Newton: the Self-Made Genius. . - Reviews - Newton: The Making of Genius - book review

Contemporary Review, August, 2002 by John Knight

Newton: The Making of Genius. Patricia Fara. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]20.00. 347 pages. ISBN 0-333-90735-3.

Dr Fara is careful to warn her readers at the beginning of this fascinating and well-researched book that it is not a conventional biography, rather an examination of how that most famous of seventeenth century natural philosophers -- born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, on Christmas Day 1642 -- came to be regarded as the world's first scientific genius. (I recommend all those not conversant with the salient details of the great man's life to spend a few minutes with the Encyclopaedia Britannica before embarking on this volume.) Three hundred and fifteen years have passed since Isaac Newton, thanks to considerable financial and moral support from Edmond Halley (of comet fame), published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and, ever since, what is meant by the word 'science', our perceptions of 'genius' and the very image of Isaac Newton have all undergone a process of metamorphosis. 'The story of Newton's shifting reputations', writes Dr Fara, 'is inseparable from the rise of science itself' and s ince, over the centuries and across the world, Newton came to represent different things to different people her journey of exploration does not end with Newton's death and burial in Westminster Abbey but moves on through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into our own time where Newton has become an intellectual icon and 'genius commands the reverence formerly reserved for sanctity'.

Isaac Newton would never have described himself as a 'scientist' -- the word was not coined until more than a century after his death. He was, rather, a reclusive Hebrew scholar and Classicist who wrote more about alchemy and theology than the natural world, and his posthumous reputation is riddled with contradictions. The 'facts' of his life have frequently been disputed and, despite the portraits, statues, busts and commemorative medallions, we're not sure exactly what he looked like since each artist was making a personal or public statement about how a genius should be represented. His death mask, which showed him to have had a sharply receding forehead, created problems for nineteenth century phrenologists since it 'left no room for the organ of causality'. It's little wonder, then, that Salvador Dali's surrealist sculpture of Newton has a 'disturbingly empty oval instead of a face', allowing us to impose our own interpretations of the man. Generations of such interpretations have created mythical vision s of Newton, writes Dr Fara, 'from which the central core of the man himself is missing'.

Even those of us who understand little of Newton's physics would be prepared to swear that an apple falling from a tree in his orchard led him to postulate his revolutionary theory of the earth's gravitational pull. Newton, himself, was the origin of this story, although it didn't take hold of the popular imagination until the early nineteenth century. But was it true? We shall never know for certain and, perhaps, it doesn't really matter. The legend's symbolic importance, argues Dr Fara, far outweighs its basis in truth and, like Archimedes in his bath and Galileo watching a lamp swinging in Pisa cathedral, it has come to symbolise those flashes of intuition by persons of genius which have led to momentous scientific discoveries.

The tale of the falling apple, whether true or false, also tells us that, far from being unaffected by public opinion -- a common myth about genius -- Newton was 'actively engaged in fashioning his posthumous image'. An adept self-publicist, we're told, Albert Einstein, 'who found it advantageous to present himself as Newton's opponent in a head-on confrontation between two intellectual giants', was, nevertheless, more than content to be part of the historic continuum of scientific genius stretching back to Newton. Also, in what Dr Fara describes as 'a bizarre re-enactment of a mythical event', Stephen Hawking was not averse to promoting himself as Newton's natural successor by being photographed in the Woolsthorpe orchard, 'sitting beneath a supposed descendant of the original apple tree'. Most of us have little real understanding of the work of either Einstein or Hawking but, like Newton's Principia, their writings have become fashionable topics of conversation and such is the media pull of Hawking that som e scientists are reluctant to publish papers whose findings are at odds with his.

Isaac Newton was voted Man of the Millennium but, despite his disciples, shrines and icons (about which Dr Fara writes engagingly), his standing as the world's first scientific genius has often had to withstand some pretty severe batterings from his detractors -- most notably, Bishop Berkeley, Gottfried Leibniz and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Closer to our own day, the economist, John Maynard Keynes, put the cat among the pigeons when he said that Newton was not the first great scientist, but the last great magician.