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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN num: 9781400032952
ISBN number: 1400032954
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: June 08, 2004
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: June 08, 2004
Sale Popularity Level: 20971
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation.
James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion—ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it can truly be said: We are all Newtonians.
Amazon.com Review:
As a schoolbook figure, Isaac Newton is most often pictured sitting under an apple tree, about to discover the secrets of gravity. In this short biography, James Gleick reveals the life of a man whose contributions to science and math included far more than the laws of motion for which he is generally famous. Gleick's always-accessible style is hampered somewhat by the need to describe Newton's esoteric thinking processes. After all, the man invented calculus. But readers who stick with the book will discover the amazing story of a scientist obsessively determined to find out how things worked. Working alone, thinking alone, and experimenting alone, Newton often resorted to strange methods, as when he risked his sight to find out how the eye processed images:
.... Newton, experimental philosopher, slid a bodkin into his eye socket between eyeball and bone. He pressed with the tip until he saw 'severall white darke & coloured circles'.... Almost as recklessly, he stared with one eye at the sun, reflected in a looking glass, for as long as he could bear.
From poor beginnings, Newton rose to prominence and wealth, and Gleick uses contemporary accounts and notebooks to track the genius's arc, much as Newton tracked the paths of comets. Without a single padded sentence or useless fact, Gleick portrays a complicated man whose inspirations required no falling apples. --Therese Littleton
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Rated by buyers 
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This audio CD based on the paperback by James Gleick is a very good source for people interested in obtaining a very detailed explanation of Sir Isaac Newton's life and works in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Religion and Philosophy. If however, the reader wants to obtain just a summary of Newton's life and works, this CD is far too detailed for him / her.
The CD explains the cooperation and / or rivalry between Newton and other famous scientists, mathematicians and philosophers of his era. So the listener also learns about how Descartes, Bacon, Huygens, Leibniz,Locke, Hook and many others approached the same issues. The conformity and discrepancies between Newton's and these other thinkers' opinions and methodologies about various physics and mathematics topics and their views of the universe are analyzed. Sometimes differences of opinion have led to personal rivalries between Newton and some of them.
Nevertheless, Newton is one of the greatest men whose works have shaped mankind's understanding of the universe. This audio CD clearly makes us understand his contributions. It is not an abstract explanation of Newton and other scientists' theories alone but a practical application of these theories in interpreting our universe. It is made clear that subsequent works by other scientists such as the General Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein that challenged Newton's interpretation of the universe, absolute time and space have not belittled Newton's contributions. On the contrary, Newton's ideas developed more than 250 years ago were and still are a great stepping stone that led to the development of subsequent scientific theories like those of Einstein.
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Newton the man was a classic, and this slim, readable biography is very good. Newton studied and wrote in secret, argued and lived in public, recreated the world we live in, and knew he stood subsequent to God Himself in understanding the creation.
Interestingly, millions of words of his works were sold in small lots after his death and scattered about Europe; to date, much remains unpublished..
Rated by buyers 
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Gleick brought Newton's world to life in this tightly written biography. I felt, though, that it left a lot out. I am interested in reading other biographies of Newton because he seemed so fascinating. It is a glimpse at an amazing figure with some elucidation on science and the world of Newton's time.
I felt that Gleick took some liberties in saying that Newton presented a fork in the road as far as the divorce of philosophy from science. That had been going on since Descartes, even if Descartes' science was mistaken philosophy wouldn't know the difference. Also, left out, was mention of Ovid's Metamorphosis as an alchemist's cookbook.
Reading this I felt like I was reading a half hour summary of movie fragments of a 12 hour motion picture; but at least I still want to see the motion picture. I think there may be better biographies out there. I hope
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Several versions of Isaac Newton's life have evolved in the three centuries since his death in 1727. They are the products of admirers, detractors, philosophers, scientist, and poets. Some have the virtue of being partially true. Indeed, Isaac Newton was brilliant, restless, creative, vindictive, and proud. That his image yesterday is so disjointed comes as no surprise. James Gleick attempts to sort the wheat from the chaff, but his work goes far beyond that, to a splendid essay of Newton in his time.
The 17th century was a curious time to be alive in England. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his brilliant study of the Reformation, identifies Newton as the pivotal character in the swing from theology to science as the defining key of existence. But the old cosmologies were dying slow, painful deaths, while the new ones were generally infantile, utopian, or speculative. Even Galileo hesitated at very first to turn his telescope to the skies, for fear of offending the divine, and when he finally caught glimpse of Saturn, the imperfections of his optics led him to announce "a planet with handles." [Newton himself had to disguise his mathematics of infinity under the cloak of annuity interest projections to maintain proper theological etiquette at Cambridge.] The new science, such as it was, required as much faith as the old religion. A few souls like Kepler understood that there might be logic at the root, but his mathematics were daunting.
What makes Newton's life so interesting is the intellectual and philosophical journey that took him from the age of Galileo into the age of Einstein. He attended Cambridge in the aftermath of Oliver Cromwell but his Protestantism was not entirely appropriate as he harbored closet doubts about the Holy Trinity, finding no scriptural basis for it. His theology evolved from Aristotle as much as from anyone. He respected Aristotle's concept of First Cause, and he had enough innate oppositional defiance to approach his studies with a rigorous scientific method in the manner of The Philosopher, chips fall where they will.
Newton excelled in mathematics, physics, and mechanics, and his interests were broad enough that he brought a philosopher's eye to these various disciplines. In a sense he began his life's work while still a college student, looking for a unifying factor or factors to all the known sciences and disciplines of his day. This was a gargantuan task, and its audacity took Newton to the virtual doorstep of the best of medieval theology. His quest became an obsession, and for several solitary years it led him down the dark alley of alchemy. Alchemy was highly suspect; its practitioners were considered either heretics for seeking divine secrets, or outright charlatans looking to create gold. Newton, however, was attempting to find a bridge between the stasis of matter and the observable flux of actual life.
What seemed to bring Newton out of his cave was the appearance of a spectacular comet in 1681. A young astronomer named Halley, an early admirer of Newton's work, postulated that comets might be cyclic objects with elliptic trajectories. Halley's thesis on the trajectory of comets--rather easily substantiated even in his day by visual observation and Kepler's foundational math--was a physical puzzlement in an age when behavior of heavenly bodies was something of a psychological/religious given. Not even the telescope had shaken that. Why, then, would a comet make what amounts to a 270 degree change in trajectory as it passed the sun?
Gleick traces with broad sweeps Newton's intense pursuit of an answer, which led to the basic laws of physics we call Newtonian. Gleick's economy is appreciated: Newton's paper trail is extensive and exhaustive; one key to his sucess was exactitude. [The economist John Maynard Keynes led an extensive recent effort to recover and catalogue Newton's body of work.] Although his publications in his day had modest circulation due to the highly technical nature--Halley, in fact, funded some of the publishing--there were two polarities permeating his theories that captured public attention and attracted considerable criticism in his time: his dependence upon the invisible, and the extensiveness of his claims.
There is irony in the fact that Newton's passion for scientific verifiable method allowed room for what his enemies would deride as invisible forces. Gravity is the most obvious example, though here the difficulty was mathematical semantics: just as most of us labor with the material reality of e=mc(2), so too in Newton's day the mathematics and physics underlying gravitational force escaped even many professionals of his time. But in other areas of his work Newton claimed a certainty that was at best hypothetical and at times almost magical. So confident was he in the power of computation and observation that he promoted his ideas about atoms and light transmission, for example, ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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James Gleick has written some excellent books -- Chaos and Genius, but this book fails to clear that bar.
Inside the front flap of the dust cover it reads "In this original, sweeping, and intimate biography, Gleick moves between a comprehensive historical portrait and a dramatic focus on Newton's significant letters and unpublished notebooks to illiminate the real importance of his work in physics, in optics, and in calculus." In my opinion, the book fails to meet this objective. The biography and other information is superficial and far from initimate -- the book is a good introduction to basic facts but no more than that. His biography of Richard Feynman in Genius comes much closer to the goal of an intimate biography.
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