Last of the magicians

Book: Isaac Newton
Author: James Gleick
Price: (Fourth Estate, ?15)

"He of all people was no Newtonian," declares James Gleick in the introduction to his new biography, Isaac Newton. Paradoxical but true. Sixty years ago, John Maynard Keynes scandalised the scientific establishment by announcing that Newton was not the world's first great scientist but was "the last of the magicians."

These days, Newton's alternative interests have been made respectable. Scholars have overturned older prejudices by showing how Newton's apparently arcane obsessions-alchemy, Solomon's temple, early Christian heresies-were far from being eccentric sidetracks but fed directly into his cosmological theories. Now Gleick, one of America's most successful popularisers of science, has transformed mainstream academic research into an exciting story about this revised Newton, a thinker more akin to Aristotle than to Einstein.

Newton himself would have been horrified by modern Newtonian physics, especially the innovations it owes to Pierre Laplace, the "French Newton" who introduced the deterministic, godless interpretation we now associate with Newtonianism. For the real Newton, God was everywhere, even-or especially-in empty space.

Gleick has done a fine job of recreating intellectual life in Britain at the end of the 17th century. Instead of mocking Newton's alchemical experiments, Gleick empathises with his subject's self-destructive quest to purify his own spirit as well as to transmute the chemicals that were insidiously eroding his health.

In describing how Newton pursued the active agent lying at the heart of Dame Nature, Gleick seems to seek the secret source of Newton's own mind through exposing not only his mathematical quandaries but also his sexual fantasies as he spiralled downward into melancholic solitude.

Gleick's Newton is nothing like the harsh stereotype of a Newtonian scientist: the unemotional atheist who proceeds with machine-like logic, reducing the messy living cosmos to implacable mathematical order. But would Newton have recognised himself in this book? Biographers often reveal as much about themselves as their subjects. In Victorian England, historians praised Newton for his patience, dedication and hard work because they wanted their hero to match up to their own ideals of how a scientist should behave. Dubbing him "the Christian philosopher," they outlawed comments about alchemy and religious heresy and tried to make Newton appear normal by inventing girlfriends and a dog. But now we are fascinated by precisely those quirks of Newton's character that previous writers ignored. We prefer to think of him as an obsessive recluse who believed in numerology (no accident that the rainbow has seven colours), experienced sexual torments and poisoned himself with alchemical experiments. This is the Newton that Gleick has supplied.

Gleick has not been able to escape viewing his subject from the present. According to received wisdom, Newton was a Cambridge academic who did virtually nothing after publishing the Principia, his masterpiece on gravity and mechanics. Gleick reinforces this view by devoting only 20 pages to the last third of Newton's life, which he spent in London. However, 30 years is a long time, and Newton was not idle. Among other things, he headed the Royal Mint (which involved beheading forgers), was president of the Royal Society, produced two revised editions of the Principia, and wrote Opticks (1704), a book which covered far more than just the study of light and which set the experimental agenda for the rest of the 18th century. Not bad going for a supposedly fallow retirement.

Because science is of paramount importance in our society, Gleick has viewed Newton from a scientific perspective. Yet Newton was cited as a historian well into the 19th century. One way of understanding how Newton's contemporaries saw him is to look at his monument in Westminster Abbey. Newton rests his elbow on four books, whose titles make clear that he was valued not only for the Principia and Opticks but also for his research into theology and ancient civilisations. Urania, the goddess of astronomy, reclines on a globe that reflects Newton's work on comets but also shows the constellations at the time Jason sailed with the Argonauts, a voyage which Newton tried to date accurately. The small bas-relief beneath shows cherubs busily absorbed with chemistry and coins. Newton himself is dressed like a Roman: Enlightenment gentlemen looked back to the classical past rather than forward to a scientific future. Urania's star marks the tip of a pyramid symbolising eternity. Three centuries later, this star still shines bright, but which version of Newton are we worshipping?

Reprinted from Science magazine, Vol 301