Isaac Newton (Hardcover)

It is a brave writer who tackles a biography of the world famous pioneer mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton and James Gleick has acquitted himself superbly well in his new bookIsaac Newton. Accolades to Newton were piling up even during his early lifetime in the 17th century when such fame was usually confined to royalty, popes and archbishops and certainly not to ordinary mortals born in 1642 of yeomen stock in deepest rural England. According to Gleick, Newton was the first person whose attainment "lay in the realm of the mind" to have a state funeral and be buried in Westminster Abbey. A Latin inscription proclaimed his "strength of mind almost divine" with "mathematical principles peculiarly his own" and declared that "mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race"--not bad for a farm boy from Lincolnshire.

Sensibly, Gleick, a well-known American science writer and author of the acclaimed Chaos, focuses a great deal on how such a transformation could happen to anyone with such humble beginnings at that time in British history. There is no doubt Newton's innate talent and genius but he was also lucky in that he had excellent schooling and through the intervention of a relative he was able to go to the University of Cambridge and went on to stay there most of his professional life. His mother supplied him with "a chamber pot; a notebook of 140 blank pages... a quart bottle and ink to fill it, candles for many long nights, and a lock for his desk". Try sending your child to university so equipped today.

Of course the critical achievements of Newton's life were in his scientific achievements and here is the real problem: how to explain them for the general reader when even academic mathematicians today find much of the detail of Newton's work hard to comprehend. This is largely because Newton did not have today's familiar technical language or standard units of measurement available to him; he really was exploring terra incognita and feeling his way. But this is exactly what Gleick manages to get over so well and there is so much more. Aside from it being an eminently accessible biography, illustrations, extensive notes, bibliography and index make this an invaluable source for anyone who wants to enter the wonderful and arcane world of Sir Isaac Newton. --Douglas Palmer

On WHAT JUST HAPPENED: 'This collection of pieces originally published in The New York Times, is very special... Untangling anything from an interview with Microsoft is hard; putting it into context harder; making that readable, and even enjoyable, the work of a master. Gleick does it. It's a pleasure flying with him' Charles Arthur, Independent On FASTER: 'It's an important portrait of an age; a learned, witty, eclectic treatise, and it might even help you to slow down. So don't hang around - go out and buy it right now.' Robert Macfarlane, Observer 'Brilliantly dissects our unceasing daily struggle to squeeze as much as we can into the 1,400 minutes of the day.' Sunday Times Books of the Year

Newton was the Einstein of his day, a genius whose scientific discoveries brought a greater understanding of our universe and led directly to the space age. Every child knows how Newton watched apples falling from trees and so discovered gravity. What few people know is what Newton the man was really like. We can only say that even by the standards of his own time he was an oddball - the sort of character with whom few people felt comfortable. In this biography, James Gleick, an American science writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist, attempts to get into Newton's psyche. Newton tried hard not to leave any clues about himself but conclusions can be drawn from what is known of his lifestyle and what others of the time said about him. The result is an engrossing study of a man with as many hang-ups as flashes of brilliance. Even as a ten-year-old in 1653, Newton showed a grasp of complex issues far beyond his years. But beneath that maturity lurked a sensitive soul that longed for love and didn't get it. His mother apparently cared little for him, separating him from his siblings and sending him off to a distant school. That rejection was to shape Newton's outlook on life. He grew up a furtive, secretive individual who made amazing discoveries but often kept them to himself for years. As an adult he lived reclusively, seldom leaving his rooms and shunning the company of the few people who wanted to be his friends. He dabbled in occultism, spent his evenings surrounded by the paraphernalia of alchemy, and hated putting his thoughts to paper. Despite all this he made astounding breakthroughs in various branches of science - a fact that drew world acclaim but left him feeling more vulnerable than ever. Gleick has performed a remarkable job in showing Newton as the misunderstood man he was - a genius with psychological flaws but a good heart. (Kirkus UK)

Science author and journalist Gleick (Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, 1999, etc.) traces with equal measures of irony and sympathy the life of an Enlightenment icon as notable for misery, backbiting, paranoia, deceit, and greed as brilliance. Fatherless, left in the care of his grandparents for eight years, young Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was so maladjusted that he threatened to torch the house of his mother and stepfather with them inside. His schoolmaster and uncle rescued him from life on the farm by getting him admitted to Trinity College at Cambridge. In 1666, when the college was stricken by plague, he returned home and embarked on his landmark mathematical studies. Yet his magnum opus, Principia (1687), came only after years of half-hints to scientific colleagues and controversies over plagiarism. Gleick spends much effort elaborating how Newton followed up on imperfectly intuited hypotheses by Galileo and Descartes to derive laws related to gravitation, inertia, planetary motion, and optics. But inevitably the focus shifts to how this loveless, largely friendless man tried to peer into the heart of the world's mysteries. Unable to purge "occult, hidden, mystical qualities from his vision of nature," the scientist's research encompassed not just mathematics but also two more disreputable covert enterprises: alchemy and unorthodox scriptural interpretation. Newton evinced "implacable ruthlessness" toward scientists Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, John Flamsteed, and Gottfried Leibniz. Hair and clothing askew, he scratched diagrams with his stick in the walkways of Trinity and, as the half-century mark approached, experienced a nervous breakdown. In his last three decades, he grew rich as the college's Warden and later Master of the Mint. For all his faults, Gleick notes, Newton's legacy is clear: "He bequeathed to science, that institution in its throes of birth, a research program, practical and open-ended." Engaging, concise biography of a monumental visionary and eccentric whose life was as remarkable as the universe he struggled to understand. (16 b&w illustrations) (Kirkus Reviews)