Isaac Newton, by James Gleick

James Gleick’s Isaac Newton is both the history of a man as well as of a set of ideas. Gleick is a science writer whose other books include a study of chaos, the accelerating pace of life, and a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. My interest in Einstein and relativistic physics directed me to this book. I’ve read a lot about Einstein and therefore became interested in reading about this famous predecessor. The common notion is that Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics. Such is not the case, at least according to Gleick, who sees Einstein’s theory of relativity as supplementing and building on Newtonian concepts rather than replacing them.

Gleick shows how Newton’s ideas, especially his study of light, optics, and the planetary laws of the universe, were built on the work and ideas of those who preceded him. He also shows how Newton conceived of these laws through mathematics and reason and perhaps intuition as well. Above all else, Gleick shows how Newton really was a monumental genius, one of the great thinkers of civilization, of a sort that comes along only every millennium or so. I found especially fascinating Gleick’s descriptions of the scientific community in Newton’s time, especially the incipient Royal Society of Sciences, which Newton served as president from 1703 to his death. Newton’s rivalry with Robert Hooke, who preceded him as president of the Society, is a theme that runs through much of the book. At times, however, Gleick does not write clearly about the scientific principles and discoveries for which Newton is famous. Some portions of the book are slow-going as a result.

The fact of Newton’s genius, and of his theories and discoveries, naturally leads me, a humanist, to a desire for more information about Isaac Newton the human being, the man. Gleick offers some satisfaction on this score, though ultimately I want more than he gives. Newton was a great genius who devoted himself to science with monastic dedication. He kept journals in which he recorded his theories and his own self-criticisms. In one journal entry he worries that he is not pure because he has unchaste thoughts. (Newton never married). He wrote extensively about religion and was a passionate alchemist. He was a man of great vanity and ego who wrote glowing anonymous reviews of his own work. As warden of the Royal Mint, a post to which he was appointed late in life, he diligently pursued counterfeiters and saw them condemned to death.

Gleick effectively shows why Newton’s simultaneous interests in science, religion, and alchemy were, for the times in which he lived, not contradictory at all. Yet he leaves much unanswered about Newton the human being, the cipher who remains one of the great scientists who ever lived.