Behind the legend
During the first wave of Covid-19, Isaac Newton briefly trended on social media. “When Newton stayed at home to avoid the 1665 plague, he discovered the laws of gravity, optics, and he invented calculus,” read one version of the meme. Its message – What will you achieve during lockdown? – was only slightly diminished by the fact that Newton’s vaunted annus mirabilis is largely a myth.
In her 2002 book Newton: The Making of Genius, Patricia Fara showed how the myth of Newton as an ascetic intellectual, a scientific saint who thought little of food or sleep, was constructed by a group of admirers. In Life After Gravity, we re-encounter them as friends and colleagues of the mature Newton: a cosmopolitan gentleman and wealthy administrator. Fara is a Cambridge academic, but the university city, home to a younger Newton, barely features. Instead we are thrown into London life at the turn of the 18th century.
The book is neatly structured around a Hogarth painting replete with Newtonian symbolism. This is not the squalid London of Gin Lane but the burgeoning imperial hub of Handel and Walpole. The painting depicts a theatrical performance in the richly decorated drawing room of John Conduitt, Newton’s quasi-son-in-law and his successor as master of the Royal Mint. A bust of the great man looks down on an audience of princes and aristocrats. Fara reveals how the supposedly reclusive mathematical philosopher was plugged into high society; he was a wealthy investor in the ill-fated South Sea Company and, through his presidency of the Royal Society, supported the growing slave trade.
Science is always part of society, as Fara entertainingly shows. She assembles an array of sources to show how the cold questions of physics Newton was considering as he corrected the second edition of the Principia were woven into the theology and politics of Hanoverian 'ngland.