Sublime spirit! Vast and profound genius! Divine being! Newton, deign to accept the homage of my feeble talents!. . . Surely even an idiot uses the same ink as a man of genius?
Étienne-Louis Boullée, 1784
Salvador Dalí’s startling surrealist sculpture of Isaac Newton is an elegant abstract figure, its outstretched hand holding a ball on the end of a rope (Figure 0.1). Despite its rippling musculature, this polished bronze humanoid has a hollow body and a disturbingly empty oval instead of a face. By obliterating Newton’s personality, Dalí implicitly invites us to impose our own interpretations. Similarly, generations of interpreters have created mythical visions of Newton from which the central core of the man himself is missing.
Although Newton wrote far more on alchemy, theology and ancient chronology than on either gravity or optics, he is now universally acclaimed as a scientific genius. Many good biographies fill in the details of Newton’s life – Dalí’s central void. In contrast, Newton: The Making of Genius examines how Newton was converted into the world’s first scientific genius. The story of Newton’s shifting reputations is inseparable from the rise of science itself. During the last three centuries, our views of Newton, science and genius have all changed dramatically, and this book explores these transformations. Repeatedly made to mean different things for different people, Newton has become an intellectual icon for our modern age, when genius commands the reverence formerly reserved for sanctity.
Newton was born well over 300 years ago, and much has happened since then. This may be stating the obvious, but it explains why comprehensiveness is not just impossible, but undesirable. To clarify the ways in which multiple versions of Newton’s life have been created, this book deliberately leaves a lot out. It is emphatically not a conventional biography: on the contrary, one of its central arguments is that no ‘true’ representation of Newton exists. The narrative moves from Newton’s lifetime to the present, hinging about the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a key period when science became consolidated and genius took on new meanings. Newton’s ideas and opinions permeate this study of idolatry, but it is written for readers with no particular scientific, religious or historical expertise.
There are many different ways of telling history. History of science is a relatively new field, which came into its own after the Second World War. Partly in response to public repulsion at the atomic bomb, several eminent scientists wrote ‘Plato to NATO’ accounts that celebrated science’s progressive march towards the truth. But these stories, appealing though they may be, now seem too simplistic and triumphal. Since the 1970s, sociologists have been minutely dissecting specific episodes from the past to reveal the social, political, economic and religious constraints that affect scientific practices and knowledge. Currently, historians are exploring new ways of incorporating these micro-studies within long-term analyses of science’s rising power. This study of Newton’s posthumous reputations responds to that challenge.
Newton is not just another dead white male scientist, but a major figurehead who symbolizes individual brilliance and scientific achievement. Moreover, he has helped to define what those very concepts mean. We can only view Newton’s accomplishments and experiences through the refracting prism of a society that has itself been constantly changing. Examining his fleeting images illuminates how we have come to see ourselves.