Grappling with apple's fall

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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.