Isaac Newton
By James Gleick
Pantheon, 272 pages, $34.95
Anyone who studied physics in secondary school or college has heard of Hooke's Law of Elasticity, Boyle's Law of Gases and Newton's Laws of Motion. Many more people will be familiar with Pepys's diaries, Wren's churches and Halley's Comet. All of these eponymous gentlemen glittered in the intellectual firmament of late-17th-century London, a city with one-fifth the population of present-day Toronto. They knew each other, fed off one another's curiosity and together established the Royal Society, the first bona fide scientific organization. They can fairly be called the first moderns, and that is exactly what they understood themselves to be.
Standing head and shoulders above them all was Isaac Newton, a man of prodigious intellect and inscrutable personality. Here's how James Gleick describes him in the second sentence of this superb new biography: "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."
The last clause of that sentence is a formidable claim for any biographer to make of his subject, especially of a man whose abstruse great book, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (or simply, from its Latin title, Principia), had few comprehending readers then or now. Can the claim be justified?
Consider Newton's achievement in the years 1665-66, while still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. Plague had reached England; in London, one out of every six people would die, and soon the contagion spread to outlying towns. The colleges of Cambridge closed down and students dispersed to the countryside; Newton returned to his home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Solitary and self-taught, he embarked upon a spree of mathematical discovery that seems almost superhuman. He developed the theory of infinite series, and showed that it was possible to treat the infinite and the infinitesimal with mathematical rigour. He refined concepts of space, time, inertia, force, momentum and acceleration and formulated laws of mechanical motion. He invented the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and applied it to celestial and terrestrial motions. To facilitate his calculations, he devised what is now called the differential and integral calculus. All of this before he was 24 years old.
Astonishingly, he kept most of it to himself. At age 27 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and occasionally sent dribbles of what he learned for consideration by the Royal Society. The irascible Robert Hooke, in particular, was quick to give Newton a hard time, frequently claiming priority for himself. Newton's response was to become even more secretive.
In solitude, he continued his mathematical and physical studies, but also embraced alchemy and esoteric biblical scholarship. He felt himself to be seeking ancient knowledge that had been lost or hidden in the dark centuries of the more recent past. Today's scientists tend to be embarrassed by Newton's religious and alchemical studies, but Newton was looking for deeper, unifying truths than the superficial speculations of the secular empiricists of London. Gleick writes: "He communed night and day with forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined."
But enough of his ideas leaked out to make the London savants aware that the mysterious professor at Cambridge sat atop a trove of new learning. Eventually, Edmund Halley, later of comet fame, convinced Newton to write it down, and published Newton's book at his own expense - 20 years after much of what it contains had ignited in the febrile mind of a college student in his early 20s. Suddenly, Newton was wildly famous, extolled by scientists and poets alike. Alexander Pope's couplet summarizes the adulation: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light." Newton left Cambridge for London, leaving not a friend behind, and took up posts as warden of the Mint and, eventually, when Hooke died, president of the Royal Society.
If there is a single work of human genius that separates medieval and modern times, it is the Principia. In it, Newton demonstrated that the motions of Sun, Moon, Earth, planets, the moons of planets, comets, tides, cannonballs and falling apples can all be deduced with mathematical exactitude from a handful of elegantly simple laws of nature. The Newtonian world is not an arena of spirits and divinities acting arbitrarily; rather, it is a great clockwork, whose every tick has been determined since the dawn of time by immutable mechanical laws. This, says Gleick, is what separates us from the pre-Newtonians: "We deem the universe solvable."
James Gleick established himself as one of the best science writers of our time with his bestselling book on the new theories of complexity (Chaos, 1987). He practiced tangling with prodigious intellect with a biography of Richard Feynman, one of the smartest physicists of the 20th century (Genius, 1992). And now 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. I've read much of what has previously been written about Newton, both scholarly and popular, and I found Gleick's book hard to put down.
The authoritative scientific biography of Newton is Richard Westfall's Never at Rest (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Westfall suggests in that bulky tome that only another Newton could provide a complete understanding of Newton's enigmatic genius, but, of course, another Newton would presumably have better things to do than write a biography of his predecessor. The Newtonian universe may be solvable, but the author of that universe remains a conundrum.
Gleick makes no claim for completeness, or for solving the riddle of the man. What he offers instead is a concise appraisal of the mind and personality of one of history's most intriguing characters, and he places his subject squarely in the context of his times - at the cusp of history between the pre-Newtonian and post-Newtonian worlds. Newton had a foot in both worlds.
Chet Raymo's is a U.S. science columnist. His most recent book is The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe.
