James Gleick

This review is based on the Blinkist version of the book...thus a summary and my review needs to be qualified as such. Presumably the original full text has much more details and research.....but it also takes much longer to read. If I like the Blinkist version, I might seek out and read the full book. Meantime here are a few nuggets that particularly struck me: Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in a modest English farmstead in Woolsthorpe, in the county of Lincolnshire. Newton's father, a man who’d never learned to read or write, died before he was born. England in the 1640s was in a state of chaos. The English Civil War was in full swing, As a child, Newton was especially interested in the movements of the sun. By using a string, he measured how the sun traverses across the sky and even sketched three-dimensional sundials and other geometric figures. He noted too that the moon’s movements were similar to those of the sun.
He went to school in nearby Grantham.....In arithmetic class, he learned how to measure areas and shapes, and methods for surveying land. Soon enough, he put this knowledge to use by creating lanterns, watermills and windmills at home......[Seems that Newton had a fairly difficult start without a dad and my recollection is that his mother re-married and didn’t have a whole lot of time for Isaac].....But thanks to the support of his schoolmaster at Grantham, as well as his uncle, a respected churchman, Isaac Newton was found a place at Cambridge University. In June 1661, Newton matriculated at Trinity College, which is widely considered the best of Cambridge University’s sixteen colleges. [We should all probably thank that schoolmaster who had the foresight to support Isaac]
The works of Greek philosopher Aristotle formed the basis of the curriculum, especially his theories concerning substances, form, time and motion. But more modern scientific ideas, like those of the Italian astronomer Galileo, were not ignored.........Just as an object could be in motion if it was pushed or pulled, a once-fresh apple in the process of rotting was also thought to be in motion. Equally, a stone being sculpted into a statue was also considered to be in motion. [Interesting concepts....I was not aware of this before]. However, it was Galileo–who, incidentally, died in 1642, the same year Newton was born–who first argued that motion should only be a state and not a process.
Accurate clocks became more available during the course of Newton’s education. This meant that time could be more practically measured and, consequently, time-based experiments could be conducted more easily and more rigorously. And Newton worked well by himself. Proof of this came in 1664. That year the outbreak of plague was so severe that Cambridge University was forced to close its doors. Newton returned home and continued his research with fervour. His experiments focused on optics, light and colour. He also began his revolutionary work in applying mathematics to questions of motion. Over dozens of pages, Newton sought “to resolve problems by motion.” It became increasingly clear to Newton that everything was in motion. In other words, everything was in "flux." By the time the plague had dissipated and Cambridge University had recommenced its teaching, Newton had already put the major pieces in place for a full theory concerning the science of motion.......This included thoughts on the nature of gravity and its effect on objects in motion.
The apocryphal story goes that Newton was inspired when he saw an apple fall from a tree. But, in reality, the process of discovery involved dropping objects, rolling them down slopes and recording his observations.
In October 1667, the year he returned to Cambridge, Newton was summoned by his mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, who asked the 24-year-old to help him prepare his lectures. Before too long, Newton was himself giving lectures. By the end of 1669, Barrow vacated the highly-respected Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, which was awarded to Newton soon after....Newton now had his own laboratory at Trinity. [Aged only 27] Before his twenties were over, Newton had engineered a prototype for the first reflecting telescope.
Before too long, the Royal Society, the foremost scientific institution in Britain, got wind of Newton’s invention and he was invited to publish his work on light and colour in 1672...Based on these results, Newton posited that light was made up of particles.
The paper ruffled a fair few feathers at the Royal Society. In fact, one of its members, Robert Hooke, was especially aggrieved and became a lifelong critic of Newton’s work.
Once he’d got over a sulk that lasted for months, Newton went on the attack. He laid into Hooke, and defended the robust mathematical proof of his work.......There’s a good argument that Hooke’s hostility was actually beneficial. It certainly pushed Newton to go further in some fields than he might otherwise have gone....Most importantly, Hooke’s constant pressure on Newton to produce mathematical proof meant that Newton worked harder and more diligently on the fundamentals of his theories. His work on the Earth’s orbit is a key example of this method. The end result was the landmark 1684 paper, “On the Motion of Bodies in Orbit.”.....Counterbalancing Hooke’s skepticism, Newton also had a staunch supporter, a man named Edmond Halley. Halley was able to support Newton financially in the publication of his first book in 1686, arguably the most important book ever published on mathematics–the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.....This book contains Newton’s three fundamental laws, which are still taught to children the world over to this day. Newton’s first law states that bodies in motion stay in motion unless met with resistance; his second, that force generates motion. The final law famously declares that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
His great rival Robert Hooke died in 1703, and Newton soon took over as the head of the Royal Society. In part, it was because of Newton’s efforts that the Society ceased to concern itself with mysticism and the occult, instead, turning its focus to proving nature’s laws through mathematics.....However, Newton’s presidency of the Royal Society meant he had less to fear from such naysayers. His new post lent him a greater authority and he became less worried about detractors. Britain was no longer ruled by a Catholic monarch whose church regarded Newton’s work as borderline blasphemous. What’s more, his work was being received well and widely across Europe thanks to advances in publishing. The might of new printing presses had won Newton an international audience.
Around this time, Newton added another feather to his cap. He was appointed the head of the Royal Mint. In other words, he was in charge of England’s currency......A sound and functioning currency was an important component in this new world of political arithmetic.
The job was prestigious and well remunerated. It even came with a certain amount of international celebrity. At last, Newton’s respectability was beyond question. People were finally listening to him and taking his ideas seriously.
The death of Robert Hooke had relieved Newton of his greatest critic, but he still kept on attracting controversy. Most famously, he squared off against the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Each claimed to have been the inventor of calculus and that the other had copied his own work.....What really complicated the issue, though, was that Newton’s claims were based on work that he had produced but not published....Finally, John Wallis, one of Newton’s fellow mathematicians at Cambridge, implored Newton to release some ground-breaking work he’d been holding onto since the 1660s.....Unsurprisingly, Newton was using his full institutional power to attempt to disprove Leibniz’s accusations and demonstrate that he was no thief. In spite of Newton’s efforts, his rivalry with Leibnitz showed no sign of abating........The German also scoffed at Newton’s belief that the laws of attraction obtain even in the vacuum of space. The rivalry remained on Leibnitz’s mind to the bitter end......As he neared his death in 1716, he wrote to a friend, “Adieu the vacuum, the atoms, and the whole philosophy of M. Newton.”.....Newton died a superstar on March 31, 1727. He’d been knighted and was even buried at Westminster Abbey, in London, alongside many of Britain’s monarchs. Though he’d been in great agony, suffering from a kidney stone, the story goes that he never cried out or complained.
For poets like William Blake, Newton had turned the world into a “dull catalog of common things.”
According to one of Newton’s theories, the Earth bulged at the equator, due to gravity and the Earth’s movement. And this was proved by a ten-year-long French expedition in 1733. What’s more, when Albert Einstein led the way for the next wave of advances in physics in the twentieth century, he did so on a foundation of Newtonian physics.
When volumes of Newton’s research were discovered in the 1930s after a distant relative's estate sale, it came to light that Newton had been practicing alchemy–the less scientific precursor to chemistry–for his entire life. In other words, he’dbeen obsessed with the occult. Clearly, Newton was not merely the purveyor of cold rationalism as depicted by the Romantics.
The key message: Isaac Newton is one of the most influential people who ever lived. By relying on mathematical proof, he forever changed the way we test observations and deduce the workings of the world. Part of Newton’s influence is attributable to the fact that he lived during the Enlightenment, a time in history when much of the world was leaving behind superstition and belief in magic. His math-based methodology, as well as the scale of his fundamental discoveries, set the standard for scientific inquiry for generations to come.
My take on the book: Good though I probably knew most of it. Still a few new things there for me. Four stars from me.… (altro)