“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
– Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5 February 1675
Sir Isaac Newton revolutionized how human beings see the world … and the universe. He may have been the most influential scientist of all time. It is said that Albert Einstein kept a picture of Newton on his “study wall,” alongside his other pictures of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. But in Newton’s time, the word “scientist” did not exist yet, nor did the phrase “natural science.” Instead, the subject was described as “natural philosophy,” making Newton into a “natural philosopher.” In modern philosophical terms, Newton would be in the empirical tradition, although he showed the influence of some Continental Rationalists like René Descartes as well.
This audiobook is partly a biography of Isaac Newton, and partly an examination of his ideas. But before they dive into his ideas, they spend some time discussing his various influences. As mentioned, his influences included the French mathematician René Descartes, who saw the universe as a mechanical system. (In an oft-cited paraphrase, a “clockwork universe.”) But Newton’s influences also included the chemist Robert Boyle, the astronomer Galileo Galilei, and the astronomer Johannes Kepler. We know that Newton read their works in college, along with many other authors.
Isaac Newton
Newton was a mathematician, as much as he was a scientist. This audiobook goes into some of his mathematical contributions. When covering these contributions (and his other contributions), this audiobook tries to balance the need for accuracy with a need for accessibility. If this audiobook had decided to give too little detail, it would have been hard to do justice to these contributions. If this audiobook had decided to give too much detail, most listeners would have found it incomprehensible. Since I want to keep this discussion understandable, I’ll just mention one of his mathematical contributions here. This was his invention of calculus in the seventeenth century. There was a German mathematician named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who also invented calculus around this same time. They most likely developed it independently of each other, so I think that both men deserve some credit for its development. However, Newton’s way of writing calculus was unnecessarily hard to follow, and thus never really caught on. Leibniz’s way of writing calculus was much easier to follow, and thus is the standard way of writing calculus today.
Isaac Newton
Leibniz seems to have been the better mathematician, but Newton was definitely the greater physicist. As the famous apple story illustrates, Newton is associated with the law of gravity. He even showed that the same laws of motion affecting the planets are also affecting objects here on the earth. Newton expounded some of these theories in a famous work with a long Latin title. The title is “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”). Newton also did work with telescopes and optics, and did a number of experiments with prisms and light. He showed that “white light” contains all of the colors of the rainbow within it, and most of his work in this area has never needed correction. Newton also made a number of contributions to astronomy, and famously formulated some influential laws of motion. They are still known today as “Newton’s Laws of Motion.”
Isaac Newton
I admit freely that I don’t have the scientific background to do justice to these contributions. But this audiobook is clearly written by a person who knows (or at least knew) a lot about it. This person clearly knew a lot about the history, and a lot about the science. The author notes how some of Newton’s ideas have not aged well, such as Newton’s work on alchemy. But Newton may have advanced the study of science further than anyone else ever did. This audiobook is the best introduction to Newton’s contributions that I have ever heard, and is much recommended to any modern student of the history of science. It is an examination of a beautiful mind, who continues to influence the way that we think about our world.
If you liked this post, you might also like:
Part of an audiobook series
Science & Discovery
Isaac Newton’s New Physics
Others to be covered later
See also the audiobook series
The Giants of Philosophy
Others to be covered later
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