Looking back from our times, one of the most amazing aspects of the book was the way that Newton hoarded his discoveries. If you are involved in academia today, you know that there is a "publish or perish" mentality that forces you get your work in front of the public. That wasn't the case in Newton's time. He passed on some of his discoveries piecemeal, and intended to keep others secret. Unfortunately, this led to some nasty public disputes about plagiarism, most notably with Robert Hooke of the Royal Society in London, and later with Leibniz over who had discovered the calculus (it appears they did it independently, but Leibniz published while Newton at first didn't.) His own writings ended up in the possession of various noble families, and there wasn't a real effort to collect them until the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes started doing it in the 1930's.
By the way, the scoop on the apple is this — his boyhood home was surrounded by orchards, and he told at least four different people the story of the apple. One of those people was his niece, who told it to Voltaire (a fan of Newton) who did much to publicize it. However, Newton never writes about the apple story himself.
Those of you who have read other books by James Gleick know that he can write about complicated subjects (chaos theory) and scientists (Richard Feynman) and can do it well. If you are interested in the history of science, or in reading about the great minds of history, or you just want to find out about the person who helped make you suffer through calculus class in college, then you should be interested in this book.
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