Grappling with apple’s fall

NEWTON: THE MAKING OF GENIUS

By Patricia Fara

Columbia University Press, $35, 347 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY RAYMOND PETERSEN

At the beginning of the 20th century, Max Planck and Albert Einstein announced to the world two theories that were to alter our perception

of reality. One, quantum physics, shreds the very fabric of reality into pixilated unites of energy and light and eventually into uncertainty.

The other, relativity theory, both expands and compresses time like so much clay, doing away with what had been regarded as the Newtonian absolutes of space and time and deforming the straight line-based geometry of Euclid. Physicists took notice. Others, if they took notice of the new theories, were perplexed or incredulous. All waited tangible proof, which came decades later with the invention of television and the atomic bomb. A new era in the history of science had begun.

In her appealing history of the impact Isaac Newton had on western culture, “Newton: The Making of Genius,” Patricia Fara takes us back to another halcyon time in the development of science, 300 years ago, when one man — Newton — more than any other, brought us kicking and screaming irrevocably into the scientific age.

This Newton accomplished in 1687 with the publication of “Principia Mathematica” where he reasons the universe as a few differential equations. Ms. Fara’s book is not about the origins and development of Newton’s great mind, but about how the world came to see him as a genius, indeed as the example of scientific genius par excellence. At the time he published his “Principia,” Ms. Fara notes that only a few minds were capable of fathoming its profundity and the magnitude of Newton’s accomplishment. This failure of comprehension delayed its influence on Western thought.

Instead, it was with the publication of his “Opticks” in 1704 that the great man’s genius became evident. In that work, Newton described the refraction of sunlight by a prism into a rainbow of colors. He also — and this is very significant — espoused the application of mathematics to scientific research. The book and its arguments dazzled the public and had an immediate impact, ushering in what we call today the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. With thepopularity of Newton’s “Opticks” greater attention began to be paid to his “Principia” and its seminal significance.

There was a deep irony in what happened. Newton, who never lost his Christian faith and who has been described as “god-filled,” presented the Age of Reason with a materialistic and clockwork universe, which had not been his intention.

Among the first to trumpet Newton’s genius were the French who embraced the Englishman’s Theory of Universal Gravity, while jettisoning much of the natural philosophy — the science of the great French philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes.

Voltaire and his mistress Emilie du Chatelet were among the earliest and most articulate and influential of Newton’s continental converts. Not mincing words, Emilie described Cartesian natural philosophy as “a house collapsing into ruins.” Voltaire’s own homage to Newton, writes Ms. Fara, “verged on obsession,” obliging his dinner guests to gaze with admiration on a bust of Newton while their host praised him as the greatest genius who had ever walked the Earth, the true deity of the “New Age.”

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