newton’s death, and it is only today that the enterprise of science is seriously threatened by the corporate control of research, a patent system that’s seriously flawed, and a culture of greed.
Newton died, very rich and very famous, in 1727. His was hardly, by the measure of our times, a happy life: he had no wife, no family, no intimate friends. Yet he accomplished a great deal of what he set out to accomplish; he was recognized and rewarded for those accomplishments; and he left us with a universe that was notably different than the universe into which he was born. Indeed, no other individual has changed the way we live and think about our world more dramatically and to more significant effect than Newton.
Gleick’s book is not so much a detailed biography of Newton as an extended essay exploring his character and importance to history. James Gleick has clearly done enormous research, and his writing is lucid and enthusiastic. I recommend the book heartily.
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