On the Shoulders of Giants

'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,' wrote Isaac Newton in a letter to his fellow-scientist Robert Hooke, but for many people, it was Newton himself who was the giant.

'In one person,' said Albert Einstein in 1932, 'he combined the experimenter, the theorist, the mechanic, and, not least, the artist in exposition.'

10 years later, the economist John Maynard Keynes saw him as 'The last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.'

Nearer his own time, Voltaire wrote that 'A man such as Newton, the like of whom is scarcely to be found in ten centuries, is the truly great man, and the politicians and conquerors, in which no period has been lacking, are usually nothing more than illustrious criminals.'

There are, of course, examples of more qualified praise. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while admitting that 'Newton was a great man,' added that he must be excused for thinking that 'it would take many Newtons to make one Milton.'

Alexander Pope noted that 'Sir Isaac Newton, though so deep in algebra and fluxions, could not readily make up a common account: and, when he was Master of the Mint, used to get somebody to make up his accounts for him.'

Newton himself said that however he might appear to the world, 'to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

The image of continuing scientific discovery is an attractive one, but it is impossible to see Newton only as one among many. Pope in his 'Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton' wrote: 'Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'

To quote his actual epitaph, in Westminster Abbey: 'Here lies Sir Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a vigour of mind almost supernatural, first demonstrated, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of the comets, and the tides of the oceans - Let mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of Nature.'

Isaac Newton is published by OUP (Hardback) $18.95.

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