Isaac Newton Paperback – June 8, 2004

Several versions of Isaac Newton's life have evolved in the three centuries since his death in 1727. They are the products of admirers, detractors, philosophers, scientist, and poets. Some have the virtue of being partially true. Indeed, Isaac Newton was brilliant, restless, creative, vindictive, and proud. That his image today is so disjointed comes as no surprise. James Gleick attempts to sort the wheat from the chaff, but his work goes far beyond that, to a splendid essay of Newton in his time.The 17th century was a curious time to be alive in England. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his brilliant study of the Reformation, identifies Newton as the pivotal character in the swing from theology to science as the defining key of existence. But the old cosmologies were dying slow, painful deaths, while the new ones were generally infantile, utopian, or speculative. Even Galileo hesitated at first to turn his telescope to the skies, for fear of offending the divine, and when he finally caught glimpse of Saturn, the imperfections of his optics led him to announce "a planet with handles." [Newton himself had to disguise his mathematics of infinity under the cloak of annuity interest projections to maintain proper theological etiquette at Cambridge.] The new science, such as it was, required as much faith as the old religion. A few souls like Kepler understood that there might be logic at the root, but his mathematics were daunting.What makes Newton's life so interesting is the intellectual and philosophical journey that took him from the age of Galileo into the age of Einstein. He attended Cambridge in the aftermath of Oliver Cromwell but his Protestantism was not entirely appropriate as he harbored closet doubts about the Holy Trinity, finding no scriptural basis for it. His theology evolved from Aristotle as much as from anyone. He respected Aristotle's concept of First Cause, and he had enough innate oppositional defiance to approach his studies with a rigorous scientific method in the manner of The Philosopher, chips fall where they will.Newton excelled in mathematics, physics, and mechanics, and his interests were broad enough that he brought a philosopher's eye to these various disciplines. In a sense he began his life's work while still a college student, looking for a unifying factor or factors to all the known sciences and disciplines of his day. This was a gargantuan task, and its audacity took Newton to the virtual doorstep of the best of medieval theology. His quest became an obsession, and for several solitary years it led him down the dark alley of alchemy. Alchemy was highly suspect; its practitioners were considered either heretics for seeking divine secrets, or outright charlatans looking to create gold. Newton, however, was attempting to find a bridge between the stasis of matter and the observable flux of actual life.What seemed to bring Newton out of his cave was the appearance of a spectacular comet in 1681. A young astronomer named Halley, an early admirer of Newton's work, postulated that comets might be cyclic objects with elliptic trajectories. Halley's thesis on the trajectory of comets--rather easily substantiated even in his day by visual observation and Kepler's foundational math--was a physical puzzlement in an age when behavior of heavenly bodies was something of a psychological/religious given. Not even the telescope had shaken that. Why, then, would a comet make what amounts to a 270 degree change in trajectory as it passed the sun?Gleick traces with broad sweeps Newton's intense pursuit of an answer, which led to the basic laws of physics we call Newtonian. Gleick's economy is appreciated: Newton's paper trail is extensive and exhaustive; one key to his success was exactitude. [The economist John Maynard Keynes led an extensive recent effort to recover and catalogue Newton's body of work.] Although his publications in his day had modest circulation due to the highly technical nature--Halley, in fact, funded some of the publishing--there were two polarities permeating his theories that captured public attention and attracted considerable criticism in his time: his dependence upon the invisible, and the extensiveness of his claims.There is irony in the fact that Newton's passion for scientific verifiable method allowed room for what his enemies would deride as invisible forces. Gravity is the most obvious example, though here the difficulty was mathematical semantics: just as most of us labor with the material reality of e=mc(2), so too in Newton's day the mathematics and physics underlying gravitational force escaped even many professionals of his time. But in other areas of his work Newton claimed a certainty that was at best hypothetical and at times almost magical. So confident was he in the power of computation and observation that he promoted his ideas about atoms and light transmission, for example, as Gospel. The debate over the nature and transmission of light was an intense one during Newton's working years. Newton himself made major contributions in his work with prisms and improvements on reflecting telescopes. But his hubris and scientific acclaim led him into an alchemy of speculation which later scientists corrected.On the other hand, Newton was attacked by poets and artists for redefining the world in the cold jargon of scientific certitude. He was accused of stripping the human experience of mystery. Even some scientists worried that Newton had left nothing for them to do. In some cases these criticisms are the fruit of Newton's own exhaustive claims, and like many famous men, he did suffer in translation and adulation. Newton's personality--including his lifelong love of declarative sentences--did not facilitate clarification or negotiation. Having solved to his own satisfaction the mysteries of the universe, Newton turned to an even greater challenge: the English economy. In 1696 he was appointed Warden and eventually Master of the Mint where he essentially restored credibility to the coin of the realm. Little wonder Keynes would protect his memory.

Newton's life is obviously of monumental importance. That, combined with Gleick's ability as a storyteller, makes for a compelling read.Still, what kept this book from being fully satisfactory to me was Gleick's fascination with drama and controversy. He often would lead up to some quotation from Newton by saying that the latter "raged," along with a few other synonyms to make sure we get the point. The result is an over-dramatic lead-in to the quotation. I am thinking particularly about Newton's debates with Robert Hooke. Yes, Newton had a bit of a temper when he was criticized. Point taken. But do we need three sentences to tell us, in various ways, that Newton was angry? I would have preferred some sort of discussion about why Newton might have been that way, as indeed many scholars are today. Some of the fiercest dialogues occur between great intellects who disagree on some topic. I know someone who threw a book against a wall because of the way it understood the Greek verb...Gleick also begins his book by saying that Newton didn't believe his "standing on the shoulders of giants" quotation. When he got to that point in the book, I wasn't entirely convinced that Newton was being sarcastic, as argued. However, it did seem that he was going out of his way to justify himself ("If I have seen further" ... and I have). To begin the book with a point that seems disputable, I think, reveals Gleick's over-the-top fascination with drama and controversy.My verdict: If you want an intellectually stimulating life of Newton, look elsewhere. If you want a brief, dramatic, and at times fascinating portrait, you'll enjoy this one just fine.

At this time of the year, I select a few books about diverse subjects and re-read them with the hope that new insights will occur that I missed previously. That is certainly true of this book (first published in 2003 when I last read it) and Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine (1997). Dozens of other reviewers have already covered most of the strengths and pleasures of James Gleick's book about Isaac Newton (1642-1727), one that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. I prefer to cite four of several dozen passages that caught my eye. They are representative of the thrust and flavor of Gleick's thinking and writing."No one understands the mental faculty we call mathematical intuition+; much less, genius. People's brains do not differ much, from one to the next, but numerical facility seems rarer, more special, than other talents. It has a threshold quality. In no other intellectual realm does the genius find so much common ground with the idiot savant. A mind turning inward from the world can see numbers as lustrous creatures; can find other in them, and magic; can know numbers as if personally." (Page 38)The author of Micrographia (published in 1665) was Robert Hooke, "a brilliant and ambitious man seven years Newton's senior, who wielded the microscope just as Galileo had the telescope. These were the instruments that penetrated the barrier of scale and opened a view into the countries of the very large and the very small. Wonders were revealed there. The old world -- the world of ordinary scales -- shrank into its place in a continuum, one order among many." (62)John Locke (1632-1704) "had just completed a great work of his own, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), and saw the Principia [Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a three-volume explanation of his laws of motion and universal gravitation] as an exemplar of methodical knowledge. He did not pretend to follow the mathematics. They discussed theology -- Locke amazed at the depth of Newton's biblical knowledge -- and these paragons of rationality found themselves kindred spirits in the dangerous area of anti-Trinitarianism." (145)"The Principia marked a fork in the road: thenceforth science and philosophy went separate ways. Newton had moved from the realm of metaphysics many questions about the nature of things -- about what exists -- and assigned them a new name, physics. 'This preparation being made,' he declared, 'we argue more safely.' And less safely, too: by mathematizing science, he made it possible for its facts and claims to be proved wrong." 184-185)Two concluding points. First, I selected Pope's observation ("Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light") for the title of this review because, in fact, Newton was neither the first nor the last to illuminate major realities in the natural world that had previously been ignored, misunderstood, or simply not recognized. That leads to a second point: It was a twelfth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher, scholar, and administrator, Bernard of Chartres, and not Newton who first explained, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." However, countless others (including Albert Einstein) have since stood on Newton's shoulders for almost three centuries.