There are a couple of books I’ve been working on for a while – they’re the kinds of books it seems okay to just dip into, put down for a while, and pick back up again.
One of these books is Isaac Newton
What a fascinating man. I knew nothing about Newton the person – just knew his laws of motion, and the apple falling, and all that stuff that everybody knows. I know him because of the biographies I’ve read of Einstein and all the quantum physics shit I struggle through. Newton, of course, is a major player in all of that.
But here’s some more about him from the biography:
Solitude was the essential part of his genius. As a youth he assimilated or rediscovered most of the mathematics known to humankind and then invented the calculus — the machinery by which the modern world understands change and flow — but kept this treasure to himself. He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself to the most secret of sciences, alchemy. He feared the light of exposure, shrank from criticism and controversy, and seldom published his work at all. Striving to decipher the riddles of the universe, he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw them encoded. He stood aloof from other philosophers even after becoming a national icon — Sir Isaac, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society, his likeness engraved on medals, his discoveries exalted in verse.
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” he said before he died, “but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Einsten wrote:
Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science! Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.
There are many things that do not knock me flat on my ass anymore … no matter how amazing the fact of them … they no longer have the power to stun me into total stillness.
There are many things that I am “over”.
Isaac Newton ain’t one of them.
That quote from Newton is one of my all-time favorites and I share your feelings for it.
The same great man was able to gently chide his pet dog who destroyed some great work or other – “O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief done”
graboy – ohhh. I love that!
I don’t know if I agree about the “shying away from controversy” bit – Newton could be a world class peckerwood when it came to critiquing other people’s work – it was controversy about his own that he avoided. Huygens was more right than Newton ever admitted to other people.
I’ve seen some people speculate that he had Asperger’s, but I think you can take a sensitive genius, add a lot of teasing in childhood, throw in a superiority complex built up by showing up one’s supposed teachers, and mix in a little bit of paranoia about possibly being wrong about something major that all true scientists must have, and voila – you have the Academic perckerwood personality as prototyped by Newton – all without resorting to mental disorders.
But he wasn’t alwyas a peckerwood – I used this quote:
“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
in the Forward to my thesis.
that’s one of my favorite quotes of all time.
and yeah – I’m not too wacky about the whole diagnose-someone-with-a-mental-disorder after the fact. I think people are still threatened by “unexplainable” genius. They need to EXPLAIN it.
I see actors do it too. They diagnose Lady Macbeth with a borderline personality – yadda yadda – They play the diagnosis as opposed to playing the character – and in doing so, they miss the SCOPE of what Shakespeare wrote.
I don’t buy into the mental-disorder to ‘explain’ Newton’s genius.. but he could indeed be a complete peckerwood.
There is though an interesting shift, between his time spent at Cambridge when he did most of his thorough investigations into various subjects.. including the alchemical studies and the less-well-known work on prophesies and researching biblical texts.. and his later career in the Royal Mint and the Royal Society where he was able to use his administrative abilities to full effect.
The supposed isolated genius became quite the establishment figure in his own lifetime. And that isolation seems mostly a later construction to me.. he was in regular disputes with other notable natural philosophers in his day – although often stopping contact when he felt like it.. and in correspondence with people like Locke when he started to emerge onto the London scene. There are though references in letters from Newton to Locke where he apologises, for example, of “Being of opinion that you [Locke] endeavoured to embroil me[Isaac] with women and by other means I was so much affected with it that when one told me you were sickly and would not live I answered twere better if you were dead” – that more than hint at occasional bouts of paranoia.
I can also recommend Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest, Sheila, or rather his later revised version The Life of Isaac Newton – which focuses less on the technical aspects, it’s the one I picked up – It’s well worth reading.
“Blast! I fold!” — Sir Isaac Newton, possibly apocryphal
You have to hand it to the guy. He saw the problems and the math, knew there had to be more, so he went out and invented it. In his way he was the DaVinci of physics.
Nightfly,
there’s a quote at the beginning of James Gleick’s biography, from John Conduitt, Newton’s nephew by marriage, referring to his reflecting telescope –
“I asked him where he had made it, he said he made it himself, & when I asked him where he got his tools said he made them himself & laughing added if I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me, I had never made anything..”