![]() When Isaac was 10 his mother returned to Woolsthorpe, bringing three new children from her second marriage. He was lonely, unhappy, given to impotent rages in which he threatened to burn the house down on the heads of his absent mother and his stepfather, the wealthy rector Barnabas Smith, whom he hardly knew and thoroughly hated. Young Isaac attended the village dame school, where he learned his sums and studied the Bible thus were founded the two great obsessions of his life, mathematics and religious speculation. The late-feudal England of Newton's childhood and youth was torn by rebellion and warfare the revolution began the year he was born, and he was six when Charles I was executed. His father's people were yeomen - Isaac senior was an illiterate farmer - but his mother, Hannah Ayscough, was of gentler stock. Isaac Newton was born in 1642 in the village of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. "Newton," Keynes told his students at Trinity, "was not the first of the age of reason. The economist John Maynard Keynes, the saviour of much of this documentation, was astonished by what he read. These studies in the dark art were conducted in deepest secrecy, and did not come to light until centuries after his death, when a large portion of his papers were reassembled. Yet throughout his long life Newton continued to experiment in alchemy indeed, he was, as Gleick writes, "the peerless alchemist of Europe". ![]() He established principles, and they are called his laws." He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. Newton, he writes, "was chief architect of the modern world. Gleick, in his concise and masterly new biography, states the case with characteristic directness. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone." "Fortunate Newton," he exclaimed, "happy childhood of science. Einstein himself revered Newton, whose portrait was the only one he kept on the wall above his desk in his office at Princeton. He took our human measure, and he is our yardstick. After Einstein's discovery of relativity, the popular imagination conceived the notion that henceforth we would inhabit a time-space continuum in which the atom would be the arbiter of everything, spacemen would return to earth younger than they were when they left, and apples might fall upwards from the bough.īut ours is a Newtonian reality, and always will be. ![]() It is not too much to say that our world was founded by Newton. "Solitude," James Gleick observes, "was the essential part of his genius." Although he confessed to his diary that, like a fasting monk, he was prone to "apparitions of weomen & their shapes", he died a virgin. The man whose scientific imagination knew no bounds lived out the first half of his life between his chambers in Trinity College, Cambridge, and a rented room in London a late foray into society, and even into parliament, sent him scurrying back to his chambers for shelter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |