Ask most people about Isaac Newton, and they will think of the story about the apple and "discovering gravity." That is just a gloss on the real story of Newton, who author James Gleick describes as
"..chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws."
This brief book (191 pages of text, along with substantial notes and bibliography) sketches how Newton lived, a mostly solitary life in which he moved barely over 150 miles from his birth in Lincolnshire in 1643, to Cambridge, and eventually to London. More important, however, was in describing how Newton thought, and how that thinking fit in to the world. Science thought had stagnated for centuries, since Aristotle, until a burst of scientific creativity finally decided that maybe Aristotle didn't have the last word after all. Newton himself said that he saw farther because he was standing on the shoulders of genius, referring to the scientific revolution that saw Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton in rapid succession. (Galileo died the year Newton was born.)
While his Principia Mathematica codified his laws of motion, his theory of gravity, and the calculus, his life's work actually had a larger scope. He also did important work on optics, wrote secretly on theology (it's a good thing it was secret, since his writings verged towards Arianism, which would have proved a conflict with his position as a Fellow of Trinity College) and also dabbled in alchemy (since he died, it appears he never developed the Sorcerer's Stone). Eventually his fame led to his appointment as Warden and then Master of the Mint, where he spent the last part of his life cracking down on counterfeiters.
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