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“... There are at least three possible portraits of Isaac Newton. Traditional internalist historians of science depict him as an aloof scholar, remote from the world, solving in his Cambridge ivory tower problems which derived logically from the state of contemporary mathematical knowledge. A second approach, which originated with the Soviet scientist Hessen, relates the problems which Newton studied, together with other scientists of his day, to the economic needs of rising capitalist society, or draws attention to the continued influence of his Puritan background on his mode of thought ...”

“... and also for having the nerve to lay accusations of malpractice against ‘that Worthy Gentleman Isaac Newton Esq.’ No one could read about the life and death of William Chaloner without suspecting that there may be more to it than meets the eye. Was he as guilty as he was made out to be, or was he framed as a result of an unwise choice of ...”

“... on a run-down country estate in Ireland where he hopes to put the finishing touches to a book on Isaac Newton. Gradually, his research takes a back seat as he becomes fascinated with the family on whose property he is living. Edward Lawless is a wreck of a man, clumsy, inarticulate, frequently drunk; his wife Charlotte is noble, suffering, strangely ...”

“... first review of the Principia began, in summer 1687: from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three years earlier, during a visit to Cambridge, he had posed the puzzle which started Newton on the path to ...”

“... The life of Isaac Newton falls into two halves, and the main problem for Newton studies is how to fit them together. In the first half he was a sulky Cambridge mathematician who, at the age of 44, astonished the world with a work of natural science that was soon recognised as one of the greatest books ever written ...”

“... Joined for all time on the title-page of the Book that Made the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands’ and one of the multitude who understood scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women ...”

“... In one of the most celebrated expressions of scientific humility, Isaac Newton said that he felt himself to have been ‘only like a boy playing on the seashore . . . whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Kary Mullis approaches the seashore from a different direction. On the day he won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis went surfing ...”

“... his doings with those of anyone else. He is a figure of the same chronological vintage as Sir Isaac Newton, dabbling in alchemy and gravity by turns, and he exhibits a perhaps comparable mixture (though in very different proportions) of the open-minded and the credulous. Coming as he does right on the edge of the Enlightenment, he does not provide ...”

“... Lee and Alistair Fraser put it, to question the rainbow wisdom of the Royal Society’s President, Isaac Newton: ‘I begin now to imagine, that the Rainbow seldom appears very lively without something of this Nature, and that the suppos’d exact Agreement between the Colours of the Rainbow and those of the Prism, is the reason that it has been so little ...”

“... remains – so far – curiously distant and opaque. As Keynes himself wrote in his essay on Isaac Newton, ‘geniuses are very peculiar,’ and it may be the case that no academic account can fully recapture Keynes’s extraordinary mixture of grossness and sensitivity, intuition and logical power. A playwright might do it, as has been done for ...”

“... the leadership Trinity gave to science by using her great wealth to found the Science Park and the Isaac Newton Institute, and make Cambridge a scientific city as well as a university. Brooke replies that he is writing the history of the university not the colleges. Winstanley wrote his history of later Victorian Cambridge by minutely analysing ...”

“... early 1880s to recognise that all was not well with their discipline. Two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton had bequeathed to them a remarkable system of laws which made it possible for them to describe – and predict – the motion of everything from an apple falling from a tree near Woolsthorpe to the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. When Mach ...”

“... despite his admiration for Perrault’s writings, was also interested in the occult, and that Isaac Newton considered the Temple of Solomon ‘the original divine exemplar for all building’. Newton saw the drawings of the Temple made by the antiquarian William Stukeley. Where Villalpando’s Temple looks like the ...”

“... the book of his works certain parallels can be drawn. That earlier master of nature’s forces, Isaac Newton, had specified rules for the correct reading of each. It is striking how similar they were for the two books, Newton himself having drawn attention to the quest for simplicity as a common desideratum. As with ...”

“... he was admitted in person to his fellowship, and had the privilege of being welcomed by Sir Isaac Newton. During his later years he pursued his researches in Italy, Provence and Switzerland, and – obsessed as ever by water – collected materials for another book, a Physical History of the Sea. He turned back, too, to his native Bologna, which he ...”