Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

by James Gleick  · 1 Jan 2003  · 244pp  · 68,223 words

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

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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

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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

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, 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

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& things for me, I had never made anything.… Contents Cover About the Author Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication List of Illustrations Isaac Newton 1. What Imployment Is He Fit For? 2. Some Philosophical Questions 3. To Resolve Problems by Motion 4. Two Great Orbs 5. Bodys & Senses 6

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? 14. No Man Is a Witness in His Own Cause 15. The Marble Index of a Mind Notes Acknowledgments and Sources 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

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.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 ISAAC 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

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years a Dutch fleet had invaded a divided England, James had fled to France, and a new Parliament had convened at Westminster—among its members, Isaac Newton, elected by the university senate to represent Cambridge. As the Parliament proclaimed William and Mary the new monarchs in 1689, it also proclaimed the monarchy

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the better half.3 Tsar Peter of Russia traveled to England in 1698 eager to see several phenomena: shipbuilding, the Greenwich Observatory, the Mint, and Isaac Newton.4 The Royal Society was becalmed, its finances ragged, its membership dwindling. Hooke still dominated. Even living in London, Newton mostly stayed away. Yet numerical

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: sin and knowledge; knowledge and inspiration. “Man fell with apples, and with apples rose,” Byron wrote— for we must deem the mode In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road, A thing to counterbalance human woes; For ever since immortal man hath glowed With all

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early Sunday morning, March 19, 1727. On Thursday the Royal Society recorded in its Journal Book, “The Chair being Vacant by the death of Sir Isaac Newton there was no Meeting this Day.” His recent forebears had used scriveners to draft wills directing the disposition of their meager possessions, principally sheep. When

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MS 130.10. 1. “What a lesson to the vanity and presumption of philosophers!” exclaimed his first biographer, Brewster, in 1831 (The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, p. 303). Newton, who read incessantly and remained unsettled, was echoing Milton (Paradise Regained, 320–21): Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not

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), p. 12. 11. Couth, ed., Grantham during the Interregnum, 1641–1649. 12. Stukeley, Memoirs, p. 43. Other, presumably Newtonian, crude diagramming has been uncovered. Whiteside (“Isaac Newton: Birth of a Mathematician,” p. 56) assessed them coolly: “It would need the blindness of maternal love to read into these sets of intersecting circles

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the 1920s in the possession of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where it remains (MA 318). Cf. David Eugene Smith, “Two Unpublished Documents of Sir Isaac Newton,” in Greenstreet, Isaac Newton, pp. 16–34; Andrade, “Newton’s Early Notebook”; and the original Bate, Mysteryes. 20. Stukeley, Memoirs, p. 42. 21. Bate, Mysteryes, p. 81. 22

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.” 13. Exception: Sidereus Nuncius, published in Venice in 1610. Newton acquired a version of this when he was in his forties (Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, p. 147). It was first translated into English in 1880. 14. Some biographers have suggested that Newton invented this phrase, but Aristotle expresses the sentiment

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, “Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax.” 9. Galileo, Il Saggiatore (1623), in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, pp.183–84. 10. Elliott, “Isaac Newton’s ‘Of an Universall Language,’ ” p. 7. 11. Whiteside, “Newton the Mathematician,” in Bechler, Contemporary Newtonian Research, pp. 112–13. Newton’s annotated student copy

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. Analysis of four surviving locks of Newton’s hair in 1979 found toxic levels of mercury. Johnson and Wolbarsht, “Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills”; Spargo and Pounds, “Newton’s ‘Derangement of the Intellect.’ ” But the severity remains in doubt, as do suggestions that mercury

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. Whatever James did with his copy, it did not survive. 4. Halley, “The true Theory of the Tides, extracted from that admired Treatise of Mr. Isaac Newton, Intituled, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” Phil. Trans. 226: 445, 447. 5. Untitled draft, Corres II: 301. 6. Newton to John Covel, February 21, 1689, Corres

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. Some of the debate plays out in Spargo and Pounds, “Newton’s ‘Derangement of the Intellect’ ”; Johnson and Wolbarsht, “Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills”; Ditchburn, “Newton’s Illness of 1692–3”; and Klawans, Newton’s Madness. Whiteside has summarized the scholarly state of affairs

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or communicated with the academy. When French scientists meant “Newtonians,” they generally said, “les anglais.” 5. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, The Eloguim of Sir Isaac Newton (London: Tonson, 1728), read to the Académie Royale des Sciences in November 1727; reprinted in Cohen, ed., Papers and Letters, pp. 444–74; based in

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turn on John Conduitt’s “Memoir,” in Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives, pp. 26–34. (“He had such a meekness and sweetness of temper.… His whole life was one continued series of labour, patience

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& Epigrams). Also: “To teach doubt & Experiment / Certainly was not what Christ meant.” The Everlasting Gospel. 22. Blake, Jerusalem, Chapter I. 23. Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton, p. 271. 24. Byron, Don Juan, Canto X. 25. Burtt, Metaphysical Foundations, pp. 203, 303. 26. Principia (Motte), p. 192. 27. As Clifford Truesdell puts

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my agent, Michael Carlisle. Above all to my editor, Dan Frank. PUBLISHED WORKS OF NEWTON There is no such thing as The Collected Works of Isaac Newton. The Newton Project, at Imperial College, London, has long-term plans for the theological, alchemical, and Mint writings. Meanwhile two monuments of scholarship are the

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Philosophy (cited as Principia). Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman with the assistance of Julia Budenz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Translated by Andrew Motte (1729), revised by Florian Cajori. Berkeley: University of California

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. John Herivel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook. J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of

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the English Civil War. Bridgend, U.K.: Sutton, 1998. Alexander, Henry Gavin, ed. The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956. Algarotti, Francesco. Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d For the Use of the Ladies. In Six Dialogues on Light and Colours. London: E. Cave, 1739. Andrade, Edward Neville da

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Costa. “Newton’s Early Notebook.” Nature 135 (1935): 360. ———. Sir Isaac Newton: His Life and Work. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Arbuthnot, John. An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning in a Letter from a Gentleman in

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,” Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain 67 (1996): 239–75. Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New York: Free Press, 1984. ———. Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Clark, David H.; and Clark, Stephen P. H. Newton’s Tyranny: The

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, Paul. “The Birth of Public Science in the English Provinces,” Annals of Science 57 (2000): 61–100. Elliott, Ralph W. V. “Isaac Newton as Phonetician.” Modern Language Review 49 (1954): 1. ———. “Isaac Newton’s ‘Of an Universall Language.’ ” Modern Language Review 52 (1957): 1. ’Espinasse, Margaret. Robert Hooke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962

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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. Introduction by James Gleick. New York: Modern Library, 1994. Foster, C. W. “Sir Isaac Newton’s Family.” Reports and Papers of the Architectural & Archeological Society of the County of Lincoln 39 (1928). Galileo Galilei. The Controversy on the Comets of

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Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Greenstreet, W. J., ed. Isaac Newton 1642–1727: A Memorial Volume. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1927. Guerlac, Henry. Newton on the Continent. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Guicciardini, Niccolò

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. Rupert. Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in the Relations of Science and War with Reference Principally to England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. ———. Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Newton, His Friends and His Foes. Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1993. ———. Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between

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on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of D. T. Whiteside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Harrison, John. The Library of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Heilbron, J.L. Physics at the Royal Society during Newton’s Presidency. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1983

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. Hill, Christopher. Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. History of Science Society. Sir Isaac Newton 1727–1927: A Bicentenary Evaluation of His Work. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1927. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard E. Flathman and David Johnston. New York

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Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73 (1982): 233–53 Huxley, G. L. “Two Newtonian Studies.” Harvard Library Bulletin 13 (winter 1969): 348–61. Iliffe, Robert. “Playing Philosophically: Isaac Newton and John Bate’s Mysteries of Art and Nature.” Intellectual News 8 (Summer 2000): 70. Jacob, Margaret. The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720

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Modern England.” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 159. Johnson, L. W.; and Wolbarsht, M. L. “Mercury Poisoning: A Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 34 (1979): 1. Kaplan, Robert. The Nothing That Is. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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: 108–42 McKnight, Stephen A. ed. Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. McLachlan, H., ed. Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1950. McMullin, Ernan. Newton on Matter and Activity. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978. Meli

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, or An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man, whether there be not a God. London: Roger Daniel, 1653. More, Louis Trenchard. Isaac Newton: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1934. Moretti, Tomaso. A General Treatise of Artillery: or, Great Ordnance. Translated by Jonas Moore. London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1683. Murdin

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. Ornstein, Martha. The Rôle of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. Palter, Robert, ed. The Annus Mirabilis of Sir Isaac Newton: 1666–1966. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970. Park, David. The Fire within the Eye. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel

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in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Price, Derek J. de Solla. “Newton in a Church Tower: The Discovery of an Unknown Book by Isaac Newton.” Yale University Library Gazette 34 (1960): 124. Pyenson, Lewis; and Sheets-Pyenson, Susan. Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises, and Sensibilities. New

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York: Norton, 1999. Raphson, Joseph. The History of Fluxions. London: William Pearson, 1715. Rattansi, Piyo M. Isaac Newton and Gravity. London: Wildwood, 1974. Ronan, Colin A. Edmond Halley: Genius in Eclipse. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations. Cambridge

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of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color, 1672–1727. Perspectives on Science 4 (1996): 59–140. Socolow, Elizabeth Anne. Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton. Introduction by Marie Ponsot. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Spargo, P. E.; and Pounds, C. A. “Newton’s ‘Derangement of the Intellect’: New Light on an

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, Roger H. “Was Newton’s ‘Wave-Particle Duality’ Consistent with Newton’s Observations?” Isis 60 (fall 1969): 203, 392–94. Stukeley, William. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, 1752. Edited by A. Hastings White. London: Taylor & Francis, 1936. Telescope, Tom (pseudonym). The Newtonian System of Philosophy: Explained by Familiar Objects, in

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. Westfall, Richard S. Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century. London: Macdonald, 1971. ———. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. “Newton and the Fudge Factor,” Science 179: 751. ———. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press

Money for Nothing

by Thomas Levenson  · 18 Aug 2020  · 495pp  · 136,714 words

far as may be, to general Rules or Laws,—establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the cause and effects of things. —ISAAC NEWTON CHAPTER ONE “The System of the World” WOOLSTHORPE, LINCOLNSHIRE, MIDSUMMER, 1665 He had walked for three days to escape a farmer’s life just four

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Trinity acknowledged the obvious and decided to pay its members an allowance whether or not they remained in residence after that date. No record for Isaac Newton appears in Trinity College’s accounts for the extra stipend. The newly passed bachelor of arts had already fled, traveling the sixty miles north and

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further into an investigation of light, color, and optics that would yield his first great public triumphs. The record does not reveal when—or whether—Isaac Newton slept. This seemingly superhuman accumulation of ideas during his plague-imposed exile has created a mythology of superhuman genius, conjuring worlds of thought out of

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prove the skill that would make him rich, through his work as Ireland’s first comprehensive geographer. In his middle age, just as the young Isaac Newton began to build his system of the world, Petty’s ambition narrowed, increasingly focused on a single goal, shifting his “Trade of Experiments from Bodies

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was or could be made to be expressed mathematically, thus revealing relationships between everything that empirical experience could count, weigh, or measure. Fifteen years later, Isaac Newton would publish his great account of celestial motion. It’s easy to exaggerate the connection with Petty’s attempt to quantify economics and politics, certainly

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the Channel to Paris and Amsterdam. Among those consulted were four fellows of the Royal Society: Davenant, Sir Christopher Wren, the philosopher John Locke—and Isaac Newton. Here the scientific revolution, in the persons of some of its greatest minds, collided directly with a financial transformation, at a moment when the fate

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edge of monetary disaster. That was when, in September, the Treasury secretary, William Lowndes, reached out to his handpicked group of wise men—among them, Isaac Newton—for advice. Newton’s response would put him at odds with other, more experienced financial thinkers and, read in hindsight, offers a glimpse of the

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The diarist and scholar John Evelyn feared the worst: “Tumults are every day feared, nobody paying or receiving money.” In the nick of time, enter Isaac Newton. Neale had no chance against his intelligence, preparation, and simple presence. The new warden showed up at the Mint more or less every day; Neale

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too, as on the day he found himself “at Jonathan’s, [with] Sir Chr[istopher] Wren.” The topic? “Planetary motion”—the question that would evoke Isaac Newton’s Principia. It’s even possible, perhaps likely, that the ultimate encounter between baristas and men of science reached its climax at Jonathan’s—if

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not. * * * — POLLEXFEN PUBLISHED HIS argument in 1697, at the height of the Great Recoinage. The warden of the Mint was thus rather busy, so despite Isaac Newton’s urgent interest in any debate about England’s currency, he does not seem to have noticed the pamphlet on its first release. It was

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one soon-to-be former friend—that relationship among the least of the casualties of what was about to come. And above all, what of Isaac Newton? Newton was, of course, an incomparably more skilled calculator than virtually anyone then living. He had, after all, invented the calculus decades earlier. He

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to break a financial market; that is: the ordinary flow of human emotion, swept up in the excitement, can be enough of the trick. If Isaac Newton, his time’s avatar of reason, couldn’t control his passions long enough to think his choices through, how many others would? * * * — ANOTHER EXPLANATION

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this price mechanism shaped a nation’s trade, its employment, and the productive capacity of its economy. This was not wholly new thinking—recall that Isaac Newton answering Pollexfen had offered some similar notions, and that others were working on related ideas. But there was more to come: Law’s book offered

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convulsed Europe from the late 1600s forward. The seventeenth-century scientific revolution had not been solely or even mostly a British invention, for all that Isaac Newton has come to symbolize its triumph. The various breakthroughs behind the new forms of money and credit that Britain exploited for its ends weren’t

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extending into the future, and, perhaps, an extra, unquantifiable happy jolt every time Major Tom spoke on their radio, floating in his most peculiar way. Isaac Newton and Robert Walpole might have been amazed by the reality of David Bowie, but they would have had no problem with the thinking behind selling

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exposition in Never at Rest, pp. 126–34. THE TRICKS THAT SCHOOLMASTERS USED Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 132. THE “GENERATION OF FIGURES BY MOTION” Isaac Newton, in a document written as part of the conflict with Gottfried Leibniz on who first invented calculus, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 55n to

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chapter 4. THE “INFINITELY LITTLE LINES” Isaac Newton, Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, 1664–1666, D. T. Whiteside, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 382 et seq. AS HE TOLD THE STORY SIXTY

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YEARS LATER William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752), MS/142, Royal Society Library, London, p. 15r. SUDDENLY, AN APPLE FELL No anecdotes about an apple survive from near the time

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IS TRUE See, for example, this account of one of the Woolsthorpe apple tree’s descendants at York University: Richard Keesing, “A Brief History of Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree,” University of York Department of Physics, n.d., http://www.york.ac.uk/​physics/​about/​newtonsappletree/. My home institution, MIT, also possesses

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for a more detailed account of the specific steps in Newton’s readings. I also consulted James Gleick’s treatment of the same material in Isaac Newton, pp. 54–59. My Newton and the Counterfeiter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) also discusses these events on pp. 15–20. HE “FOUND

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THEM ANSWER PRETTY NEARLY” Isaac Newton, draft of a letter to Pierre des Maiseaux, probably in the summer of 1718, quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge

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University Press, 1971). Newton produced several drafts of this letter, many of which are cited in the notes to the version in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 6, 1713–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), document 1295 pp. 454–562. See also D. T. Whiteside, “The Prehistory of the Principia

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look.) Another good account of the development of Newton’s thoughts on gravity through this period comes in A. Rupert Hall’s highly readable biography Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 58–63. TO FIND OUT, HE TURNED TO THE NEAREST EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECT Newton’s notebook, reproduced

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alchemical treatises with his notes or commentary. Many of these had been labeled “not fit to be printed” at his death. (The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, “About Isaac Newton and Alchemy,” n.d., https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/​newton/​project/​about.do). In 1872 the Cambridge University library rejected a proposed donation of much

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to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Newton’s alchemical papers themselves and a significant amount of explanatory material are online at The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/​newton/), part of the international collaboration to digitize and study Newton’s papers. A DECADE LATER, HE TURNED HIS QUANTITATIVE

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after Newton’s death. PEPYS WROTE A BRIEF SERIES OF LETTERS Six letters between Pepys and Newton, beginning on November 22, 1693, contained in Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3, 1688–1694, ed. H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 293–303. HE GOT HIS SUMS RIGHT Stephen M

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, the leading Treasury civil servant. See his A Report Containing an Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins (London: C. Bill, 1695). CHAPTER 4 ISAAC NEWTON HAD FIRST MADE HIS WAY Elements of this chapter are drawn from my earlier work, Newton and the Counterfeiter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

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. INITIALLY NEWTON’S NEW LIFE WAS LARGELY CONFINED Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 556. HE WOULD, HE PROMISED, FACE “NOT TOO MUCH BUS’NESSE” Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 4, 1694–1709, ed. J. F. Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), document 545, p. 195. KING WILLIAM HAD ADVERTED TO WHAT

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plausible fears of the disruption the calling-in and reminting process would involve. See Li, Great Recoinage, pp. 65–67. NEWTON WROTE BACK TO LOWNDES “Isaac Newton Concerning the Amendment of English Coins,” Goldsmiths Library, University of London, MS 62, reprinted in Li, Great Recoinage, p. 217. “IN STATING THE VALUE OF

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from the same passage. The figure of five hundred men working at the mint comes from Craig, Newton at the Mint, p. 14. See also Isaac Newton, “Observations Concerning the Mint,” 1697, in Newton, Correspondence, vol. 4, document 579, p. 258, online at http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/​view/​texts/​

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, New History of the Royal Mint, p. 394. Challis cites Haynes for Newton’s calculations. The figure of fourteen men working each press comes from Isaac Newton, “Observations Concerning the Mint.” £6,722,970 0S. 2D., TO BE EXACT Li, Great Recoinage, p. 140. TO SWITCH FROM SILVER TO GOLD See

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. S. Ashton, Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1955 and 2006), p. 171. Newton’s own report can be found in “Sir Isaac Newton’s State of the Gold and Silver Coin,” published in William Arthur Shaw, Select Tracts and Documents Illustrative of English Monetary History 1626–1730: Comprising

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Coyn, and Paper Credit, and of Ways and Means to Gain, and Retain Riches (London: Brabazon Aylmer 1697), pp. 65–69. “TOO MUCH PAPER CREDIT” Isaac Newton, “Untitled Holograph Draft Memorandum on John Pollexfen’s A Discourse on Trade, Coyn and Paper Credit,” 1697, Mint 19/II, 608–11, National Archives, Kew

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, DISAGREED William Lowndes, secretary to the Treasury, was much more suspicious of credit than Newton was. See G. Findlay Shirras and J. H. Craig, “Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency,” Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219 (June–September 1945): 231. CHAPTER 7 IT PROVED JUST AS COSTLY Henry Roseveare, The Financial Revolution

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of Clubs: Particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Stake, Uertuocsos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden Fleece, Florists, Beaus, &c […]. (London: Booksellers, 1709), p. 361. AMONG THEM ISAAC NEWTON’S NIECE, CATHERINE BARTON Richard Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 595. A WHIFF OF WALPOLE’S NEW WORLD See, for

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Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London: Cresset, 1956), p. 307. HE SOLD ABOUT HALF Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, pp. 306–8. SIR ISAAC NEWTON DID BETTER Odlyzko, “Newton’s Financial Misadventures,” p. 50. EVERY SOUTH SEA STOCK TRANSACTION THE BANK MADE IN 1720 The details of Hoare’s trading

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YOUR FAVOR” John Blunt, A True State of the South-Sea Scheme (London: J. Peele, 1722), p. 32. ISAAC NEWTON, WHO TRADED ANNUITIES Isaac Newton to John Francis Fauquier, July 27, 1720, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 7, 1718–1727, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 96

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, Money and the English State, 1688–1783. 1988. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Brewster, David. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1855. A Brief Description of the Excellent Vertues of That Sober and Wholesome Drink, Called Coffee, and Its Incomparable Effects

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, Natasha. “Calculating Credibility: Print Culture, Trust and Economic Figures in Early Eighteenth-Century England.” Economic History Review 60, no. 4 (2007): 685–711. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Random House, 2003. Goss, David. “The Ongoing Binomial Revolution.” arXiv.org, May 18, 2011. arXiv:1105.3513v1. Graunt, John. Natural and Political Observations

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.edu/​wp-content/​uploads/​2015/​06/​Chronology_Economic_Financial_Crisis.pdf. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Halley, Edmond. “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge, Laid Before the Royal Society, on

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of Financial Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Neale, Thomas. The Profitable Adventure to the Fortunate. London: F. Collins, 1694. Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Various editors, 7 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. ———. The Principia. 1687. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Ann Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press

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, 1999. ———. “Sir Isaac Newton’s State of the Gold and Silver Coin.” In William Arthur Shaw, Select Tracts and Documents Illustrative of English Monetary History 1626–1730: Comprising Works

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): 73–104. Sherman, Sandra. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Shirras, G. Findlay, and J. H. Craig. “Sir Isaac Newton and the Currency.” Economic Journal 55, no. 218/219 (June–September 1945): 217–41. Shovlin, John. “Jealousy of Credit: John Law’s ‘System’ and the

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Graduate School of Business Administration, 1962. Spiegel, Henry William. The Growth of Economic Thought. 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Stigler, Stephen M. “Isaac Newton as Probabilist.” Statistical Science 21, no. 3. (2006): 400–403. Stone, Lawrence. An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815. London: Routledge, 1993. Stone

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/​stone-lecture.pdf. Stringham, Edward Peter. Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Stukeley, William. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life. 1752. MS/142, Royal Society Library, London. http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/​view/​texts/​normalized/​OTHE00001. Sussman, Nathan, and Yishay Yafeh. “Institutional

Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson  · 9 Sep 2004  · 1,178pp  · 388,227 words

hypotheses as first principles of their speculations . . . may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713 Boston Common OCTOBER 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M. ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUST as the executioner raises

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of them came over on ships. As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit

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Boston waterfront, seeking to buy passage on a ferry run by an Englishman, cannot pay with the coins that are being stamped out by Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. The only coinage here is Spanish—the same coins that are changing hands, at this moment

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time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin. This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be

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judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments. Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony OCTOBER 12, 1713

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the Alchemists are forever seeking: a mysterious supernatural presence that is supposed to suffuse the world. But they can never seem to find any. Sir Isaac Newton has devoted his life to the project and has nothing to show for it.” “If your sympathies do not run in that direction, then I

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works of Aristotle and Euclid. But in fact, he had over the last year become the one thing, aside from the Grace of God, keeping Isaac Newton alive. He’d long since stopped asking him such annoying, pointless questions as “Can you remember the last time you put food into your mouth

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—I say, I’ll do that with one hand, and take notes of what I see with the other.” So the night proceeded—by sunrise, Isaac Newton knew more about the human eye than anyone who had ever lived, and Daniel knew more than anyone save Isaac. The experiment could have been

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the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears. Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts

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of the rising sun into sectors. College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge 1664 IN THE GREAT COURT of Trinity there was a sundial Isaac Newton didn’t like: a flat disk divided by labeled spokes with a gnomon angling up from the center, naïvely copied from Roman designs, having a

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, one deck below his cabin, and tries to organize his thoughts. Some weeks after we had received our Scholarships, probably in the Spring of 1665, Isaac Newton and I decided to walk out to Stourbridge Fair. Reading it back to himself, he scratches out probably in and writes in certainly no later

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absent. Their coat of arms was a proof, of Euclidean certainty, that he was right about this. “Is that you, Daniel?” said the voice of Isaac Newton, not very loud. A little bubble of euphoria percolated into Daniel’s bloodstream: to re-encounter anyone, after so long, during the Plague Years, and

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its yellow part, appears blue.” Daniel was peering out at a dim vision of blue-blossomed apple trees before a blue stone house—a blue Isaac Newton sitting with his back to a blue sun, one blue hand covering his eyes. “Forgive me their rude construction—I made them in the dark

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hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case. But I did believe, and do still, that the end of our City will be with fire and brimstone from above, and

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the river-bend to Fleet Ditch, where the wharves began. Daniel Waterhouse walked past Mrs. Green’s one summer morning in 1670, a minute after Isaac Newton had done so. It had a little garden in the front, with several tables. Daniel went into it and stood for a moment, checking out

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, looking anxious until he caught sight of whatever he was looking for. Then he relaxed, sat down, and rode slowly in the general direction of—Isaac Newton. Daniel sat down in that wee garden in front of Mrs. Green’s, and ordered coffee and a newspaper. King Carlos II of Spain was

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been exactly what the Earl wanted. The Earl, for his part, shed his entourage at a tavern, and went alone into the same shop as Isaac Newton. Daniel, by that point, wasn’t even certain that Isaac was still in there. He walked by the front of it once and finally saw

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revive him; and that in case he were revived, he might have his life granted him. Mr. WATERHOUSE produced a new telescope, invented by Mr. Isaac NEWTON, professor of mathematics in the university of Cambridge, improving on previous telescopes by contracting the optical path. THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET, Dr. CHRISTOPHER WREN, and

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Pepys and Wilkins. The telescope seemed to be watching Daniel, too: it sat in its box across from him, a disembodied sensory organ belonging to Isaac Newton, staring at him with more than human acuteness. He heard Isaac demanding to know what on earth he, Daniel Waterhouse, could possibly be doing, riding

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, without really being surprised, that they had stopped in front of the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure, King’s Chymist—the very same place where Isaac Newton had spent most of the morning, and had had an orchestrated chance encounter with the Earl of Upnor. The front door opened and a man

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, taking Daniel’s arm and turning him away from the Earl. The timing was unfortunate, because Daniel was certain he had just overhead Upnor mentioning Isaac Newton by name, and wanted to eavesdrop. Pepys led him past Wilkins, who was good-naturedly spanking a barmaid. The publican rang a bell and everyone

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—let’s back to the tavern!” HE WOKE UP SOMETIME THE next day on a hired coach bound for Cambridge—sharing a confined space with Isaac Newton, and a load of gear that Isaac had bought in London: a six-volume set of Theatrum Chemicum,* numerous small crates stuffed with straw, the

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meant fighting their way against a flood tide of “French Mistresses” coming back from the “Sun King’s” throne. Even as the sensitive eyes of Isaac Newton had been semi-permanently branded with the image of the solar disk during his colors experiments, so Daniel’s retinas were now stamped with a

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. He glanced down toward the far end of Neville’s Court, then frowned at Daniel and said, “Where is he? Or at least it!” meaning Isaac Newton and his paper on tangents, respectively. Then Oldenburg turned the other way and peeked up round the edge of his mortarboard toward the Angleseys’ box

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side facing towards the town. These chambers had been used to shield various Fellows from the elements over the years, but lately Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton had been living there. Once those two bachelors had moved in their miserable stock of furniture, there had been plenty of unused space remaining, and

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interior of Castle Suckmire. As things were being re-arranged upon the stage, Oldenburg leaned close and said, “Is that him, then?” “Yes, that’s Isaac Newton.” “Well done—more than one Anglesey will be pleased—how did you flush him into the open?” “I am not entirely sure.” “What of the

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Francis Buggermy had showed up incognito and begun chasing the slave Nzinga around in hopes of verifying certain rumors about the size of African men. Isaac Newton was pinching the high bridge of his nose and looking mildly nauseated. Oldenburg was glaring at Daniel, and several important personages were glaring from On

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awful torment of watching a comedy. Daniel kept a sharp eye out, but saw nothing except for tedious alchemical notes and recipes, many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work. In any case—without solving the eternal mystery of why Isaac did

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face.” “It is not necessarily true that infinite series must be some sort of concession to the unknowable, Doctor . . . they can clarify, too! My friend Isaac Newton has done wizardly things with them. He has learned to approximate any curve as an infinite series.” Daniel took the stick from Leibniz, then swept

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Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.” “Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren out—shall we?” IPSWICH HAD BEEN A CLOTH port forever, but that

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cautious when handling Inflammable Objects. WATERHOUSE: Here, m’lord, fresh from Cambridge, as promised, I give you Books I and II of Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton—have a care, some would consider it a valuable document. APTHORP: My word, is that the cornerstone of a building, or a manuscript? RAVENSCAR: Err

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the surf and into the firm sand. The longboat was reluctant to move, and one who had not recently familiarized herself with the contents of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica might have given up. But the elemental precepts of that work were certain laws of motion that stated that, if she pushed

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Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things

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into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who’d fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten ’em, who’d made Isaac Newton’s ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would

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to converse with fellows like those—we trade news as fervidly as traders swapping stocks on the ‘Change. And one thing I know is that Isaac Newton is in London to-night.” It struck Daniel as bizarre that John Churchill should even know who Isaac was. Until Churchill continued, “Another thing I

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think you make too much of them. For never have you seen such a gaggle of frauds, fops, ninehammers, and mountebanks.” “Which of these is Isaac Newton?” The question was like a bung hammered into Daniel’s gob. “What of King Charles II? Which was His Majesty, ninehammer or mountebank?” “I have

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Bob in tow. “Mark those three great windows above the entrance, glowering blood-red as the light shines through their curtains. Once I spied on Isaac Newton through those windows, using his own telescope.” “What was he doing?” “Making the acquaintance of the Earl of Upnor—who wanted to meet him so

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five paces down the hall, moving now towards the front of the house, and paused before the large door at the end. He could hear Isaac Newton saying, “What do we know, truly, of this Viceroy? Supposing he does succeed in conveying it to Spain—will he understand its true value?” Daniel

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through with red veins. Two men were seated there, looking up at him: on Daniel’s left, the Earl of Upnor, and on his right, Isaac Newton. Posed nonchalantly in the corner of the room, pretending to read a book, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers. Daniel immediately, for some reason, saw this

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polished door. Pepys scurried round in front of the sedan chair and flung that door open to reveal everyone: not only Hooke, but Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Isaac’s little shadow Fatio, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Roger Comstock, Christopher Wren, and twenty others—mostly Royal Society regulars, but a few odd men

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Comstock), discoursed of his work on artificial muscles. He did not say that they were for use in flying machines, but Daniel already knew it. Isaac Newton was living in London now, sharing lodgings with Fatio, and had become Member of Parliament for Cambridge. Roger was bursting with scandalous gossip. Sterling was

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was closing in on the end of Cryptonomicon [1999], I heard from a couple of different people about some interesting things having to do with Isaac Newton and with Gottfried Leibniz. One person pointed out to me that Newton had spent about the last thirty years of his life working at the

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, religion, language, title or noble status, or other methods. Clearly Major Characters Jack Shaftoe Eliza Daniel Waterhouse Enoch Root Natural Philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Isaac Newton Spinoza Thomas More Anglesey Robert Hooke John Wilkins Nicolas Fatio de Duillier Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit Aristocrats and Politicians James I of England Oliver Cromwell Charles

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by Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., London, 1967. Flea illustration from Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia reprinted by permission of Octavo, www.octavo.com. Illustrations from Isaac Newton’s 1729 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy courtesy of Primary Source Microfilm. This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments

The confusion

by Neal Stephenson  · 13 Apr 2004  · 1,020pp  · 339,564 words

with money, revenue, banks, stocks, and other subjects that fascinate you. But I must confess I have fallen quite out of touch with such matters. Isaac Newton was elected to Parliament a year ago, in the wake of our Revolution. He had made a name for himself in Cambridge opposing the former

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, but before I could post this, King William and Queen Mary prorogued and dissolved Parliament. There have been new elections and the Tories have won. Isaac Newton is no longer M.P. He divides his time between Cambridge, where he toils on Alchemy, and London, where he and Fatio are reading Treatise

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if you have a rival.” Fatio said nothing. “The answer is: you do not.” “That is well.” “You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.” Ireland 1690–1691 THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John

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Eliza could muster when Fatio walked into the library accompanied by a man with long silver hair—a man who could not be anyone but Isaac Newton. Even by the standards of savants, this had been a socially awkward morning. Eliza had been in London for a fortnight. The first few days

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; but the situation was, after all, complicated. Before Eliza could respond, Fatio stepped aside and thrust a hand at his companion. “I present to you Isaac Newton,” he announced. Then, switching to English: “Isaac, it is my honor to give you Eliza de Lavardac, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm.” Fatio scarcely

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to overpower same would else have sent her right back out into ’Change Alley, where she’d have gone into a fit as bad as Isaac Newton’s. As it was, she had no lack of incentive to make the conversation brief and momentous. “With so many gentlemen here, there is no

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, unexpectedly, was a pang of sympathy for young Dominic Masham. Daniel, too, would have been amazed by what John Locke, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and Isaac Newton were up to at Oates, if he had not been at Epsom during the Plague Year. As it was, the laboratory that those three lonely

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. The gust waned and Daniel heard Locke’s voice from the garden, saying things long-winded and soothing and reasonable, interrupted by sharp objections from Isaac Newton. Daniel stepped out into the garden just in time to be wrapped up in another wind-gust. This weather was stripping browned and withered petals

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. “Mr. John Locke. And the ink is still damp on it,” Daniel replied. “I am quite sure he did not mean it to apply to Isaac Newton!” Fatio returned, jarred, but recovering quickly. “I believe what you really mean to say is, ‘Newton and Fatio,’ ” Daniel said. Newton and Fatio looked at

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at least he knows what it is! Hooke is nothing more than a sooty, bloody empiricist!” “I am here as a cat’s paw for Isaac Newton, my friend of thirty years. I fear for him because I perceive that he has an idea of what Natural Philosophy is, and of what

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met from that quarter. Now I have come to offer you the Mint.” Everyone now observed a prayerful silence for a minute or two as Isaac Newton considered it. “In normal circumstances the position would be without interest,” he said, “but Comstock has sent adumbrations my way concerning a great Recoinage.” “It

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a few moments as if he could not believe he’d said it—waiting, Daniel thought, for Newton to retract everything he’d said. But Isaac Newton was long past being able to change his mind. Fatio was left with only one thing he could possibly do: He ran away. Once Fatio

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bring me a cup of coffee. I am going to do something I have not done in three decades: sit up all night worrying about Isaac Newton.” “What you have done was necessary and in no way do I fault you for it,” Locke said, “but gravely I fear that he shall

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been ugly, and she had a self-possession that made her more watchable than anything Eliza had laid eyes on since her weird audience with Isaac Newton. Eleanor hugged Eliza for a solid minute; in the same interval of time, Caroline greeted everyone on the Zille, asked the skipper three boat-questions

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well I’ve been up at Cambridge helping Isaac clean out his lodgings.” Roger affected astonishment. “I say, that wouldn’t by any chance be Isaac Newton the savant—?—! Why ever is he leaving Cambridge?” “Coming down here—finally—to run the Mint,” Daniel allowed (this had been in the works for

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?” “As you know, Jack, it has long been supposed that Solomon—the builder of the Temple in Jerusalem, the first Alchemist, and the subject of Isaac Newton’s obsessions for lo these many years, departed from the Land of Israel before he died, and journeyed far to the east, and founded a

The system of the world

by Neal Stephenson  · 21 Sep 2004  · 1,199pp  · 384,780 words

contacts and forging alliances between London and Hanover. This has had the side-effect of throwing into high relief a long-simmering dispute between Sir Isaac Newton—the preëminent English scientist, the President of the Royal Society, and Master of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London—and Leibniz, a privy

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of Technologickal Arts. Dr. Waterhouse has very recently re-crossed the Atlantic and is even now on his way to London to confer with Sir Isaac Newton…” The mention of Daniel’s name caused a sparse ripple of curiosity to propagate through the company of cold, irritable Gentlemen. The mention of Isaac

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LATE FEBRUARY 1714 DANIEL WAS LURKING LIKE A bat in the attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks. Sir Isaac Newton emerged from a room on the floor just below, talking to a pair of younger men as they strode down the corridor. Daniel craned his

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, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively. “Say no more, Miss Barton.” Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London LATER THAT DAY “I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel

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ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton. He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting

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you to heed my warning.” Daniel was now very close to laughing out loud. He could not choose which was funnier: the phant’sy that Isaac Newton was not suspicious-minded, or that Mr. Threader possessed charm. Better change the subject! “But my question is not answered yet. Why did he

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any other man on earth—Natural Philosophers included—this would amount to saying, “I was sloppy in the laboratory and got it wrong.” From Sir Isaac Newton, it was truth of Euclidean certainty. “I am put in mind of the discovery of phosphorus,” Daniel remarked, after considering it for a few moments

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affect the water?” “Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot. “That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it

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rescue most,” Daniel suggested. “Leave me on yonder vessel,” Isaac demanded, gesturing toward the hooker, which was now upright and adrift. “I cannot abandon Sir Isaac Newton on a derelict fishing-boat!” shouted Barnes, exasperated. “Then do you stay with him, Colonel,” suggested Sergeant Bob, “and take a few men. I’ll

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the guineas, does it not?” “It does.” “Then by the same token it must have something to do with the man who makes them: Sir Isaac Newton.” “Leibniz told me that you required little instruction—that you worked things out for yourself. I see that this was more than avuncular pride.” “Then

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visits from ‘horrid Englishmen.’ ” “Aha!” Sophie glanced in the direction of the great fountain. “Something must have gone awry at the English Mint.” “But Sir Isaac Newton has charge of the Mint! I have been studying it,” Sophie said proudly. “When I’m Queen of England we shall all go to the

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too pleased to let Whigs expend their powder on it. “I HAVE BEEN made aware of four diverse Projects for discovering the Longitude,” said Sir Isaac Newton. “Only four?” asked Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar: a Whig, and the bloke who had invited Newton here. He belonged to Lords, not Commons

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to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude anywhere.” Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an

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this world considered most important by men like Ravenscar and Bolingbroke, Sir Isaac was most apt to find trivial and annoying. Bolingbroke did not know Isaac Newton. Newton was a Puritan and a Whig, Bolingbroke a man of no fixed principles, but with the brainstem reflexes of a Jacobite Tory. Bolingbroke was

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of Ravenscar, standing serenely on the opposite side of the Chamber as other Whigs bent their backs to the very odd job of dragging out Isaac Newton. Ravenscar held out a hand. Someone slapped a walking-stick into his palm. He hefted it. Charles White, anticipating physical violence, took half a step

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lord Bolingbroke investigating the fineness of Her Majesty’s coinage? Why, because he fears it has been adulterated by Jack the Coiner. Why has Sir Isaac Newton suffered a nervous collapse? Because of the mischief committed against him by Jack the Coiner. Now, I ask you men of the Clubb: supposing, for

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opportunity to be of service to great men—men such as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Viscount Bolingbroke, Mr. Charles White, and Sir Isaac Newton!” “Ah, yes, that would seem like an Opportunity for some,” said Mr. Kikin, “but not for me, as I am already quite busy being

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been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London. Daniel guessed that they were swinging round the northern limb of St. Paul’s Churchyard, but he had

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them. For today Daniel, who on so many days was the personification of Melancholy, was standing in this queue to the left hand of Sir Isaac Newton: Mr. Mania himself. He looked back and forth a few times between sculpted Mania—or, as the Vulgar styled him, Raving Madness—and Isaac,

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called, “they’re with us.” “And who the hell are you?” Daniel silenced Saturn with a hand on his shoulder, and gave the answer: “Sir Isaac Newton, the Master of Her Majesty’s Mint, investigates an act of High Treason. You are impeding his deputies. Pray stand aside.” Isaac was as startled

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, taking all the residues of the receipt with him. Hooke set it down as best he could from his recollections.” “This explains much,” said Sir Isaac Newton, eyeing Daniel very oddly indeed. Daniel hardly cared; he had leaned back flaccid against the wall, and was gazing mindlessly at the oculus of silver

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asked all sorts of questions about what happened during the meetings, and what the Fellows were like—Sir Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley, and especially Sir Isaac Newton.” “Did you ever mention to this amateur that Sir Isaac made a practice of coming to Crane Court on Sunday evenings, and working late?” asked

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the little wood. The growth at this time of year was too dense to allow a clear look, but a careful, keen-eyed observer—Sir Isaac Newton, for instance—could glimpse, through gaps between branches, taut canvas, and the occasional hemmed edge, tent-pole, or staked rope. “Why, there is a

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worry, they were loyal servants and retainers all. Daniel found his phaethon and commanded the driver to take it round Leicester Fields and collect Sir Isaac Newton. This was achieved shortly and in absurdly conspicuous style. The diverse spies planted in and around Leicester Fields by political factions, foreign governments, nervous speculators

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a bit of prestidigitation—easily arranged, have no fear—will give the assay greater weight, and make all the numbers come out as they should.” Isaac Newton, who had been strangely unmoved by all that infiltrated his nostrils and stuck to the soles of his shoes here in Newgate, was nauseated by

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who had gone out to meet them. Clasping his hands behind his back Roger ambled over to a window and looked down to see Sir Isaac Newton saying something peremptory to Bolingbroke’s butler, who was nodding and shrugging a lot—but not budging. Daniel Waterhouse paced slowly back and forth behind

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around the Mint.” Peter stood up and turned around, which obliged everyone else to stand up, too. The exact moment of the meeting between Sir Isaac Newton and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz went unobserved by Daniel, who had become so upset that the blood stopped flowing to his brain for a

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up behind the table, waved one arm in the air until he got the attention of the newcomer, who approached, looking befuddled. “Was that—?” “Sir Isaac Newton? Yes. Daniel Waterhouse at your service.” “Frightfully sorry to intrude,” said the courtier, “but word has reached the Household that an Important Man has come

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—is a characteristic of what group?” “The Esoteric Brotherhood.” “Otherwise known as—?” “Alchemists,” Daniel snapped. “So the priority dispute would never have arisen if Sir Isaac Newton were not thoroughly infected with the the mentality of Alchemy.” “Granted,” Daniel sighed. “So it is a philosophical dispute. Daniel, I am an old man

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before they could enter into speculation as to Monsieur Kohan’s real motives, that Silence fell over the room that heralded the arrival of Sir Isaac Newton. It was a different room, and a different meeting suddenly. Isaac made his way around shaking the hands of the Members and Guests: Mr.

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down,” said Daniel. “That moment has arrived I prayed would never come,” said Threader. “I must get down on my knees and pray to Sir Isaac Newton for my life—or, barring that, an honorable death—or if that is not feasible, an expeditious.” “Then you admit collusion with coiners?” said Isaac

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Raleigh on the carpet in here. No books by living authors were in evidence. The coastlines on the globe were hopelessly out of fashion. Sir Isaac Newton did not have leisure to peruse this convex Artifact, however. He had been escorted to the library by young Johann von Hacklheber—a Leipziger baron

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no rhinestones. Johann von Hacklheber had already ducked out. Leibniz had the floor. “Your royal highness,” he said to the young woman, “this is Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac, it is my honor to present Her Royal Highness Caroline, Princess of Wales, Electoral Princess of Hanover, et cetera, et cetera.” “Stay! Do

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—as now, when I am expected to utter profundities on topics far afield from what I have chosen to study.” “So says the public Sir Isaac Newton,” said Daniel, “Author of Principia Mathematica, and Master of the Mint. But this is a private gathering, which might benefit from the participation of the

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the coronation, which I’m told is scheduled for the twentieth of October. Give us, then, say, a week for the festivities to subside…” “Sir Isaac Newton suggests Friday, the twenty-ninth.” “Worst possible day, I am afraid. That is a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. Impossible to move.” “Sir Isaac is aware

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Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.” “Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on

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silver-greyhound badges, and flung them on the cobbles, turned their backs, and walked away in the direction of Brass Mount, dividing to pass round Isaac Newton who was coming the other way. “My lord,” said Newton. “Sir Isaac,” said Lostwithiel, and doffed his hat. “I am pleased that his majesty has

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grumbled and closed them. The light waned as it was directed elsewhere. Jack opened his eyes full, and gazed up into the face of Sir Isaac Newton. The Gallows, Tower Hill DAWN, 22 OCTOBER 1714 WHEN IT GREW LIGHT enough for them to move around without having to tote flaming objects, four

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assets had been spent. And what hadn’t been spent had been seized, or otherwise put out of his reach, by his febrile Persecutor, Sir Isaac Newton. There was no fixed rent for the apartments of the Press-Yard and Castle. Rather, the Keeper applied a sliding scale, depending upon the Degree

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different Persons of Quality who spotted him and demanded to know how long he had been there. “HOW LONG HAVE YOU been here?” asked Sir Isaac Newton. The Templar-tomb was a bubble of warm, oily smoke, for many candles and lanthorns had been brought down. The steam pulsing from the nostrils

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Messengers, you may’ve noticed, keep looking to them for instructions. They have been communicating with semaphores. I think that one of them is Sir Isaac Newton.” This was altogether predictable, and yet it was enough to make Daniel turn around and brave the wind. In a few moments he had picked

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to be a long and eventful night at the College of Physicians; but at least Jack Shaftoe would get some privacy, and some sleep. Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s EVENING, THURSDAY, 28 OCTOBER 1714 “MR. THREADER,” the butler announced. Daniel looked up, and turned around. Mr. Threader stood

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in the laboratory doorway, hat in hand, decidedly cringing, looking about the room as if expecting Sir Isaac Newton to spring out from behind a glowing furnace and turn him into a newt. “He is not here,” Daniel said gently. “He is at his

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the Lords of the Council and the King’s Remembrancer), the Exchequer (which is playing host to the Trial), the Mint (today, synonymous with Sir Isaac Newton), and a medieval guild called the Company of Goldsmiths. In effect, what they are all here to do is to construct an airtight legal case

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trial plates, and all agree that the match is perfect. These are indeed the true plates made by the Goldsmiths as a challenge to Sir Isaac Newton; the Trial may proceed. Similar rites attend the box of weights. This is lined in green velvet, with neat depressions to contain the individual

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good or bad news to their fellow-Citizens. In recent centuries the presence of the City men has slowly dwindled, to the point where Sir Isaac Newton has felt moved to complain that Trials of the Pyx have become a shadowy rite conducted by a cabal or conspiracy of Goldsmiths, unobserved and

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perfectly still. Daniel need not check his pulse to be certain that what he is looking at, here, is the recently deceased corpse of Sir Isaac Newton, dead at age seventy-one of Newgate gaol-fever. The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison TEN MINUTES LATER they are down in the Press-Yard, just

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“Yes my lord, ’twas at that moment when the Mobb became most frenzickal, and rushed the Gallows to cut him down—” “Him, or his corpse?” Isaac Newton asks. “Colonel Barnes,” says Marlborough, “did they cut him down, or did they merely rush the gallows to cut him down? There is a difference

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LATER Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe 12 MARCH 1714 DAN A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell EARLY APRIL 1714 Bloomsbury HALF AN HOUR LATER “A Sir Isaac Newton’s House,St. Martin’s Street, London LATER Leicester House TEN SECONDS LATER The Kit-Cat Clubb THAT EVENING “I Crane Court, London 22 APRIL

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of London MIDDAY, TUESDAY, 26 OCTO The Temple of Vulcan WEDNESDAY, 27 OCTOBER 1714 Newgate Prison 28 OCTOBER 1714 …the Bell-man, who is Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s EVENING, THURSDAY Westminster Abbey MORNING Chapel of Newgate Prison IT IS A WHOLE new look for th New Palace

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI

by Edward Dolnick  · 8 Feb 2011  · 439pp  · 104,154 words

to a great extent those pioneering figures had been lone geniuses. With the rise of the Royal Society—and allowing for the colossal exception of Isaac Newton—the story of early science would have more to do with collaboration than with solitary contemplation. Newton did not attend the Society’s earliest meetings

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ears of a horse. Such monstrous prodigies are permitted by God to appear to mankind as harbingers of calamities.” The greatest scientists of the age, Isaac Newton chief among them, believed as fervently as everyone else that they lived in the shadow of the apocalypse. Every era lives with contradictions that it

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time when it would be safe to gather in groups again. In June 1665 plague struck Cambridge, and the university closed. A young student named Isaac Newton gathered up his books and retreated to his mother’s farm to think in solitude. Chapter Six Fire In the fateful year of 1666, a

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background note of sewage. Chronic pain was all but universal. Medicine was useless, or worse. Who could contemplate that chaos and see order? And yet Isaac Newton turned his attention to the heavens and described a cosmos as perfectly proportioned as a Greek temple. John Ray, the most eminent naturalist of the

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. The crucial differences lay deeper than any such roster of specifics can reveal. On even the broadest questions, our assumptions conflict with theirs. We honor Isaac Newton for his colossal contributions to science, for example, but he himself regarded science as only one of his interests and probably not the most important

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compact, elegant, and perfectly meshed with one another. “It is ye perfection of God’s works that they are all done with ye greatest simplicity,” Isaac Newton declared. “He is ye God of order and not of confusion.” The primary mission that seventeenth-century science set itself was to find His laws

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Hamlet and Paradise Lost, it was calculus that one distinguished historian proclaimed “by all odds the most truly revolutionary intellectual achievement of the seventeenth century.” Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus, independently, Newton on his mother’s farm and Leibniz in the glittering Paris of Louis XIV. Neither man ever suspected

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. (The spider, unfazed, “immediately ran out several times repeated.”) Spiders turned up more often than one might have expected. On a winter afternoon in 1672 Isaac Newton made his first formal presentation to the Society. (Reclusive as always, Newton stayed away while someone else read aloud a paper he had sent.) Newton

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displayed not backwardness and credulity but up-to-the-minute open-mindedness. John Locke, a philosopher of decidedly levelheaded views (and, incidentally, a friend of Isaac Newton), considered it likely that the seas contained mermaids. Learned journals in the second half of the seventeenth century published articles with titles that sound like

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gold and to convey immortality to anyone who drank it. A devout belief in alchemy was standard in the seventeenth century, but no one exceeded Isaac Newton in persistence. His small, crabbed handwriting fills notebook after notebook with the records of his alchemical experiments. In all Newton lavished some half million words

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is the sense in which the scientific revolution was indeed revolutionary. Nonetheless, even many who fought on the revolutionary side harbored doubts about the program. Isaac Newton, for one, recoiled at the thought of catering to ordinary, educated readers. He never revealed his writings on alchemy, and though he did publish his

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comet’s path. For each question, one winner, many losers. Rivals shouted insults at one another or fumed in silence. Feuds burned on for decades. Isaac Newton and John Flamsteed, the first royal astronomer, hated one another. Newton warred with Hooke, too, and Hooke despised Newton in return, as well as Christiaan

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Copernicus’s death, Galileo would face the threat of torture and then die under house arrest for arguing in favor of a sun-centered universe. (Isaac Newton was born in the year that Galileo died. That was coincidence, but in hindsight it seemed to presage England’s rise to scientific preeminence and

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the same observation about the independence of horizontal motion and vertical motion was a further surprise. Galileo might have found it, but he didn’t. Isaac Newton did. Imagine someone firing a gun horizontally, and at the same instant someone standing next to the shooter and dropping a bullet from the same

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Earth. Perhaps that was to be expected. What did falling rocks have to do with endlessly circling planets, which plainly were not falling at all? Isaac Newton’s answer to that question would make use of mathematical tools that Kepler and Galileo did not know. Both astronomers were geniuses, but everything they

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the infinite. Because the essential point is that infinity is not just a big number but something much, much more bizarre than that. Photographic Insert Isaac Newton was one of the greatest of all geniuses and one of the strangest men who ever lived. “The most fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper that

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the moon was not a perfect sphere, as everyone had believed, but was rough and pockmarked. Galileo painted these watercolors himself. The crucial belief of Isaac Newton and his fellow scientists was that God had designed the world on mathematical lines. All nature followed precise laws. The belief derived from the Greeks

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Halley (known today for Halley’s Comet) was a brilliant astronomer and, just as surprisingly, a man so congenial that he could get along with Isaac Newton. Halley took on the task of coaxing the reluctant, secretive Newton into publishing his masterpiece, Principia Mathematica. The 500-page book, in Latin and dense

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“On the other hand, a bullet comes close to a person if it gets within a few inches of him.” How close is close? Even Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, the boldest thinkers of their age and the leaders of the assault on infinity, found themselves tangled up in confusion and contradiction

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underpinnings of calculus were still cloaked in mystery. “Persist,” d’Alembert advised, “and faith will come to you.” Chapter Thirty-Eight The Miracle Years Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz had egos as colossal as their intellects. In the hunt for calculus, each man saw himself as a lone adventurer in unexplored

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the terrible burden which he would have to carry in the isolation it imposed for more than sixty years.” Chapter Thirty-Nine All Mystery Banished Isaac Newton believed that he had been tapped by God to decipher the workings of the universe. Gottfried Leibniz thought that Newton had set his sights too

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brightly lit stage, and trading ideas with England’s greatest thinkers. Georg Ludwig had a different vision. By the time of King George’s coronation, Isaac Newton had long since made his own dazzling ascent. In 1704, he had published his second great work, Opticks, on the properties of light. In 1705

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, the onetime farmboy had become Sir Isaac Newton, the first scientist ever knighted. (Queen Anne had performed the ceremony. Anne was no scholar—“When in good humour Queen Anne was meekly stupid, and

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Leibniz had fought to claim. Both men discovered calculus, but it was Newton who provided a stunning demonstration of what it could do. Until 1687, Isaac Newton had been known mainly, to those who knew him at all, as a brilliant mathematician who worked in self-imposed isolation. No recluse ever broke

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must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating. . . .” The story, which is the one thing everyone knows about Isaac Newton, may well be a myth.48 Despite his craving for privacy, Newton was acutely aware of his own legend, and he was not above adding

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had committed heresy. Both Leibniz and Newton believed in a clockwork universe, but now Leibniz invoked the familiar image to mock his old enemy. “Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his

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minutes, a metal spike had been driven through his tongue. Almost exactly a century later, in 1705, the queen of England bestowed a knighthood on Isaac Newton. Among the achievements that won Newton universal admiration was this: he had convinced the world of the doctrine that had cost Giordano Bruno his life

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13 “The trumpet would sound”: Perry Miller, “The End of the World,” p. 171. 14 “Books on the Second Coming”: Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 129. 14fn Christopher Wren’s father: Adrian Tinniswood, His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren, p. 17. 14 “great apostasy”: Richard Westfall

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suggests that she was probably around thirty when she married for the second time, three years after Isaac’s birth. See Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 24. 45 “When one . . . compares”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 45 Frederick the Great declared: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p

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of Nature, p. 241. 54 painstakingly dissected one witch’s: Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 644. 55 the “philosopher’s stone”: Christianson, Isaac Newton, p. 55. 55 some half million words: Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” p. 193. 55 Leibniz’s only fear: Stewart, The Courtier

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and the Heretic, p. 48. 55 “Whatever his aim”: Christianson, Isaac Newton, p. 55. 55 He never spoke of: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 298. 55 “the Green Lion”: William Newman, Indiana University historian of science, speaking

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Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke, by Stephen Inwood. 75 Newton’s aim was evidently: Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 145, and Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment, pp. 23–24. CHAPTER 13. A DOSE OF POISON 76 dissections had been performed: Terence Hawkes,

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shall not dare to think”: Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England, pp. 91–92. 84 “Should those Heroes go on”: Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 130, quoting Joseph Glanvill. Glanvill’s remark is from his Vanity of Dogmatizing, written in 1661. 86 Gimcrack studied the moon: Claude Lloyd, “Shadwell

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. 69. 116 “limbs with joints, veins in these limbs”: Nicolson, “The Microscope and English Imagination,” p. 210. 117 “Were men and beast made”: Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, p. 149, quoting a notebook entry of Newton’s headed “Of God.” 117 “large Hollows and Roughnesses”: Robert Hooke, Micrographia. See http

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s remark in his introduction to Voltaire’s Candide, trans. Lowell Blair (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 5. 128 “Some kinds of beasts”: Michael White, Isaac Newton, p. 149. 128 The world contained wood: Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 20. 128 Even if someone had conceived: Steve Jones, Darwin’s

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Prism and the Pendulum, p. 31. 188 “In performing the experiment”: Ibid., p. 32. 188 When television shows a diver: Barry Newman, “Now Diving: Sir Isaac Newton,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008. CHAPTER 32. A FLY ON THE WALL 190 “I sleep ten hours”: Alfred Hooper, Makers of Mathematics (Vintage, 1948

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reprinted as an appendix to Hall’s Philosophers at War. The quoted passage appears on p. 298. 270 It, too, was written: Charles C. Gillispie, “Isaac Newton,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1970–80), vol. 10. 270 “broke Leibniz’ heart”: William Whiston, Historical Memoirs of the Life and

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it”: Roche, “Newton’s Principia,” in Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be!, p. 58. 280 taverns with Peter the Great: Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 318. 280 he would invent a diving bell: Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998

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. 319 “The more I learned”: I interviewed Westfall in connection with an article marking the three hundredth anniversary of the Principia. See Edward Dolnick, “Sir Isaac Newton,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1987. Westfall used the same “wholly other” phrase in the preface to Never at Rest, p. x, where he discussed

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the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development. New York: Dover, 1949. Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Brooke, John. “The God of Isaac Newton.” In Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be! Brown, Gregory. “Personal, Political, and Philosophical Dimensions of the Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence.” in Paul Lodge, ed., Leibniz

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: Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004. Christianson, Gale. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New York: Free Press, 1984. ———. Isaac Newton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “Newton the Man—Again.” In Paul Scheurer and G. Debrock, eds., Newton’s Scientific and

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, 1964. Fauvel, John, Raymond Flood, Michael Shortland, and Robin Wilson, eds. Let Newton Be! New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Feingold, Mordechai. The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ferguson, Kitty. Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding

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Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Keynes, John Maynard. “Newton, the Man.” In Newman, ed., The World of Mathematics, vol. 1. Keynes, Milo. “The Personality of Isaac Newton.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 49, no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 1–56. Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New

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. 45–64. MacIntosh, J. J. “Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God’s Existence.” In Hunter, ed., Robert Boyle Reconsidered. Manuel, Frank. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1968. ———. The Changing of the Gods. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brown University Press, 1983. Mazur, Joseph. The Motion

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, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Weinberg, Steven. “Newton’s Dream.” In Stayer, ed., Newton’s Dream. Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. “Newton and the Scientific Revolution.” In Stayer, ed., Newton’s Dream. ———. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. Ann

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of a Mathematician.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 19, no. 1 (June 1964), pp. 53–62. ——— ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1, 1664–1666. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Wiener, Philip. “Leibniz’s Project of a Public Exhibition of Scientific Inventions.” Journal of the

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Greek original (marble) by Pinacoteca Capitolina, Palazzo Conservatori, Rome, Italy/Index/The Bridgeman Art Library. Page 14 Top: Public domain. Bottom: Telescope belonging to Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), 1671 by English School. Royal Society, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. Page 15 Top: Portrait of Edmond Halley, c.1687 (oil on

Coming of Age in the Milky Way

by Timothy Ferris  · 30 Jun 1988  · 661pp  · 169,298 words

of science in the Mediterranean. Thereafter, the great advances came in the north countries. The physics of the Copernican universe was to be elucidated by Isaac Newton, born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642, the year of Galileo’s death. * Ruled not by a feudal aristocracy but by a thriving merchant

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us continue to think in Newtonian terms, and Newton’s laws still work well enough to guide spacecraft to the moon and planets. (“I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now,” said astronaut Bill Anders, when asked by his son who was “driving” the Apollo 8 spacecraft carrying him

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’s accomplishment, hastened to Cambridge and urged him to write a book on gravitation and the dynamics of the solar system. Thus was born Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World—the Principia. Work on the book took over Newton’s life. “Now I

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the first cause? But to ask such questions is to leave science behind, and to enter precincts still ruled by Saint Augustine of Hippo and Isaac Newton the theologian. *Translation by Dave Fredrick. *I have tried this one myself and can testify that, like many of Newton’s inventions, it works very

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—an underestimate by some twenty times, but an enormous distance nonetheless. A somewhat more refined approach, proposed by James Gregory in 1668 and detailed by Isaac Newton in a draft of the Principia, was to use Saturn, the outermost known planet, as a sort of reflecting mirror to gauge the intensity of

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amateur astronomers before and since, he began by reading books of popular science. He was particularly impressed by James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles and Robert Smith’s A Compleat System of Opticks. Ferguson had begun his study of astronomy when as an uneducated shepherd boy he

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and pain that drove some to suicide.24 *Einstein shared this fate with Newton, whose ideas were routinely characterized as incomprehensible. A student who saw Isaac Newton passing in his carriage is said to have remarked, “There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.” *I

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Noteworthy Events: Transit of Venus observed by two English amateur astronomers. Time: 1662 Noteworthy Events: Royal Society chartered in London. Time: 1665–1666 Noteworthy Events: Isaac Newton, age twenty-three, home from college, realizes that gravitational force obeying an inverse-square law would account alike for falling bodies on earth and the

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: 1675 Noteworthy Events: Olaus Römer determines, from studying the satellites of Jupiter, that light has a finite velocity. Time: 1684 Noteworthy Events: Edmond Halley visits Isaac Newton at Trinity College, resurrects line of research that leads Newton to write the Principia. Time: 1686 Noteworthy Events: Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la

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., p. 245. 10. In Spinoza, 1928, p. 80. 11. In Jones, 1981, p. 197. 12. Descartes, Geometry, p. 353. 13. William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, in Cohen, I. Bernard, 1971, p. 301. 14. In Manuel, pp. 27–28. 15. In Westfall, p. 141. 16. Ibid., p. 405. 17

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.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Broad, C.D. Leibniz: An Introduction. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. —————. Scientific Thought. Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, 1959. Brodetsky, S. Sir Isaac Newton. London: Methuen, 1927. Bronowski, Jacob. The Ascent of Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. —————. The Common Sense of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. —————. The

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.M. Karade. On Relativity Theory. Singapore: World Scientific, 1984. Proceedings of an Arthur Eddington centenary symposium. Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New York: Free Press, 1984. Cicero. De Fato, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Timeless critique of philosophical issues

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Determination of the Velocity of Light. New York: The Burndy Library, 1944. —————, ed. Introduction to Newton’s “Principia.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. —————, ed. Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. Cohen, Morris, and Ernest Nagel. An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method

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Robert Shapiro. Life Beyond Earth: An Intelligent Earthling’s Guide to Life in the Universe. New York: Morrow, 1980. Ferguson, James. Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, 2nd ed. London: self-published, 1757. Popularization that helped kindle William Herschel’s passion for astronomy. Ferguson, Wallace, et al. The Renaissance: Six

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and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. —————. Newtonian Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. —————, and I. Bernard Cohen, eds. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Krauss, Lawrence M. Quintessence: The Mystery of Missing Mass in the Universe. New York

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. Introduction to fractal geometry, by its founder. Manier, E. The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle. Boston: Reidel, 1978. Manuel, Frank E. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Washington, D.C.: New Republic, 1968. Psychological study. Marchant, James. Alfred Russel Wallace: Utters and Reminiscences. 2 vols. London: Cassel & Co., 1916. Marques, A.H

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of Birr Castle. London: Mitchell, 1971. Moore, Ruth. Niels Bohr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Accessible biography of the leading quantum physicist. More, L.T. Isaac Newton: A Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1934. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942; Boston

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York: 1975. Newman; James R., ed. The World of Mathematics. 4 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956. Standard reference work. Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling. London: Cambridge University Press, 1959. —————. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Florian

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and Destiny of Man. New York: Scribner’s, 1945. Nisbet, Robert. History of the Idea of Progress. New York: Basic Books, 1980. North, J.D. Isaac Newton. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. —————. The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Nunis, Doyce, ed. The 1769

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: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Vlastos, Gregory. Plato’s Universe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975. Plato’s cosmological ideas. Voltaire. The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, trans. John Hanna. London: Cass, 1738. Voltaire’s popular exposition of Newton’s theories. —————. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctoral Regions of

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theory. Wess, Julius, and Jonathan Bagger. Supersymmetry and Supergravity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. London: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Standard biography. Weyl, Hermann. Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. New York: Atheneum, 1963. —————. Space Time Matter. New York: Dover

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

by Joel Mokyr  · 8 Jan 2016  · 687pp  · 189,243 words

Entrepreneurs and Economic Change, 1500–1700 Chapter 6: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Choice-based Cultural Evolution 59 Chapter 7: Francis Bacon, Cultural Entrepreneur 70 Chapter 8: Isaac Newton, Cultural Entrepreneur 99 Part III: Innovation, Competition, and Pluralism in Europe, 1500–1700 Chapter 9: Cultural Choice in Action: Human Capital and Religion 119 Chapter

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for the rise of the Industrial Enlightenment and eventually the emergence of useful knowledge as the main engine of modern economic growth—Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. It should be made clear, however, that between 1500 and 1700, the European intellectual scene included other remarkable individuals, who dramatically changed the cultural menu

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, such as German Calvinism, and also helped introduce the new chemistry of van Helmont and the metaphysics of Descartes into the Cambridge of the young Isaac Newton (Greengrass, Leslie, and Raylor, 1994, p. 18). Hartlib and Dury were far from alone. Theodore Haak (1605–1690), another German immigrant, was one of the

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interesting; but we do not find the bright flashes of genius that we expected.” See Hegel ([1805-1806] 1892-1896, p. 172-74). Chapter 8 Isaac Newton, Cultural Entrepreneur Newton’s role as a cultural entrepreneur was quite different from Bacon’s. If Bacon’s messages about knowledge-based progress were in

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which Life and Health do flow are the necessary consequences of its Oeconomy. … This Oeconomy depends on attractive power first discovered by the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton” (Keill, 1708, pp. v–vi, 8). 6 Boerhaave serves as another classic example of the kind of epigone that is instrumental in disseminating the ideas

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Enlightenment, not only in his own country but throughout Europe. 7 In his History of Astronomy, Smith wrote that “Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis …His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a

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lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” Instead it reads (in Latin) “here lies that which was mortal of Isaac Newton.” 25 “Yet the incomparable Mr. Newton has shown how far mathematics, applied to some part of nature, may, upon principles that matters of fact justify

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and occult powers was widely shared in early modern Europe among learned people, from the Neapolitan philosopher and experimentalist Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) to Isaac Newton himself.48 Subsequent generations, embarrassed by what they regarded to be the superstitions of their predecessors, tried to minimize this element: intellectual history, too, is

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). All the same, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the occultist tradition had lost its intellectual respectability and contemporaries, much as they adulated Isaac Newton, avoided mentioning his occultist interests (Copenhaver, 1978, p. 34). The market for ideas was the arena in which philosophical doctrines battled one another for acceptance

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are the standard of this literature, has shown how “Puritan science” transformed itself into “Anglican science” during the restoration, reaching maturity in the science of Isaac Newton (Jacob, 1997, pp. 60–61). Regardless of whether it wholly overlapped with Puritans beliefs, the cultural change in Britain that traced the influence of Bacon

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equally unattractive. As so often happens with intellectual disputes, the exact lines between the two camps are not always easy to draw. In some ways Isaac Newton, the arch-hero of the modern camp, ironically belonged more to the ancients than to the moderns. He believed (expressed in a set of propositions

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poor Philosophers … with regard to the Knowledge of Nature, the thing is too notorious to admit of any Dispute at all. The discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton … amount to a hundred times more than what all the antient Philosophers knew put together” (Clark, 1731, p. 47). Similarly, Richard Helsham, who held the

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competitive process compared the logic and evidence, and the various biases of cultural evolution ended up settling on certain paradigmatic beliefs, coordinated on key players. Isaac Newton played exactly that role, as did Paracelsus, Vesalius, Descartes, Galileo, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Einstein and numerous others. What made such successful entrepreneurs possible was that

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University Press. Algar, Hamid. 1973. Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Algarotti, Francesco. 1739. Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies. In Six Dialogues on Light and Colours. London: Printed for E. Cave. Allen, Robert C

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. 2003. “Jesuits: Savants.” In Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–45. ———. 2004. The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “The War on Newton.” Isis Vol. 1010, No. 1, pp. 175–86. Fernández

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the Antients and Moderns. Written by the Same Author. London: Printed for J. Darby. ———. [1727] 1728. “Éloge de M. Neuton.” In The Life of Sir Isaac Newton, London: printed for James Woodman, pp. 1–23. Fowler, James and Darren Schreiber. 2008. “Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature.” Science, Vol

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Modern Science. Cambridge: Icon Books. ———. 2008. The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, third ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hetherington, Norriss S. 1983. “Isaac Newton’s Influence on Adam Smith’s Natural Laws in Economics.” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 497–505. Hilaire-Pérez

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Charters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. [1837]. 1983. “Lord Bacon,” Edinburgh Review, repr. ed., Kessinger Publishing. Maclaurin, Colin. 1750. An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, in four books. second ed. London: printed for A. Millar. MacFarlane, Alan. 1978. The Origins of English Individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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: Oxford University Press. de Mandeville, Bernard [1724] 1755. The Fable of the Bees. ninth ed. Edinburgh: W. Gray and W. Peter. Manuel, Frank E. 1963. Isaac Newton: Historian. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Margóczy, Daniel. 2014a. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago

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Vol. 72, No. 4, pp. 1189–98. ’s Gravesande, Willem Jacob. 1720. Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy Confirmed by Experiments, Or an Introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. London: J. Sene and W. Taylor. Shank, J. B. 2004. “The Abbé Saint-Pierre and the ‘Quantifying Spirit’ in French Enlightenment Thought.” In

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Dynastic Decline: The Principal-Agent Problem in Late Imperial China 1700-1850.” Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 54, pp. 107–27. Snobelen, Stephen D. 1999. “Isaac Newton, Heretic: the Strategies of a Nicodemite.” British Journal for the History of Science Vol. 32, pp. 381–419. ———. 2012. “The Myth of the Clockwork Universe

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Letters Concerning the English Nation, edited by John Leigh, translated by Prudence L. Steiner. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. ———. 1738. The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, translated from the French, revised and corrected by John Hanna. London: Printed for Stephen Austen. ———. [1751] 1785. Siècle de Louis XIV. In Oeuvres

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of Academies. London: Giles Calvert. Wesson, Robert. 1991. Beyond Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Westfall, Richard S. 1980. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985. “Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope.” Isis Vol. 76, No. 1 (March), pp. 11–30. ———. 1986. “The Rise of

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of Science with Theology. New York: D. Appleton and Company. White, Lynn. 1978. Medieval Religion and Technology. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Michael. 1997. Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer. New York: Helix Books. Wigelsworth, Jeffrey R. 2003. “Competing to Popularize Newtonian Philosophy: John Theophilus Desaguliers and the Preservation of Reputation.” Isis

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, 300 see also civil service examinations exceptionalism, cultural, 243 experimental data as rhetorical tool, 217 validity of, 190 experimental method, 73, 76, 190, 213 and Isaac Newton, 104 in Bacon’s thought, 76 experimental methodology, 231 experimental philosophy, 228 experimentation, and content bias, 212 expertise, 218 demand for, 109 experts, 217 eyeglasses

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham

by Joe Carlen  · 14 Apr 2012  · 398pp  · 111,333 words

of bacterial meningitis reveal that the mortality rate was 98.7 percent for one and 100 percent for the other.30) Tragically, not only did Isaac Newton Graham pass away just days before his ninth birthday, but, as the infection consumed and debilitated him in progressive stages, the last weeks of his

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kept by Malou) before he was cremated. Graham's remains were sent back to America, where they were buried beside his “sweetest, bravest, most beloved” Isaac Newton Graham (or Newton I) in a Jewish cemetery north of New York City. (Newton II is interred in the Graham family plot in the same

The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes  · 15 Jan 2008  · 778pp  · 227,196 words

one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely

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him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage

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elegant and bantering way. Man fell with apples, and with apples rose, If this be true; for we must deem the mode In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road, A thing to counterbalance human woes: For ever since immortal man hath glow’d With

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Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind…that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir

…

Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton…Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy Looker-on on an

…

. 6 Other important things had been stirring in the world of science writing. David Brewster had begun to work on the first ever biography of Isaac Newton, designed not only to explain the work, but to draw an analytical portrait (within certain limits of propriety) of the great man’s mind and

…

Hall (1848), where it lies on the drawing-room table like a guarantee of serious intent in the household. David Brewster’s Life of Sir Isaac Newton, the first ever major scientific biography in Britain, was also issued in Murray’s Family Library in 1831. It deliberately set out to hold up

…

Stars’ chapter of Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), which ends with a long quotation from James Thomson’s poem ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727). ♣ Goethe’s Treatise on Colour (1810), which criticised Newton’s ‘mechanical’ analysis of the rainbow spectrum, remained a totem of German Naturphilosophie, though it

…

John Herschel. His researches included work on polarised light and lighthouse lenses, and he invented the kaleidoscope. He wrote an influential first biography of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), eventually expanded through several editions (1860). (See Chapter 10) COMTE DE BUFFON (GEORGES-LOUIS LECLERC), 1707-88. French geologist and naturalist who developed early

…

-31, following the crisis caused by Davy’s resignation. WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1749-1832. German heavyweight boxer, went ten rounds with the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, referees still out. (See Chapters 7-10 passim) LUKE HOWARD, 1772-1864. The first British meteorologist and student of clouds and weather phenomena. Gave his

…

and Peter Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era, CUP, 2004 John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment, CUP, 1994 James Gleick, Isaac Newton, Pantheon Books, 2003 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies (edited by Douglas Miller), Suhrkamp edition of Goethe’s Works, vol 12, New York, 1988 Jan

…

Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, CUP, 1990 Sorcerer and Apprentice; and Young Scientists Charles Babbage, The Decline of Science in England, 1830 David Brewster, Life of Isaac Newton, Murray’s Family Library, 1831 The British Association for the Advancement of Science: Early Correspondence, edited by Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, The Camden Society

…

.c.585.1); also WH Chronicle, pp42-3 61 WH Papers 1, ppxx-xxi 62 Armitage, p22 63 Crowe, 1986, pp124-9 64 James Gleick, Isaac Newton, 2003 65 Derek Howse, Nevil Maskelyne, 1989, pp70-1 66 Howse, pp66-72 67 Michael Hoskin, The Herschel Partnership, p21 68 CHM, pp22-3 69

…

’. The usage is nonetheless dated to Herschel 1802 by the OED. 135 Thomas Campbell quoted in WH Chronicle, p335 136 David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton, 1831 Chapter 5: Mungo Park in Africa 1 Sir Harold Carter, Sir Joseph Banks 1743-1820, British Museum, Natural History, 1988, p425; and Gascoigne, Banks

…

, 3, 4n, 11, 46n, 461 Bourgeois, David, 132 Brahe, Tycho, 171 Brett, Elizabeth, 139 Brewster, Sir David, 399, 437, 445, 447, 460; Life of Sir Isaac Newton, 454-6 Bridgewater, Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of, 451 Bristol: Davy in, 256; Davy leaves for London, 285; see also Pneumatic Institute Bristol Mirror

…

, 316 Thénard, Louis-Jacques, 297 Thompson, Benjamin see Rumford, Count Thompson, John, 40 Thomson, James: The Seasons, 171, 172n, 243; ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’, 440n Thornton, Dr Robert, 11, 41-2 Thrale, Susannah, 114 Ticknor, George, 359-60 Tierra del Fuego, 13, 15 Timbuctoo, 212, 215-16, 218, 220

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