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2 - The Solitary Scholar
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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- 29 September 2015, pp 19-36
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NEWTON SET OUT FOR CAMBRIDGE early in June 1661. There was no greater watershed in his life. Although he would return to Woolsthorpe infrequently during the next eighteen years, with two extended visits during the plague, spiritually he now left it, and what a later commentator has called the idiocy of rural life, once and for all. Three short years would put him beyond any possibility of return, though three more years, perhaps somewhat longer, had to pass before a permanent stay in Cambridge was assured. His accounts show that he stopped at Sewstern, presumably to check on his property there; and after spending a second night at Stilton as he skirted the Great Fens, he arrived at Cambridge on the fourth of June and presented himself at Trinity College the following day. If the procedures set forth in the statutes were followed, the senior dean and the head lecturer of the college examined him to determine if he was fit to hear lectures. He was admitted – although there is no record whatever of anything but the verdict, one feels constrained to add – “forthwith.” He purchased a lock for his desk, a quart bottle and ink to fill it, a notebook, a pound of candles, and a chamber pot and was ready for whatever Cambridge might offer.
Admission to a college was not tantamount to admission to the university. Many delayed matriculation in the university; a considerable number who had no interest in a degree, to which alone matriculation was relevant, managed to avoid it altogether. Newton did intend to take a degree. On 8 July, together with a number of students recently admitted to Trinity and to other colleges, he duly swore that he would preserve the privileges of the university as much as in him lay, that he would save harmless its state, honor, and dignity as long as he lived, and that he would defend the same by his vote and counsel; and to testify to the same he paid his fee and saw his name entered in the university's matriculation book. He was now a full-fledged member of the university.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that Newton chose to enter Trinity, “the famousest College in the University” in the opinion of John Strype, the future ecclesiastical historian, who was an undergraduate in Jesus College at the time.
Contents
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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- 29 September 2015, pp vii-viii
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5 - Publication and Crisis
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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- 29 September 2015, pp 85-109
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THE PAPER ON COLORS that Newton sent to the Royal Society early in 1672 in the form of a letter addressed to Henry Oldenburg did not contain anything new from Newton's point of view. The occasion provided by the telescope had come at an opportune time. At Barrow's behest, Newton had been revising Barrow's lectures for publication during the winter. He had not found it a great chore to produce a succinct statement of his own theory buttressed by three prismatic experiments that he took to be most compelling. He thought it relevant to include a special discussion of how the discovery had led him to devise the reflecting telescope. The continuing correspondence provoked by the initial paper, which intruded intermittently on his time and consciousness during the following six years, also involved only one addition to his optics, his introduction to diffraction and brief investigation of it. Aside from diffraction, the entire thrust of his concern with optics during the period was the exposition of a theory already elaborated.
The continuing discussion forced Newton to clarify some issues. When he wrote in 1672, he had not yet fully separated the issue of heterogeneity from his corpuscular conception of light, and he allowed himself to assert that, because of his discovery, it could “be no longer disputed . . . whether Light be a Body.” He could hardly have been more mistaken. Within a week of the paper's presentation, Robert Hooke produced a critique that mistook corpuscularity for its central argument and proceeded to dispute it with some asperity. The lesson was not wasted. Though he continued to believe in the corpuscular conception, Newton learned to insist that the essence of his theory of colors lay in heterogeneity alone. This was a matter of clarification and exposition, however, not an alteration of his theory. The very fact that six years of discussion effected no change, such that his Opticks, finally published in 1704, merely restated conclusions worked out in the late 1660s, testifies to the intensity and rigor of the early investigation.
The discussion that followed on the paper of 1672 tells us less about optics than about Newton. For eight years he had locked himself in a remorseless struggle with Truth. Genius of Newton's order exacts a toll.
12 - The Priority Dispute
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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WELL BEFORE THE CONTESTED EDITION of Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis in 1712 brought that episode to a temporary conclusion, two new concerns, which would dominate Newton's life for more than five years, had imposed themselves upon him. In 1709, work began in earnest on a second edition of the Prindpia. In the spring of 1711, a letter from Leibniz to Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society, inaugurated a heated controversy over claims of priority in the invention of the calculus. Moreover, a fourth problem of great import for Newton was also taking form. Already an ugly scene with Craven Peyton, the warden of the Mint, had signaled a deterioration of their relations which culminated in a major crisis in the Mint in 1714, when the battle with Leibniz was reaching its highest pitch. The Mint was the bedrock on which Newton's existence in London stood. Trouble there had to affect his whole life. In its intensity, the period from 1711 to 1716, succeeding more than a decade of relative calm, matched the great periods of stress at Cambridge, when his relentless pursuit of truth stretched him to the limit. The coincidence of these events, the demands they placed on Newton, may help to explain the furious episode with Flamsteed at Crane Court on 26 October 1711 and much else from these years not yet mentioned.
The second edition of the Prindpia began first. Newton had been talking about it almost from the day the first edition appeared, first with Fatio, then with Gregory. With the move to London active plans languished for a time. They never died, however, and ultimately, on 25 March 1708, in some excitement, Gregory reported that the new edition was finally in the press in Cambridge.
There were certainly sound reasons not to put off the new edition any longer. Copies of the first edition were hard to come by and consequently expensive. What swayed Newton, however, were less these considerations than the manipulations of Richard Bentley, the academic entrepreneur now installed as master of Trinity College. Bentley had long made it his business to cultivate Newton and now aggressively maneuvered him into acquiescence in an edition which Bentley himself published through the university press.
11 - President of the Royal Society
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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THE ROYAL SOCIETY, to which Newton had dedicated his Prindpia in 1687 only to ignore it steadfastly when he moved to London, stood at a low ebb during the early years of his residence in the capital city. Membership, which had reached more than two hundred in the early years of the 1670s, now scarcely numbered more than half that figure, and meetings, given over mostly to miscellaneous chitchat devoid of serious scientific interest, suggested little of the interests that had brought the society together forty years earlier. The presence of Robert Hooke, not Newton's favorite natural philosopher, may well have determined his absence from the weekly meetings. Hooke was usually there. When Newton put in one of his rare appearances to show a “new instrument contrived by him,” a sextant, which would be useful in navigation, Hooke reminded him of past antipathies by claiming that he had invented it more than thirty years before. Hooke's death in March 1703 removed an obstacle and prepared the way for Newton's election as president at the next annual meeting on St. Andrew's Day, 30 November.
Obscurity covers the background to Newton's election. Spontaneous expressions of popular will did not govern the selection of officers of the Royal Society. In all probability, Dr. Hans Sloane, the secretary, made the prior arrangements. At the meeting on 30 November something nearly went awry. Newton was not a political leader who had only to be proposed to be elected. Only twenty-two of the thirty members present voted to place him on the council, a necessary preliminary to election as president. Once elected to the council, he still received only twenty-four votes for president. Clearly, a group within the Royal Society did not rush to welcome England's preeminent natural philosopher to the presidential chair. Truth to tell, they did not rush to reelect him the next year, and the absence of vote totals in the society's Journal Book the following two years strongly implies a continuing want of universal enthusiasm.
Less than two years after Newton's election, Queen Anne knighted him in Cambridge. Master of the Mint and president of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton had become a personage of consequence. The attention he devoted to his coat of arms testifies that he recognized as much.
3 - Anni Mirabiles
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE mathematics dominated Newton's attention during the months that followed his discovery of the new world of science, although it did not completely obliterate other interests. Sometime during this period he also found time to compose the “Quaestiones,” in which he digested current natural philosophy as efficiently as he did mathematics. The other mathematicians and natural philosophers of Europe were unaware that a young man named Isaac Newton even existed. To those who knew of him, his fellow students in Trinity, he was an enigma. The first blossoms of his genius flowered in private, observed silently by his own eyes alone in the years 1664 to 1666, his anni mirabilis.
In addition to mathematics and natural philosophy, the university also made certain demands on his time and attention. He was scheduled to commence Bachelor of Arts in 1665, and regulations demanded that he devote the Lent term to the practice of standing in quadragesima. Pictured in our imagination, the scene has a surrealistic quality, medieval disputations juxtaposed with the birth pains of the calculus. An investigation of curvature was dated 20 February 1665, in the middle of the quadragesimal exercises, and in his various accounts of his mathematical development he assigned the binomial expansion to the winter between 1664 and 1665. While Stukeley was a student at Cambridge more than thirty years later, he heard that when Newton stood for his B.A. degree “he was put to second posing, or lost his groats as they term it, which is look'd upon as disgraceful.” The story raises several problems. The senate had already passed the grace granting his degree before the exercises were held, and Newton signed for this degree with the other candidates. If the story has any substance, it has to apply to prior examinations in the college. Nevertheless, as Stukeley remarked, it does not seem strange because Newton was not much concerned with the standard curriculum. Once more the laxity of the university worked to his advantage. Newton commenced B.A. largely because the university no longer believed in its own curriculum with enough conviction to enforce it.
In the summer of 1665, a disaster descended on many parts of England, including Cambridge. It had “pleased Almighty God in his just severity,” as Emmanuel College put it, “to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence.
1 - A Sober, Silent, Thinking Lad
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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ISAAC NEWTON was born early on Christmas Day 1642, in the manor house of Woolsthorpe near the village of Colsterworth, seven miles south of Grantham in Lincolnshire. Because Galileo, on whose discoveries much of Newton's own career in science would squarely rest, had died that year, a significance attaches itself to 1642.1 am far from the first to note it – and undoubtedly will be far from the last. Born in 1564, Galileo had lived nearly to the age of eighty. Newton would live nearly to the age of eighty-five. Between them they virtually spanned the entire Scientific Revolution, the central core of which their combined work constituted. In fact, only England's stiff-necked Protestantism permitted the chronological liaison. Because it considered that popery had fatally contaminated the Gregorian calendar, England was ten days out of phase with the Continent, where it was 4 January 1643 day Newton was born. We can sacrifice the symbol without losing anything of substance. It matters only that he was born and at such a time that he could utilize the work of Galileo and of other pioneers of modern science such as Kepler (who had been dead twelve years) and Descartes (who was still alive and active in the Netherlands).
Prior to Isaac, the Newton family was wholly without distinction and wholly without learning. As it knew steady economic advance during the century prior to Isaac's birth, we may assume that it was not without diligence and not without the intelligence that can make diligence fruitful. A Simon Newton, the first of the family to raise his head tentatively above rural anonymity, lived in Westby, a village about five miles southeast of Grantham, in 1524. Along with twenty-two other inhabitants of Westby, he had achieved the status of a taxpayer in the subsidy granted that year.
Fourteen of the twenty-two, including Simon Newton, paid the minimum assessment of 4d. Eight others paid assessments ranging from i id to 9s 6d, and one, Thomas Ellis, who was one of the richest men in Lincolnshire, paid more than £16. If the Newtons had risen above complete anonymity, clearly they did not rank very high in the social order, even in the village of Westby.
Dedication
- Richard S. Westfall
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Index
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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Frontmatter
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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10 - The Mint
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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CRISES RACKED THE INSTITUTION to which Newton moved in the spring of 1696. Indeed, the Mint was an institution within an institution within an institution, all three of which faced crises. The recoinage engaged every pinch of energy at the Mint. The Treasury, of which the Mint was a relatively minor department, devoted equal energy to devising temporary expedients and new machinery to cope with overwhelming financial needs caused by war with France. The English state and the revolutionary settlement it embodied balanced precariously on the outcome of the Treasury's efforts. In 1696, it was not clear that the financial demands of the war would be met. If they were not, if national bankruptcy ensued, the revolutionary settlement would undoubtedly collapse before a second Stuart restoration. In the larger crises of the government and its finances Newton was not involved beyond his concern as an Englishman committed to the revolution.
The narrower monetary crisis, which bedeviled the financial crisis by reaching a climax when it could least be tolerated, occupied him almost completely for more than two years. As the debasement of silver coinage reached disastrous proportions, the government under the leadership of Newton's friend Charles Montague, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to consider a recoinage as the only effective remedy.
In 1695, the government sought what advice it could find. In the absence of a body of recognized experts on such matters, the Regency Council resolved to consult a number of leading intellectuals and London financiers, “Mr. Locke, Mr. D'Avenant, Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Newton, Mr. Heathcote, Sir Josiah Child, and Mr. Asgill, a lawyer.” Along with most of the others, Newton replied in the autumn of 1695 with a short essay “concerning the Amendmt of English Coyns.” A general consensus among the respondents, in which he shared, accepted the need to recoin. By December, the decision was made; on 21 January 1696, the definitive recoinage act passed through Parliament. The first melting of old coins at the Exchequer commenced the following day. Hence the recoinage was both decided and inaugurated well before Newton's appointment as warden of the Mint. Nor did his opinion on the recoinage determine the policy, which differed in a minor way from what he recommended. In no sense did Newton bear responsibility for the recoinage. He did accept responsibility for carrying it through to completion.
13 - Years of Decline
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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The PRIORITY DISPUTE dragged on with diminished intensity for A another six years and during that time continued to occupy a major part of Newton's consciousness. He had never been able to lay a project down easily. Wound up as tightly as he was now, and with his honor at stake, he could not put the dispute aside simply because his antagonist had died. It was 1723 when its final faint echo was Newton's refusal to reply to a letter from Bernoulli.
Among its other effects, the controversy served to remind Newton that he needed to give attention to his intellectual legacy. As a result, he devoted considerable attention during his old age to new editions of his works. In 1717, it was a new edition of the Opticks. He did not touch the body of the treatise, which continued to set forth conclusions as he had established them forty-five years earlier, but he composed a set of eight new Queries, which he inserted as Queries 17-24 between the original set of sixteen Queries in the first edition and the set of seven added to the Latin edition. Continuing a retreat from the radical stance of earlier years, he now postulated a cosmic aether to explain gravity. To be sure, the aether had so little in common with conventional mechanical fluids that the retreat was more apparent than real, and Newton may have intended it more as a sop than a concession. The aether, he said, was “exceedingly more rare and subtile than the Air, and exceedingly more elastick and active.” He concluded indeed that the ratio of its elastic force to its density must be more than 490 billion times that of air. Was such a medium possible? It was, Newton argued, if one supposed that the aether, like the air, is composed of “Particles which endeavour to recede from one another ….” That is, Newton's new aether embodied the very problem it seemed to explain, action at a distance in the form of a mutual repulsion between aethereal particles. Standing rarer in the pores of bodies than in free space, the aether caused the phenomena of gravity by its pressure.
The Opticks was in English, of course. Only a Latin edition could effectively reach the Continental audience, and in 1719 Newton published a second Latin edition that included the new Queries.
9 - Revolution
- Richard S. Westfall
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NEWTON was hardly an unknown man in philosophic circles before 1687. The very extent to which he had made his capacity in physics and mathematics known had functioned in the early 1680s to destroy his attempt to reconstruct an isolation in which he might pursue his own interests in his own way. Nevertheless, nothing had prepared the world of natural philosophy for the Principia. The growing astonishment of Edmond Halley as he read successive versions of the work repeated itself innumerable times in single installments. Almost from the moment of its publication, even those who refused to accept its central concept of action at a distance recognized the Principia as an epoch-making book. A turning point for Newton, who, after twenty years of abandoned investigations, had finally followed an undertaking to completion, the Principia also became a turning point for natural philosophy. It was impossible that Newton's life could return to its former course.
Rumors of the coming masterpiece had flowed through Britain during the first half of 1687. For those who had not heard, a long review in the Philosophical Transactions announced the Principia shortly before publication. Although the review was unsigned, we know that Halley wrote it. With the exception of Newton himself, no one knew the contents of the work better. He insisted on its epochal significance.
This incomparable Author [the review began] having at length been prevailed upon to appear in publick, has in this Treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the Mind; and has at once shewn what are the Principles of Natural Philosophy, and so far derived from them their consequences, that he seems to have exhausted his Argument, and left little to be done by those that shall succeed him.
After the body of the review presented a summary of the Principia, Halley closed with a further encomium: “[I]t may be justly said, that so many and so Valuable Philosophical Truths, as are herein discovered and put past Dispute, were never yet owing to the Capacity and Industry of any one Man.”
In mathematical circles, such as the one gathered around David Gregory in Scotland, the fame and influence of thePrincipia spread quickly. Across the Channel, a political refugee, John Locke, set himself to mastering the book. Because he was not a mathematician, he found the demonstrations impenetrable.
Bibliographical Essay
- Richard S. Westfall
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6 - Rebellion
- Richard S. Westfall
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- The Life of Isaac Newton
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NEWTON'S REPEATED PROTESTATION thathe was engaged in other 1 \ l studies supplied an ever-present theme to his correspondence of the 1670s. Already in July 1672, only six months after the Royal Society discovered him to be a man supremely skilled in optics, he wrote to Oldenburg that he doubted he would make further trials with telescopes, “being desirous to prosecute some other subjects.” Three-and-a-half years later, he put off the composition of a general treatise on colors because of unspecified obligations and some “buisines of my own wch at present almost take up my time & thoughts.” Apparently the other business was not mathematics, because later in 1676 he hoped the second letter for Leibniz would be the last. “For having other things in my head, it proves an unwelcome interruption to me to be at this time put upon considering these things.” He was not only preoccupied, he was almost frantic in his impatience. “Sr,” he concluded the letter, “I am in great hast, Yours.…” In great haste because of what? Surely not because of ten lectures on algebra that he purportedly delivered in 1676. And not because of pupils or collegial duties, for he had none of either. Only the pursuit of Truth could so drive Newton to distraction that he resented the interruption a letter offered. Newton was in a state of ecstasy again. If mathematics and optics had lost the capacity to dominate him, it was because other studies had supplanted them.
One of the studies was chemistry. Collins mentioned his absorption in it twice in letters to Gregory. Years later, when he chatted with Conduitt about his early life in Cambridge, Newton himself mentioned that Wickins helped in his “chymical experiments.” His interest in it developed somewhat later than his interest in natural philosophy. When he composed the “Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae” in the mid-i66os, he entered almost nothing that one would call chemistry, even though Robert Boyle was one of the major sources of his new mechanical philosophy. When he extended his notes on a number of the headings under “Quaestiones” in a new notebook, however, chemistry did begin to appear, and the notes indicate that Boyle supplied his introduction to the subject. Newton's ability to organize what he learned so that he could retrieve it was a significant aspect of his genius.
8 - Principia
- Richard S. Westfall
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THE BACKGROUND to Halley's visit to Cambridge in August 1684 was a chance conversation of the previous January. By his own account, Halley had been contemplating celestial mechanics. From Kepler's third law, he had concluded that the centripetal force toward the sun must decrease in proportion to the square of the distance of the planets from the sun. The context of his statement implied that he arrived at the inverse-square relation by substituting Kepler's third law into Huygens's recently published formula for centrifugal force. He was not the only one who made the substitution. After Hooke raised the cry of plagiarism in 1686, Newton recalled a conversation with Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 in which they had considered the problem “of Determining the Hevenly motions upon philosophicall principles.” He had realized that Wren had also arrived at the inverse-square law. It is clear that the problem Hooke put to Newton in the winter of 1679-80 was one that several people defined for themselves at much the same time. It was, indeed, the great unanswered question confronting natural philosophy, the derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion from principles of dynamics.
This same problem was discussed by Halley, Wren, and Hooke at a meeting of the Royal Society in January 1684. Hooke claimed that he could demonstrate all the laws of celestial motion from the inverse-square relation. Halley admitted that his own attempt to do so had failed. Wren was skeptical of Hooke's claim. Hooke again asserted that he had the demonstration, but he intended to keep it secret until others, by failing to solve the problem, learned how to value it. We do not know what took Halley to Cambridge. Because he allowed seven months to pass, we can hardly surmise that he rushed there, afire with curiosity, to lay the problem before Newton. Nevertheless, he did find himself in Cambridge in August, and he did seize the opportunity to consult a man he knew to be expert in mathematics.
Although Halley mentioned the visit, the best account came from Newton's recollection as he told it to Abraham DeMoivre.
7 - Years of Silence
- Richard S. Westfall
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BY THE END OF 1676, as absorbed in theology and alchemy as he was distracted by correspondence and criticism on optics and mathematics, Newton had virtually cut himself off from the scientific community. Oldenburg died in September 1677, not having heard from Newton for more than half a year. Newton terminated his exchange with Collins by the blunt expedient of not writing. It took him another year to conclude the correspondence on optics, but by the middle of 1678, he succeeded. As nearly as he could, he had reversed the policy of public communication that he began with his letter to Collins in 1670 and retreated to the quiet of his academic sanctuary. He did not emerge for nearly a decade. Humphrey Newton sketched a few facets of Newton's life as he found it in the 1680s. Newton enjoyed taking a turn in his garden, about which he was “very Curious … not enduring to see a weed in it ….” His curiosity did not rise to the level of dirtying his hands, however; he hired a gardener to do the work. He was careless with money; he kept a box filled with guineas, as many as a thousand, Humphrey thought, by the window. Humphrey was not sure if it was carelessness or a deliberate ploy to test the honesty of others – primarily Humphrey. In the winter, he loved apples, and sometimes he would have a small roasted quince. Not much in the account suggested leisure, however. The Newton Humphrey found had immersed himself in unremitting study to the extent that he grudged even the time to eat and sleep. During five years, Humphrey saw him laugh only once, and John North, master of Trinity from 1677 to 1683, feared that Newton would kill himself with study.
These were disastrous years for the college. In 1675, when it was still too soon to recognize the decline in numbers that had just set in, Isaac Barrow committed the college to the construction of an extravagant library. The magnificent Wren structure became an ornament to the entire university, as Barrow intended, but its burden of expense hamstrung the college for two decades until its completion in 1696. Two disastrous masters who succeeded Barrow left the college adrift at precisely the time when it most needed vigorous leadership.
Preface
- Richard S. Westfall
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FEW MEN HAVE LIVED for whom less need exists to justify a biography. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all times – and, in the opinion of many, not one of the greatest but the greatest. He marked the culmination of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the intellectual transformation that brought modern science into being, and as the representative of that transformation he exerted more influence in shaping the world of the twentieth century, both for good and for ill, than any other single individual. We cannot begin to know too much about this man, and I will forbear to belabor the obvious and will say no more in justification of my book.
The life that I here present is a reduced version of the full-scale Biography Never at Rest, which I published in 1980. In reducing the work in length, I have attempted to make it more accessible to a general audience by also reducing its technical content. (Very little mathematics appears in The Life of Isaac Newton. I invite those who feel the lack not only of mathematics but also of other technical details to consult the longer work.) To facilitate consultation, I have retained the titles of the original chapters; and the contents of the chapters, as condensations, follow the same patterns of organization. The numbers of the chapters do not correspond, however, for in condensing I have eliminated two of the fifteen in Never at Rest (Chapters 1 and 4). Chapter 4 dealt with Newton's development of his fluxional method or calculus; a summary of it appears in Chapter 3, “AnniMirabiles,” of the present book. It should then be easy to locate fuller discussions of any issue. The present Life also contains no footnotes. Anyone wanting to find the source of a particular quotation should be able quickly to locate it in Never at Rest in the same way.
Since publishing Never at Rest, I have moved on from Newton to other issues concerned with the history of early modern science and have not remained actively involved with Newtonian scholarship. Though I am aware of newer work that has appeared in the interim, I have not felt that I had rethought the issues sufficiently to attempt to incorporate it.
Acknowledgments
- Richard S. Westfall
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The Life of Isaac Newton
- Richard S. Westfall
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Isaac Newton was indisputably one of the greatest scientists in history. His achievements in mathematics and physics marked the culmination of the movement that brought modern science into being. Richard Westfall's biography captures in engaging detail both his private life and scientific career, presenting a complex picture of Newton the man, and as scientist, philosopher, theologian, alchemist, public figure, President of the Royal Society, and Warden of the Royal Mint. An abridged version of his magisterial study Never at Rest (Cambridge, 1980), this concise biography makes Westfall's highly acclaimed portrait of Newton newly accessible to general readers.