Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton.

Lives and Legacies.

AT ONCE MORTAL AND IMMORTAL, ISAAC NEWTON WAS BOTH A
living, breathing man and a legend that forever changed the
world. Yet so reclusive was he at his most creative that his biographers
have succeeded in viewing him only through a glass darkly.
During a rare moment of introspection, Newton once compared
himself to a boy playing on a seashore, casting about for a few
beautiful pebbles that he likened to his greatest discoveries. It is
worth noting, however, that even this simple metaphor is misleading.
While Newton’s home was an island, he never set eyes on the
open sea beyond the fens until well after he had grown to manhood.
Neither, so far as is known, did he seriously entertain the
idea of taking in the wonders of the Continent only a short sail
away, or of communing with Europe’s foremost scientific minds.
Newton was a loner pure and simple, secure in the knowledge
that he was without peers when it came to almost all matters
cerebral. The only person who knew him well was his enigmatic
chamber fellow John Wickins, who lived with him when he was
formulating the calculus, conducting his brilliantly counterintuitive
prism experiments, and undergoing his earliest intimations
of gravity. When the two men finally parted company
after sharing the same lodgings at Cambridge University for some
twenty years, Wickins married and moved away to become a
successful country parson, leaving behind neither letters nor memoirs
regarding his supremely gifted friend.
Perhaps Wickins’s silence was at least partly due to the fact
that he understood so little of what Newton was about, although
he often took the part of Newton’s copyist. This was no less true
of Humphrey Newton, a distant relative hired by Sir Isaac to stoke
the fires of his alchemical furnace during what Humphrey called
“spring & fall of the Leaf.” Humphrey described his employer as
a man possessed, one who slept next to the fire through the night
without bothering to remove so much as a single article of clothing.
As for what Newton was searching for, Humphrey, like the
sorcerer’s apprentice, hadn’t a clue. “His Pains, his Diligence at
those set Times,” Humphrey wrote, “made me think he aimed at
something beyond the Reach of human Art & Industry.”
So it went for thirty years and more until Newton resigned his
professorship and set out for the greener pastures of London.
There he took charge of the royal mint, where he transformed the
coining of England’s silver and gold while vengefully running
counterfeiters to ground for a date with the hangman’s noose. And
it was in London, while Newton was presiding over the Royal
Society like some grand potentate, that he went to war against the
German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and England’s
astronomer royal, John Flamsteed.
While I can claim no personal knowledge of Newton, I have
spent much of the past twenty-five years reading, thinking, and
writing about him. This short biography is the partial distillate of
that intractable—indeed sometimes maddening—quest for understanding,
and is aimed at the casual reader who wishes to know
something more of Newton beyond his “discovery” of universal
gravitation. Still, after all that time, I, too, see him through a glass
darkly. As one Newton scholar remarked, “It would take another
Newton to understand Newton.” I am anything but that person,
yet neither were all the others who have accepted the challenge of
putting his remarkable life on paper. What sustained me was the
privilege of standing over Newton’s shoulder, a silent witness to
the creative process as it unfolded in all its majesty. Think of it: a
lone human being bent low over a desk, supplied with nothing
more than a quill pen, a pot of homemade ink, and countless
sheets of blank paper, calculating precisely how the cosmos goes.
When an awed French mathematician wrote to an English
friend and fellow member of the Royal Society, he wanted to know
if Sir Isaac Newton eats and drinks and sleeps like other men. Of
course, his friend replied, “He assumes nothing and puts himself
on a level with all mankind.” It was an opinion with which the
brilliant astronomer and comet seeker Edmond Halley profoundly
disagreed: “Nearer to the gods,” Halley declared, “no mortal may
approach,” lifting Newton to the stars.