Newton: The making of genius by Patricia Fara, Macmillan, 拢20, ISBN 0333907353 Reviewed by Harry Collins
DID you know that a certain contributor to Britain鈥檚 wealth and status, recognised as a knight of the realm, was once a very different kind of person? Those of us old enough can still remember that the newly knighted Sir Mick Jagger was once a drug-taking rebel with a novel use for a Mars bars. The past is lost as reputations change and, as Patricia Fara explains in Newton, even Isaac Newton was not always what he seems today.
In his lifetime, Newton was a leading light in theology and alchemy. As master of the Royal Mint, he pursued forgers to their deaths. He was vain and jealous of his reputation to a worrying extent. He may even have 鈥渓ifted鈥� the idea of the inverse square law from Robert Hooke, whose contribution he did everything to diminish.
Advertisement
He did not like criticism and suppressed his own book on optics until his most dangerous potential critic was dead. And gravity was, and still is, action at a distance, and has such a dubious metaphysical aspect that even his supporters constantly argued about what it meant.
In his lifetime, Newton鈥檚 reputation was no greater than a handful of others, now long forgotten, and the contribution of certain of his ousted scientific rivals, such as Leibniz, now seems to grow in significance.
What Fara does is take us from the impure Newton of his own time to the pure specimen we have today. I would have preferred some more systematic analysis but what Fara does, she does well. She simply and clearly describes the trajectory of Newton鈥檚 image, both metaphorical and literal, in the form of portraits and coins.
She takes us from his image鈥檚 origin to the point where it has been so refined that it can stand for a quintessential calculating science. This is an image that we all need to inspire us to do more of the same or to set against other images. One would like to say that if Newton had not existed he would have to be invented, but what Fara shows us is that he has been invented.
As she points out, by the way, Stephen Hawking likes to show people an episode of Star Trek in which he (played by himself) is seen debating with Newton and Einstein. And in 1987, the 300th anniversary of Newton鈥檚 Principia Mathematica, Hawking had himself photographed sitting beneath the supposed descendant of the tree from which the famous apple fell.