Preface

Summary

FEW MEN HAVE LIVED for whom less need exists to justify a biography. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all times – and, in the opinion of many, not one of the greatest but the greatest. He marked the culmination of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the intellectual transformation that brought modern science into being, and as the representative of that transformation he exerted more influence in shaping the world of the twentieth century, both for good and for ill, than any other single individual. We cannot begin to know too much about this man, and I will forbear to belabor the obvious and will say no more in justification of my book.

The life that I here present is a reduced version of the full-scale Biography Never at Rest, which I published in 1980. In reducing the work in length, I have attempted to make it more accessible to a general audience by also reducing its technical content. (Very little mathematics appears in The Life of Isaac Newton. I invite those who feel the lack not only of mathematics but also of other technical details to consult the longer work.) To facilitate consultation, I have retained the titles of the original chapters; and the contents of the chapters, as condensations, follow the same patterns of organization. The numbers of the chapters do not correspond, however, for in condensing I have eliminated two of the fifteen in Never at Rest (Chapters 1 and 4). Chapter 4 dealt with Newton's development of his fluxional method or calculus; a summary of it appears in Chapter 3, “AnniMirabiles,” of the present book. It should then be easy to locate fuller discussions of any issue. The present Life also contains no footnotes. Anyone wanting to find the source of a particular quotation should be able quickly to locate it in Never at Rest in the same way.

Since publishing Never at Rest, I have moved on from Newton to other issues concerned with the history of early modern science and have not remained actively involved with Newtonian scholarship. Though I am aware of newer work that has appeared in the interim, I have not felt that I had rethought the issues sufficiently to attempt to incorporate it.