BOOK OF THE MONTH
Isaac Newton
by James Gleick
Fourth Estate (0007163177) and Pantheon (0375422331)
Reviewer: Bob Nardini — Senior Vice President and Head Bibliographer, YBP.
One problem for a scientific biographer, at least for one who will be unsatisfied with a nano-readership, is what to do about the science. Riffle through the pages of this book and your eye will spot no more than one or two mathematical equations and a handful of scientific diagrams. James Gleick, an accomplished scientific biographer and writer whose work has gained him a substantial readership by the standards of the genre, and who in this book records the life the man who was probably the greatest scientific genius ever, Isaac Newton, here reduces the science and mathematics of his subject to a low common denominator.
And for most of us, it's a good thing too. In the plague year of 1666 when Newton had retreated from Cambridge to Woolsthorpe (his family home in Lincolnshire where he had been born in a stone farmhouse in 1642) and where were it not for his singular genius he would likely have lived a life resembling that of his father, an illiterate farmer, Newton worked out the foundations of orbital motion, of gravity. Here is Gleick at some length:
"The apple was nothing in itself. It was half of a couple — the earth's impish twin. As an apple falls toward the earth, so does the moon: falling away from a straight line, falling around the earth. ... To make the arithmetic work at all, he had to suppose that the power of attraction diminished rapidly according to distance from the center of the earth. ... He estimated that the earth attracted an apple 4,000 times as powerfully as it attracted the distant moon. ... He reckoned the distance of the moon at sixty times the earth's radius; if the moon were sixty times farther than the surface of the earth from the center of the earth, then the earth's gravity might be 3,600 times weaker there. ... He needed new principles of motion and force. ... He was hampered by the chaos of language — words still vaguely defined and words not quite existing. ... At twenty-four, Newton believed he could marshal a complete science of motion, if only he could find the appropriate lexicon, if only he could set words in the correct order. Writing mathematics, he could invent his own symbols and form them into a mosaic. Writing in English, he was constrained by the language at hand."
Throughout the book Gleick is no more demanding than this on his readers. Problems are described generally. Newton's thinking is outlined. And Gleick sketches in the background, the world in which Newton's thinking took place. It was a pre-Newtonian world, as Gleick and other biographers have said, which Newton changed utterly but which he himself never left. "He never purged occult, hidden, mystical qualities from his vision of nature," writes Gleick, whose account of Newton's work in alchemy is as lucid, polished, graceful, and forceful as the passage on gravity above, or as his sections devoted to optics, the calculus, or Newton's theological heresies.
Gleick takes a minimalist approach to Newton. Not counting notes and index, the text of this book runs to only 191 pages and 15 chapters. It can be read easily in a few sittings — you could do the math on that. His 1992 biography of the atomic physicist Richard Feynman, Genius, is better than twice as long. Other biographies offer more science and more of Newton's life. Gleick's biography is not the place to go, for example, to learn a great deal about Newton's work as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint, posts he held after 1696. Gleick's Newton is nearly an abstraction himself, ghostly as the mathematics that filled Newton's mind and which he poured into notebooks as millions of words and symbols. His life, more than anywhere else, was here. Gleick, again: "No one understands the mental faculty we call mathematical intuition; much less, genius. ... A mind turning inward from the world can see numbers as lustrous creatures; can find order in them, and magic; can know numbers as if personally. A mathematician, too, is a polyglot. A powerful source of creativity is a facility in translating, seeing how the same thing can be said in seemingly different ways. ... Newton's patience was limitless. Truth, he said ... was 'the offspring of silence and meditation.' ... He computed obsessively."
Gleick delivers the essence of Newton in prose as spare and beautiful as an equation. But one that every reader will be able to understand, and so marvel at this genius who as much as any other man created the world in which we have lived ever since.
