Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives

Publishers Weekly

While the prolific Ackroyd (London, among many others), in this addition to his Brief Lives series, doesn't provide new insights into one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, he does present a well-written distillation of the life and accomplishments of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton's scientific achievements are legend, from the creation of calculus to the formulation of the theory of gravity. Ackroyd asserts that the devout Newton, acting largely alone, institutionalized modern scientific method by demanding data and experimentation rather than supernatural explanations based in belief. Even though Newton studied alchemy, it was always within the construct of science, says Ackroyd. The biographer presents the other side of Newton as well: his quirky personality, the insecurity that made it difficult for him to tolerate any criticism and kept him from publishing many of his ideas for extended periods. And he shows how Newton, a loner as a young man, left the isolation of Cambridge University for London and the public sphere as master of the mint and president of the prestigious Royal Society. The vindictive Newton held extended grudges for slights, real or imagined, and Ackroyd summarizes the decades-long disputes with Robert Hooke and Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed. In short, Ackroyd does a commendable job in this introduction to a very complex genius. Illus. (Apr. 15)

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Library Journal

In describing the intellectual vigor that Isaac Newton applied to developing mathematical models of the physical world, to alchemy, to spiritual questions, and to his work with the Royal Mint, as well as his fierce defense of his status as a leading scholar, novelist and accomplished biographer Ackroyd draws a finely detailed miniature of the man renowned for his genius and for his ambition. In this third book of his "Brief Lives" series (after Chaucerand Turner), the author provides his portrait with a richly drawn background of the scientific culture of 17th-century Britain that includes the Royal Society of London and Cambridge University. Those looking for fuller treatments of Newton may be directed to Gale E. Christianson's In the Presence of the Creator, James Gleick's popular Isaac Newton, which includes illustrated discussions of some of Newton's mathematics (Ackroyd steers clear of the math), and The Cambridge Companion to Newton(edited by I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith), an accessible collection of essays by Newton scholars. Ackroyd's book is recommended for public libraries and undergraduate collections.
—Sara Rutter

Kirkus Reviews

Compact biography of the great English scientist, the third in Ackroyd's Brief Lives series (Chaucer, 2005; J.M.W. Turner, 2006). Born on Christmas day 1642, Isaac Newton was the posthumous child of an illiterate yeoman farmer. His mother remarried and left him to be raised by his grandmother. At a local school, he distinguished himself by his inventiveness at creating toys and gadgets; it quickly became apparent he had no aptitude for farming. At his teacher's urging, he was sent to Cambridge, where he so excelled in math that he was appointed a professor at the age of 26. His full genius bloomed during an involuntary vacation forced by the Great Plague of 1665. He experimented with prisms to uncover the nature of light; he worked up the essentials of calculus; and he laid the foundations for a theory of gravitation. Upon his return to the academic world, he began to publish some of what he had learned. Ackroyd points out that Newton was not in any haste to make his mark; indeed, a certain secretiveness characterized his work for much of his life. He delved into alchemical and theological speculations, which he was probably just as wise not to commit to publication. (In fact, had his religious convictions become known, he would undoubtedly have had to resign his academic post.) He also indulged in a series of professional feuds, with Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed and Gottfried Leibnitz in particular, that are perhaps the most regrettable blemish on his reputation. Ackroyd gives enough of the historical context to make Newton's salient character traits and greatest accomplishments clear to the modern reader. A slim but solid introduction, akin to James Gleick's Isaac Newton (2003).

The Barnes & Noble Review

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the few scientists, I think, who has an afterlife in the public imagination. Even schoolchildren have a mental image of him sitting under an apple tree about to be bonked. The secretive Newton will never have a warm haze around him like that of playful, wispy-haired Einstein sticking out his tongue, but just as people can trot out Einstein's E=mc², so they pull out Newton's laws -- e.g., "to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."

But few of us know much else about him, and that's a shame. Details of his life will never overshadow his work -- and that's a good thing -- but they do enlarge our sense of how his work came to be, where his genius resides, and what remains inexplicable about him. Our ignorance isn't the fault of willing biographers. There are several good biographies of Newton in print, especially Richard S. Westfall's thorough one that comes in at almost 1,000 pages. Peter Ackroyd has written thousands of pages of biography alone -- let's forget about the novels and histories and children's books for the moment -- but he has also started a series of Brief Lives through which he can deploy his expository skill, quick eye, and brisk commentary to terrific effect. His biography of Newton weighs in at just a few ounces, but this baby doesn't feel premature or undernourished.

Newton, by contrast, was a sickly infant; indeed, like David Copperfield, he was "a posthumous child," born after his father's death. But due also to his birth on Christmas Day, Newton's beginnings were a mixture of the unprepossessing and the auspicious. His birth into an undistinguished country family in 1642 coincided with the beginning of the English Civil War. Thus his life and career span the political turmoil from Charles I's beheading, through Cromwell's Protectorate, through Charles II's return, James II's abortive reign, William, Mary, Anne, and the German George I, who died in 1727, the same year as Newton. Young Isaac survived his somewhat unhappy family life and education at a local grammar school to head off to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did all of his most important work in mathematics and physics.

And yet Newton's great teachers were not in the lecture halls: they were Euclid, Descartes, and Kepler, all of whom he read and absorbed on his own. One of his greatest talents -- perhaps the only one he shares with Charles Darwin -- was his ability to teach himself what he needed to know, from a curriculum that didn't exist, to prepare for a job for which there was no description. Parallel to this autodidactic talent was Newton's social self-sufficiency. This manifested itself early, in his isolation from other children while he busied himself in making "knick-knacks and models of wood in many kinds." He made a mechanical cart (powered by himself at a windlass), a clock (powered by water), a mill (powered by mouse), and a super-accurate sundial; presumably based on his observations, he also made an almanac.

These details of the scientist's early life seem to have predicted the adult Newton's ability to build his own apparatus for experiments. His parabolic lensed telescope, for example, required a considerable amount of technical skill to conceive and put together -- not only did he build it from scratch, he made the tools to build it, too. But one of his most famous experiments -- Newton's Bucket -- is simple enough that you can rig it up in your backyard. These facts are important: natural philosophers tended to be stronger on abstract philosophizing, leaving more practical studies to barber-surgeons and alchemists along the lines of Victor Frankenstein. The fact is that Newton was interested in confirming his speculations by experiment (and conversely in observing natural phenomena and then speculating about their causes), was able to build his own equipment, and was willing for people to know about it. Newton's questions to himself in his notebooks -- for example, "To try whether the weight of a body may be altered by heate or cold" -- makes it pretty easy to claim him as an early scientist, a word that in its modern meaning wasn't even coined until 1833.

And yet. At the same time that Newton proclaimed his intellectual allegiances -- "Good friends are Aristotle and Plato, but a greater friend is truth" -- he also learned Hebrew the better to understand Old Testament prophecies. He devised an elegant analysis of the constituent parts of light at the same time that he practiced alchemy -- in fact, he arguably took alchemy more seriously. Ackroyd writes, "He did not take [his alchemical work] up, exhaust it, and put it down -- as he did with optics and mathematics. It was a continuing preoccupation, engaging his attention for over thirty years."

I've set these terms up as value-laden opposites, which is how we tend to think of them. Certainly Martin Gardner, a far, far, better reader in this field than I am, sincerely thinks so: "What else might he have discovered had he not squandered his energy and talents on alchemy and Biblical exegesis!" he laments in the April 2008 issue of The New Criterion. After Ackroyd's compressed exegesis of Newton's life, though, I feel even more strongly that for Newton all his studies were part of a whole. He had a sense of an underlying unity of all things everywhere -- a sense both mathematical and mystical. Without it, he might never, say, have made the mental extension from a particular apple drawn to earth to a universal force that binds all bodies together.

There's a lot of material in Ackroyd's brisk traversal of Newton's long life -- his famous professional feuds, for instance, with Leibniz and others, and his zealous tenure running England's Mint. But the material amuses and instructs -- and provides food for thought for what we owe Newton, and a mind unafraid to embrace contradiction. --Alexandra Mullen

Alexandra Mullen left a life as an academic in Victorian literature to return to her roots as a general reader. She now writes for The Hudson Review (where she is also an Advisory Editor), The New Criterion, and The Wall Street Journal.