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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In his fascinating biography of the strange, secretive Isaac Newton, author James Gleick attempts to understand the father of physics' genius -- and comes up with a mystery.
Jun 4, 2003 | In the introduction to his new biography of Isaac Newton, James Gleick writes that Newton discovered "more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after," a fact which gets one wondering why all that most of us ever learn about the man is the story about the falling apple. You've probably heard the tale; Newton, sitting in his garden one day, sees an apple fall from a tree, and the sight -- for some reason -- inspires him to create a new science of motion. He discovers gravity, draws up three laws of physics, and, in a move whose service to humanity is still questioned by English majors, invents calculus.
The apple story has become a useful shorthand for Newton's work, but, as Gleick points out, it has a few flaws. One, the whole thing probably didn't happen. "Newton did not need an apple to remind him that objects fell to earth," Gleick writes -- Galileo had already shown that. But the bigger problem with the tale is that it condenses Newton's lifelong study of motion into a single Eureka moment, an instant in which he, for reasons that are essentially unexplainable, just Thinks Different. In school, I remember, one science teacher's entire lesson on physics consisted of an animated video that pictured Newton as a well-meaning Mr. Magoo-type, a guy who went around in a fog and, as objects presented themselves, intuited the physics behind them. The scene on inertia has him squashed by a runaway boulder. In the apple story the poor animated Newton isn't even given the dignity of having the apple inspire him into scientific discovery; instead, the apple beans him on the head, and it's in the concussion that follows that he determines the mysteries of the universe.
Of course, much in the history of science has been chopped up and boiled down for public consumption, and accuracy is often a casualty. (According to a forthcoming book, Ben Franklin might never have flown his famous kite.) But in Newton's case the history seems murkier than usual -- and after reading Gleick's "Isaac Newton" it's plain why.
Isaac Newton was a strange man, as secretive and selfish and socially inept as he was brilliant, and Gleick's account of his discoveries complicates, instead of clarifies, his greatness. The years Newton lived, 1642 to 1727, were a time of revolution in the world of science, a shift from an era of untested conjecture to one in which empirical evidence and peer review would become necessary for the validation of new theories. Newton's work completed that revolution, but the man seemed caught in it. He was perhaps the first modern scientist, rigorous and analytical, yet he was also a closet alchemist, one who saw spirits in physical matter, who believed chemicals might breathe, that they could die. He was fiercely pious, and intent on bringing to religion the same precision he was bringing to science -- for example, by questioning the mathematical logic of the Holy Trinity. His obsessions, his secrets, his suspicions, his "incessant lonely contemplation" -- they all make for a frustratingly opaque genius. Gleick tries valiantly to work through Newton's leaps, but it remains quite unclear what compelled Newton's curiosity and sparked his peculiar insights. By the end of Gleick's book, the simple story of Newton and that falling apple -- a story of unaccountable, inexplicable genius -- seems as good a way as any to describe this odd man.
At just under two hundred pages, Gleick's book is a slender, thoroughly researched account of Newton's life, written in a spare, sometimes lyrical prose-style that contrasts sharply with Gleick's other work (he was written, among other books, "Chaos," a fascinating history of chaos theory, and "Genius," a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman). Because Newton did not have much of a personal life -- "In the course of such a long life he had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman," Voltaire said of Newton -- Gleick concerns himself mainly with Newton's work, which was then called not science but philosophy.
Newton began philosophy early, and he worked constantly, never quitting. In his youth, he pursued a serious, backyard study of nature, of colors made by crushed berries, of light, of sundials, of the fundamental nature of motion and time. By his mid-20s, he'd burrowed deep into the ancients' study of mathematics and then surpassed it. In secret, he compiled perhaps more mathematical knowledge than anyone who had ever lived, inventing new notions of what math did at its extremes -- at the infinite and the infinitesimal. He wondered, too, about the transition between perception and reality: Was light created within your eyes, or outside them? "With this paradox in mind," Gleick writes, "Newton, experimental philosopher, slid a bodkin into his eye socket between eyeball and bone," and in the white circles he saw he sought to find the mysteries of light.
