Newton bio review

[pynchonoid]

...of interest to M&D readers:

Measuring an intellect as limitless as the universe 
 Isaac Newton, James Gleick, Pantheon: 272 pp., $22.95
 
By Timothy Ferris 

[...]Although he invented the calculus and figured out
gravity and light, laying the foundations of
mathematical physics so firmly that, as physicist
Hermann Bondi put it, they "entered the marrow of what
we know without knowing how we know it," these
attainments consumed but a fraction of Newton's time.
Most of it he devoted instead to the study of theology
and alchemy, producing thousands of pages inscribed in
a crabbed, slanting handwriting, with many emendations
and crossings-out, work resembling that of a crank
(although scholars claim that it establishes Newton as
the foremost alchemist and one of the leading biblical
scholars in 18th century Europe). This nonscientific
Newton inhabits a kind of parallel universe, in which
the heavenly bodies are depicted in terms not of
physics but of divine prophecy. "In the Apocalypse,"
he writes, "the world natural is represented by the
Temple of Jerusalem & the parts of this world by the
analogous parts of the Temple: as heaven by the house
of the Temple; the highest heaven by the most holy the
Sun by the bright flame of the fire of the Altar the
Moon by the burning coals upon the Altar the stars by
the Lamps," and so on, and on.

Nowadays you can see many of these papers for yourself
on the Web, courtesy of the Newton Project
(www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk). Their unanticipated
contents astonished the economist John Maynard Keynes,
who purchased a quantity of them at Sotheby's in 1936.
(In a notorious act of scholarly vandalism, Lord
Lymington, the Earl of Portsmouth, auctioned off the
papers piecemeal to raise cash for the British Union
of Fascists. Many have been recovered — Keynes gave
his to Trinity College — but the fate of others is
unknown.) A startled Keynes concluded that Newton was
"the last of the magicians almost entirely concerned,
not in serious experiment, but in trying to read the
riddle of tradition, to find meaning in cryptic
verses, to imitate the alleged but largely imaginary
experiments of the initiates of past centuries." A
biographer out to capture this side of Newton —
failure to do so would be like drawing a lunar map
that included only the near side of the moon — is
obliged to slog through his deliberations on such
mysteries as the alchemical significance of the
iridescent silver patina called Diana's doves and the
prophesied expansion period of Islam as expressed in
units of locust life spans. [...] 

<http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-ferris20jul20,0,5197034.story?coll=cl-bookreview>

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