Newton: The Making of Genius by Patricia Fara

I am revisiting some favourite reads from the past. I first read this book in 2011.

‘If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.’

I wonder what Isaac Newton really meant, when he included this line in a letter to Robert Hooke, in February 1676. Was it a generous statement of acknowledgement, or was it an unsubtle reference to Robert Hooke’s stature? All we know for certain is that Newton and Hooke had a number of disagreements, including about the nature of light. As both Hooke and Newton are scientific heroes of mine, I’d prefer to read the statement positively.

We know so little about the Isaac Newton the person, and yet most of us know of him and his achievements. We don’t really know what he looked like, and yet there are a number of differing images available. The accomplishments attributed to Newton in science and mathematics are significant. In his ‘Principia Mathematica’, published in 1687, Newton reasons the universe in terms of a few differential equations. This is profound, but was not accessible to many. The publication of ‘Opticks’ in 1704 had a more direct impact. In that work, Newton described the refraction of sunlight through a prism into a rainbow of colours. The arguments in this book had an immediate impact and its popularity caused greater attention to be paid to ‘Principia Mathematica’.

But this book is less about Newton’s science and mathematics as it is about his impact on other thinkers. Ms Fara also investigates the different ways in which Newton’s life and work have been interpreted over the past three centuries.

It is ironic that Newton, who never lost his Christian faith, had presented the Age of Reason with the tools to argue alternate views of the universe. Newton’s many admirers included Thomas Jefferson, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) and his mistress Emilie du Chatelet. Voltaire’s admiration of Newton was part of an ‘Angolmania’ that spread amongst the cultural and intellectual elite of France in the 18th century. By the early 19th century, a Romantic reaction had set in against Newton and science. In ‘Lamia’ – John Keats wrote:

Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Three years earlier, Keats had agreed with Charles Lamb that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.’

In the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes had this to say:
‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians … Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage… Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood… He regarded the Universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty—just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.’

This is an interesting book about Isaac Newton and his influence. It is is not a conventional biography of Isaac Newton: the facts of his life have frequently been disputed and his posthumous reputation has its own contradictions. This book left me wanting to know more about Newton’s life, and also to read more of the books Ms Fara refers to.

‘We can only view Newton’s accomplishments and experiences through the refracting prism of a society that has itself been constantly changing.’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith