And then roughly three million related to science and math.” There are about one million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about one million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. Indeed, as Dry explains: “There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. His experiments in alchemy and chemistry have yet to be published.”

However, they say, “less widely recognised is the fact that Newton was among the most skilled experimental scientists in history… because such a large fraction of Newton’s experimental work is not well known. They note that Newton is “commonly listed with Gauss as the greatest mathematicians in history”. So he’s become an icon, both more and less than human.”Īs Cohen and Smith explain, however, “what we now call science was then still part of philosophy, so-called ‘natural philosophy’, as in the full title of the work that turned Newton into a legend, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy… Newton’s Principia is the single work that most effected the divorce of physics, and hence science generally, from philosophy.” If you ask people to name a scientist, they’re going to say Newton, Einstein, or Darwin. “He was this shining emblem of Enlightenment rationality. “In the history of science there is no greater figure than Newton,” she said. Sarah Dry, author of The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, was equally bold when she spoke to Wired magazine in 2014.

The show’s curator, California Institute of Technology history professor Mordechai Feingold, told the New York Sun newspaper that “Newton became science personified”. In announcing a 2004 exhibition at the New York Public Library titled The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, Scientific American magazine wrote that “the pantheon of science holds few rivals of Isaac Newton, who co-invented calculus, analysed planetary motion mathematically and separated white light into its component colours”. “Without dispute Newton was the giant of science in the 17th and 18th centuries,” they wrote.Ĭohen and Smith declared, however, that the science for which Newton is known “occupied a much smaller fraction of his total intellectual life”, and that recent scholarship has brought added “appreciation of his efforts in such other areas as theology, prophesy, and alchemy”.

Isaac Newton by Michael White