The Book of the Dead

memoirs, Newton was so small that he could fit into a two-pint pot and so weak he was forced “to have a bolster all around his neck to keep it on his shoulders.” His mother married the Reverend Barnabas Smith when Isaac was three. Smith hated him on sight and refused to have him in the house, so he was sent to live with his grandmother. Like Leonardo, he became isolated and withdrew into his own world, building and inventing. In Grantham, he frightened the townspeople by flying a lantern with a kite attached. He also made a sundial by fixing pegs to the wall of his schoolmaster’s house. It became known as “Isaac’s Dial.” He hated school, where he was bullied and usually came near the bottom of the class. Some measure of his unhappiness can be seen in the long list of sins he made as a teenager: “Putting a pin in John Keys hat to prick him,” “Stealing cherry cobs from Edward Story” and “Denying that I did so,” “Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter,” and the revealing “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.”

Reverend Smith died when Newton was seventeen and his mother responded by pulling him out of school so he could farm their land. He hated farming even more than school. It bored him. So, asked to watch the sheep, he would end up building a model of a waterwheel while the sheep wandered off and damaged the neighbors’ fields. On one occasion he was walking a horse home when it slipped its bridle; Newton didn’t notice and walked back with the bridle in his hands. All he wanted to do was study. His mother gave up and sent him back to school, where he astonished everyone by graduating with top marks.

From there he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. His Cambridge career, while not a disaster, was hardly a sparkling success—probably because he spent most of his time reading Descartes, Copernicus, and Galileo, men whose radical ideas fell well outside the curriculum. When the university closed as a precaution against plague in 1665, Newton returned to his farmhouse in Lincolnshire. Over the next eighteen months, entirely on his own, he went on to discover the laws of gravity and motion and formulate theories of color and calculus that changed the world forever. His discoveries in mechanics, mathematics, thermodynamics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics make him at least twice as important as any other scientific figure who has ever lived, and the book that eventually contained all his most original work, Principia Mathematica (1687), is arguably the most important single book in the history of science. When he returned to Cambridge, still only twenty-six years old, he was elected the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a position held for thirty years by Stephen Hawking). Three years later, in 1672, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and acclaimed as one of the most brilliant men of the age.

What happened to Newton over those two years staring out across the fens remains a mystery. His obsessiveness suggests he may have suffered from a mild form of autism, such as Asperger’s syndrome. Whether that’s true or not, Newton was certainly odd. He often forgot to eat and, when he did, he did so standing at his desk. At times he would work in his laboratory for six weeks at a time, never letting the fire go out. Frequently, when entertaining guests, he would go into the study to get a bottle of wine, have a thought, sit down to record it, and become so preoccupied that he forgot all about the dinner party. He was obsessed with the color crimson. An inventory of his possessions lists a crimson mohair bed with crimson curtains, crimson drapes, crimson wall hangings, and a crimson settee with crimson chairs and crimson cushions. He was famously paranoid, keeping a box filled with guineas on his windowsill to test the honesty of those who worked for him. He had a nerdish dislike of the arts, calling poetry “ingenious nonsense,” and on the one occasion he went to the opera he left before the performance ended. Yet he was vain enough to sit for more than twenty portraits, and his sense of his own uniqueness was never in doubt. He once constructed an anagram, Jeova sanctus unus, out of the Latin version of his name, Isaacus Neutonus. It means “God’s Holy One.”

There are obvious connections here with the confidence and self-absorption of Leonardo, and with the absentmindedness of a later thinker, such as Einstein. All three took themselves very seriously; all three may have had neurological quirks; all three either missed out on or hated formal education. Significantly, of the three, Newton had the toughest childhood and he was also the one who found friendship hardest. All the contemporary accounts reveal a cold, austere, and exasperating man. Even his servant recalled him laughing only once, when he was asked what was the use of studying Euclid. The slightest criticism of his work drove him into a furious rage, and his life was blighted by vicious feuds with other eminent mathematicians, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Hooke. He had one love in his life—a young Swiss mathematician named Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. The end of their affair caused Newton to have the first of a series of nervous breakdowns, and he almost certainly died a virgin.

Despite these personal failures, the public man was a notable success. He was the first natural philosopher to be knighted and was for many years president of the Royal Society despite achieving nothing of great scientific worth after 1696. In that year, he accepted the post of warden of the Royal Mint. Instead of accepting this as the purely honorific position it was meant to be, Newton took his new role very seriously and attacked it with his customary fanaticism. He spent his days reforming the currency to save the British economy from collapse. In the evenings he lurked in bars and brothels tracking down counterfeiters—whom he then personally arranged to have hanged, drawn, and quartered. He was twice elected MP for Cambridge University but the job held no interest for him; the only comment he made during his entire political career was a request for someone to open the window.

But Newton also had a second, secret life. He was a practicing alchemist. Of the 270 books in his library, more than half were about alchemy, mysticism, and magic. In the seventeenth century, alchemy was considered heresy and a hanging offense. In conditions of utmost secrecy, he spent the bulk of his working life trying to calculate the date of the end of the world as encoded in the Book of Revelation, unravel the meaning of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, and relate the chronology of human history to the population cycle of the locust. Rather like Freud assuming he would be feted as a great scientist, Newton believed that it would be for his religious theories, rather than for his work on optics or motion, that he would be remembered. After his death, Newton’s family discovered vast trunks of these religious and mystical writings containing more than a thousand pages covered with 1.5 million words of notes, as well as two completed books. They were so embarrassed about them that they either destroyed them or kept them hidden without admitting to their existence. A huge cache came to light as recently as 1936.

It would be easy to dismiss Newton’s mystical writings as the ravings of a man who had lost his intellectual bearings. In fact, it was his belief in a creator-god that “governs all things and knows all that is or can be done” that drove his scientific breakthroughs as well as his biblical and alchemical studies. Had he not been open to the notion of an unseen mystical force controlling the universe, he might not have made his most famous discovery: the mathematical proof of the existence of gravity.

If Newton paid for his lonely, fatherless childhood with a debilitating social awkwardness, it also left him peculiarly equipped for intense, solitary work. The mathematician and engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) provides an even more extreme example of this. While not quite in the Newtonian league in terms of scientific achievement, without Heaviside we would have no long-distance telephones and a much less precise understanding of the behavior of electrical and magnetic fields. Though he isn’t a household name, Heaviside did for electromagnetism what Newton did for gravity: describing observable physical phenomena using mathematical equations.

Heaviside was born into poverty in Camden Town, London. His father was a gifted engraver, producing the woodcuts that illustrated the serialization of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in the Strand magazine, but the house was poky, cold, and dark, with most of the windows boarded up because of the window tax. Thomas Heaviside was prone to violent outbursts and tended to pick on Oliver, the youngest of his four sons, because he refused to behave like other children. Some of this was due to Oliver’s partial deafness, caused by catching scarlet fever as a toddler, but the following heartbreakingly short school essay by the young Heaviside paints a dismal picture of life at home:

The following story is true—There was a little boy, and his father said, “Do try to be like other people, don’t frown.” And he tried and tried but he could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions.

His deafness also meant it was hard for him to play easily with other children, so he attended the all-girls school run by his mother. He disliked most academic subjects but was encouraged in a love of science by his uncle, Charles Wheatstone, one of the inventors of the telegraph. As a result, he was regularly at the top in the natural sciences but near the bottom in geometry, which he hated because it only involved learning proofs: There was no