Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton
by James Gleick

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Book Summary Information

Author: James Gleick
Narrator: Allan Corduner
Edition: Audio Cassette
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2003-05-01
ISBN: 0500017050
Publisher: HarperAudio

Book Reviews of Isaac Newton

Book Review: Not so good
Summary: 3 Stars

James Gleick has written some excellent books -- Chaos and Genius, but this book fails to clear that bar.

Inside the front flap of the dust cover it reads "In this original, sweeping, and intimate biography, Gleick moves between a comprehensive historical portrait and a dramatic focus on Newton's significant letters and unpublished notebooks to illiminate the real importance of his work in physics, in optics, and in calculus." In my opinion, the book fails to meet this objective. The biography and other information is superficial and far from initimate -- the book is a good introduction to basic facts but no more than that. His biography of Richard Feynman in Genius comes much closer to the goal of an intimate biography.

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Summary of Isaac Newton

As a schoolbook figure, Isaac Newton is most often pictured sitting under an apple tree, about to discover the secrets of gravity. In this short biography, James Gleick reveals the life of a man whose contributions to science and math included far more than the laws of motion for which he is generally famous. Gleick's always-accessible style is hampered somewhat by the need to describe Newton's esoteric thinking processes. After all, the man invented calculus. But readers who stick with the book will discover the amazing story of a scientist obsessively determined to find out how things worked. Working alone, thinking alone, and experimenting alone, Newton often resorted to strange methods, as when he risked his sight to find out how the eye processed images:

.... Newton, experimental philosopher, slid a bodkin into his eye socket between eyeball and bone. He pressed with the tip until he saw 'severall white darke & coloured circles'.... Almost as recklessly, he stared with one eye at the sun, reflected in a looking glass, for as long as he could bear.

From poor beginnings, Newton rose to prominence and wealth, and Gleick uses contemporary accounts and notebooks to track the genius's arc, much as Newton tracked the paths of comets. Without a single padded sentence or useless fact, Gleick portrays a complicated man whose inspirations required no falling apples. --Therese Littleton

James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science—how ideas order visible appearances, how equations can give meaning to molecular and stellar phenomena, how theories can transform what we see. In Chaos, he chronicled the emergence of a new way of looking at dynamic systems; in Genius, he portrayed the wondrous dimensions of Richard Feynman’s mind. Now, in Isaac Newton, he gives us the story of the scientist who, above all others, embodied humanity’s quest to unveil the hidden forces that constitute the physical world.

In this original, sweeping, and intimate biography, Gleick moves between a comprehensive historical portrait and a dramatic focus on Newton’s significant letters and unpublished notebooks to illuminate the real importance of his work in physics, in optics, and in calculus. He makes us see the old intuitive, alchemical universe out of which Newton’s mathematics first arose and shows us how Newton’s ideas have altered all forms of understanding from history to philosophy. And he gives us a moving account of the conflicting impulses that pulled at this man’s heart: his quiet longings, his rage, his secrecy, the extraordinary subtleties of a personality that were mirrored in the invisible forces he first identified as the building blocks of science. More than biography, more than history, more than science, Isaac Newton tells us how, through the mind of one man, we have come to know our place in the cosmos.

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