I. The Plague

1665. Newton was twenty-two. Plague interrupted life at Cambridge.

The Great Plague of London cast its shadow across the country. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, to the stone farmhouse where he was born. He spent much of the period before spring 1667 there, with a brief return to Cambridge in between.

The years 1665–1666 would later be called his miraculous years. Not one night of revelation, but a period of extraordinarily concentrated work. The name also recalls Einstein’s 1905.

What happened in that stone house?

Newton developed his work on series, fluxions and quadrature, bringing rates of change and accumulated quantities into a new relationship. Calculus did not appear out of empty space. Fermat, Descartes, Wallis, Barrow and others had prepared paths. Newton traveled very far along ground that already held footprints.

He investigated light with prisms. White light opened into a colored band, different colors associated with different degrees of refraction. The famous division into seven colors did not mean nature allowed only seven separate pieces. The important point was that glass had not spoiled a simple, pure whiteness: white light already contained different components.

He also began bringing falling bodies and the Moon into one question. Could the gravity drawing an apple down reach all the way to the Moon? A mature theory of universal gravitation still lay about twenty years of reasoning, dispute and testing ahead.

Twenty-two. Plague. The countryside. An astonishing picture, but not a person cut off from every predecessor and correspondent, producing the whole of physics from nothing.

Einstein’s 1905 yielded four important papers; Newton’s period saw mathematics, optics and gravity grow rapidly together. One worked in a patent office, the other away from university routines. Neither setting looks like the grand academic stage we might expect.

Suffering does not automatically produce discovery, and isolation is no prescription for genius. What we see is someone continuing to work after ordinary life has been interrupted.

In this essay’s picture, Newton leans toward building, Einstein toward carving. Not that one only constructed and the other only demolished. Einstein built too. Newton’s construction also pushed aside an old division between heaven and earth.

II. Construction

In 1687 the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy appeared. The Principia. A book that changed the questions later people could ask.

Three laws of motion.

First: in an inertial frame, when the net external force vanishes, a body remains at rest or moves uniformly in a straight line. Motion does not need a hand continually pushing it forward.

Second: change of motion is related to applied force. In today’s familiar formulation for constant mass, the net force is F = ma.

Third: two interacting bodies exert forces of equal magnitude and opposite direction on each other. Those forces act on different bodies; they do not cancel themselves on a single one.

Add universal gravitation: for two point masses, attraction is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their separation. F = Gm₁m₂/r². Bringing extended celestial bodies into the calculation also requires geometry, mass distributions and proof.

A few principles opened an astonishing field of calculation.

Falling apples. The Moon around Earth. Earth around the Sun. Tides. Kepler’s planetary orbits. Comets coming and going. The arc of a stone thrown near the ground. They entered a common mechanical language, though calculating tides, lunar motion and many-body interactions precisely requires far more than four sentences.

Neglect air resistance and treat near-Earth gravity as constant: the stone follows a parabola. In an ideal two-body gravitational problem, Keplerian orbits can be derived. Assumptions are not disgraceful. State them, and a calculation knows where it stands.

From underfoot to overhead, one set of principles. Here lies this construction’s force: the apple and the Moon need not belong to unrelated kinds of physics.

The Aristotelian tradition distinguished the motions of celestial aether from the changes of four terrestrial elements. Subsequent astronomy, Galileo and others had already loosened that boundary. Newton carried the transformation into a new, systematically demonstrable framework.

Set Qin Shi Huang beside him for a moment. One brought territories under shared administrative standards; the other brought heaven and earth into a common mathematical language. Decrees are enforced through power. Physical theories must face measurement. The comparison concerns an ambition to unify, not the treatment of people and objects as equivalent material.

Nor can a dynasty’s lifespan measure a theory’s life. Qin’s unified dynasty lasted about fifteen years. Newtonian mechanics crossed two centuries and is still at work.

III. He Knew Where the Gap Was

The construction was powerful. Newton did not therefore claim to have explained everything.

How, ultimately, does gravity act?

Earth and Moon are separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Writing their relationship is not the same as knowing its ultimate cause.

In the General Scholium added to the Principia in 1713, Newton wrote: Hypotheses non fingo. “I frame no hypotheses.” He had not derived the cause of gravity’s properties from phenomena.

Pause over the distinction. I can calculate motion with great accuracy. That does not mean I already know why nature possesses such a power.

This was no prohibition on scientific conjecture. Elsewhere Newton offered hypotheses and questions about aether and the action of matter. Here he refused to pass an unsupported explanation off as knowledge already secured.

More than two centuries later, general relativity described gravity through spacetime geometry. Freely falling bodies follow geodesics in curved spacetime. Changes in the gravitational field still propagate; gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. Describing gravity geometrically does not make its changes instantaneous.

In this essay’s language, Newton left a place for what was unknown. A theory that calculates well need not be proclaimed the final explanation.

We can place that posture beside the suppression of dissent through Qin’s book prohibitions. But an unanswered physical question and a person’s right to speak are not the same kind of remainder. Two different historical durations prove no law rewarding virtue and punishing vice.

Newton’s interests did not stop at the door of mechanics.

Long before the Principia he was studying alchemy and theology: copying manuscripts, conducting experiments, examining church history, reading Daniel and Revelation, interpreting prophetic periods. These labors shared his desk with mathematics. They were not a retirement project begun after physics was finished.

He sought hidden order in these pages too. We can question that desire without diagnosing a person from the subjects he studied, or declaring that success had persuaded him he knew everything.

In 1720 another kind of order cost him dearly: the South Sea Bubble. Archival research supports the outline of profitable early sales followed by renewed investment at high prices. His losses were substantial. The familiar £20,000 figure includes elements of estimate and transmitted story; it does not mean he ended up penniless.

A saying widely attributed to him contrasts calculating heavenly motions with being unable to calculate people’s madness. Its transmission is less secure than the text of the Principia. It can remain an echo of this story without becoming a verbatim recording beside the accounts.

The Moon’s orbit and a judgment in a market call for different knowledge. A loss of money does not refute universal gravitation. It does remind us that precision gained in one field is not automatic mastery of every part of life. F = ma is not the whole study of human beings.

IV. The Other Side

The ability to build a powerful theory does not guarantee fairness toward other people.

Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently. Newton’s early work came first; Leibniz published first and introduced enormously influential notation and methods. Their later priority dispute moved beyond mathematics into reputation, accusations of plagiarism and institutional power.

In 1712 the Royal Society appointed a committee to examine the dispute. Newton, its president, was deeply involved in selecting material and composing the report. It supported his priority while unfairly implying that Leibniz had plagiarized. Newton later anonymously reviewed the report as well. A party to a dispute speaking his own verdict through an institution does not become a trivial matter because that party is great.

His conflicts with Hooke over optics and gravity also left scars. Later stories even made the absence of Hooke’s portrait into an act of destruction by Newton. Yet the evidence that such a portrait ever hung at the Royal Society is itself uncertain. Their quarrels are real; destruction of a portrait does not follow from them.

Another desk stood at the Royal Mint. Newton became Warden in 1696 and Master in 1699. He interviewed suspects and informers, assembled testimony and prosecuted counterfeiting. This was no mathematical game on paper. His investigations entered a harsh penal system, and some defendants were executed.

The farmhouse, papers, committee, coinage and interrogations. One talent does not illuminate everything; one wrongdoing does not burn every achievement away.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems concern particular formal systems. They cannot establish that a personality is consistent but incomplete. To judge Newton’s use of power we need letters, actions and the people affected, not a mathematical stamp on an ethical judgment.

Washington’s relinquishment of office does not erase his enslavement of people. Einstein’s objection to quantum theory’s completeness cannot be placed beside slavery and institutional injustice as the same sort of moral failing. Each question needs its own scrutiny. Great work is no certificate of innocence; criticizing a person does not cancel that person’s standing as a human being.

V. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

In 1676 Newton wrote to Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The letter also praised work by Descartes and Hooke. Posterity has read the sentence as modesty, or suspected mockery. We need not stake an unverifiable inner drama on Hooke’s stature. First look at the relationship the words acknowledge.

His construction did not begin from zero.

Kepler described regularities in planetary motion. Galileo advanced the study of falling bodies and motion. Descartes brought algebra and geometry into new relations. Barrow, Wallis and others supplying observations and questions were also on the road. Halley’s encouragement and support for publication helped the Principia leave Newton’s desk.

Newton inherited these works and changed them. He did not place the fragments unchanged into a box. He made previously separate results available for mutual derivation and testing.

Placing Confucius and Homer nearby reveals a limited common ground: transmission does not exclude creation. Confucius’ transmitting, and the Homeric movement from oral performance to composed epic, cannot simply be reduced to one person editing a book. Neither is an early version of Newtonian mechanics.

Yet new things often grow where others have already lived, questioned and sung. Naming predecessors does not diminish one’s work.

To transmit is not only to repeat. What passes into another pair of hands can acquire new relations and new strength.

VI. Two Hundred Years

How long did Newton’s construction last?

From the Principia in 1687 to special relativity in 1905: 218 years. General relativity followed another decade later, in 1915. Those dates mark changes to different questions about space, time and gravity.

Across that long period, Newtonian mechanics profoundly reshaped engineering and astronomy. People used it and its later developments to build bridges, ships and trains, to calculate planets and comets. Heat, electricity, magnetism and light were also being investigated. Physics never consisted of the Principia alone.

Difficulties did not wait for Einstein to appear. The anomalous advance of Mercury’s perihelion had become a problem in the nineteenth century. A theory’s enormous success does not mean two centuries without discrepancies.

Then Einstein changed the scale of the questions.

Special relativity recast spacetime relations at high speeds; general relativity recast gravity. Under suitable conditions, including speeds much lower than light and weak gravitational fields, Newtonian descriptions reappear as excellent approximations.

Approximation is not carelessness. It has an accuracy and a boundary. A formula good enough for a bridge may not suffice for precision astronomy. Even the Moon’s orbit requires relativistic corrections at sufficiently high accuracy.

So being contained is a conditional description. The newer theory explains why the older works over so much territory and where it falls short. Newton’s absolute space and time did not move into the new theory unchanged.

Quantum theory also transformed descriptions of the microscopic world. Classical mechanics did not therefore leave classrooms, factories and launch sites. Its continuing usefulness does not make it the final answer at every scale.

We cannot apply this relationship indiscriminately throughout the series. Socrates’ clearing is not another thinker’s low-speed limit; Confucius’ humaneness is not an approximation to a formula; Kant’s thing-in-itself is not a measurement error. Different thoughts need different measures of comparison.

That Newton’s theory has a domain of validity is a conclusion drawn through physical reasoning and experiment, not Gödel’s theorem fulfilled again in history. Remainder here simply reminds us to keep looking at phenomena not yet explained.

VII. Newton and the Others

Bring these figures together once more. This is the series’ reading image, not a single-sentence verdict on each life.

Qin Shi Huang enlarged institutional uniformity and narrowed dissent through book prohibitions and executions. His dynasty was short; its institutional legacies continued to change. Washington returned power twice without giving everyone on his estate freedom. Alexander’s unified kingship broke apart; cultural connections did not reset to zero.

Kant wrote three Critiques and asked after reason’s limits. The Buddha taught people to use a raft without clinging to it, not to destroy every teaching. Einstein followed beauty and order while facing the distance between theory and world. The Homeric tradition carried voices across generations into writing.

Newton brought many motions in heaven and on earth into common mathematical relationships. Later theories changed the map’s boundaries without erasing all its roads.

Today’s rockets and bridges still depend on classical mechanics and its subsequent development. His is not the only work here that could be inherited, but it makes inheritance through change unusually concrete: the old formula remains on paper and still connects calculation to things.

This is not a construction without gaps. It withstands repeated use and must remain open to testing. Reliable does not mean all-explaining.

I like to imagine it as a particularly solid brick. Not to declare Newton the winner over everyone else, but to think of how many later people can still entrust weight to it.

At this series’ imagined bridgehead stand carvers, builders, people carved by life, and those who have departed. Newton is not the entire bridge. Without his brick, however, a substantial stretch would be missing.

VIII. The Apple

At the end, return to the apple.

In the memoir he completed in 1752, William Stukeley recalled a conversation with Newton in 1726. They drank tea in a garden. Newton told him of seeing an apple fall when he was young, and thinking about gravity.

In this recollection, why did the apple move toward Earth’s center rather than sideways or upward? If matter attracts matter, the apple also draws Earth toward itself. The question reached beyond the tree, gradually toward the Moon and the heavens.

It is no account of an apple striking his head, nor an immediate notebook entry from which the entire discovery can be reconstructed. But the way someone tells the beginning of his life’s work in old age is worth hearing too.

An apple falls. Someone refuses to let that is simply how things are become the final answer.

This essay calls the question carving: making the familiar strange again. What followed was not one flash explaining everything, but roughly twenty years of calculation, conversation, revision and construction.

Question: why does the apple fall? Answer: try connecting it to the Moon through universal gravitation. F = Gm₁m₂/r². The answer carries the question farther and leaves new questions behind.

We leave the final picture at Woolsthorpe: a man in his early twenties, a stone house, a garden, a falling apple. It is a literary scene drawn along a late recollection, not a replacement for a missing contemporary diary.

Later he built a calculable world of heaven and earth. Not the whole universe. Enough, however, for someone beneath a tree to see the Moon anew.

Notes

Newton was born on December 25, 1642 in the English Old Style calendar, January 4, 1643 Gregorian, and was twenty-two in summer 1665. His plague-period absence included a brief return to Cambridge. The miraculous years name concentrated early work, not a completed Principia. Calculus had a long prehistory; the spectrum is continuous, not seven separate natural ingredients.

The laws follow the 1687 Principia’s Axioms, or Laws of Motion. F = ma is the familiar modern constant-mass formulation in an inertial frame; the inverse-square expression here is for point masses. Extended bodies require treatment of mass distributions. Orbits, tides and projectiles involve idealizations and later developments, not four slogans that finish the calculation.

Hypotheses non fingo appeared in the General Scholium added in 1713; the linked English translation is from 1729. Its context is the cause of gravity not yet derived from phenomena, not a lifelong ban on conjecture. General relativity describes gravity geometrically without making changes instantaneous: gravitational waves propagate at light speed.

Alchemy, biblical studies and mathematical natural philosophy overlapped for decades. Newton’s religious interpretations also differed from prevailing doctrines; neither interest nor belief establishes a retrospective medical diagnosis. South Sea trading is discussed through archival research. The familiar £20,000 loss and saying about people’s madness do not have the same evidential status as original accounts or Newton’s own writing. No single modern currency equivalent is asserted.

Newton developed fluxions earlier; Leibniz independently developed and first published calculus. Distinguish the 1712 Royal Society inquiry, the subsequent publication and Newton’s anonymous review. His involvement as president and interested party matters. Evidence for Hooke’s portrait, its ownership and disappearance does not establish destruction by Newton. Mint records support interviewing, gathering evidence and prosecution, not the dramatic disguise scenes repeated in popular biography.

The shoulders-of-giants sentence comes from Newton’s 1676 letter to Hooke, which acknowledges both Descartes and Hooke. Mockery of Hooke’s stature is not established. The Confucius and Homer comparison is the essay’s reading of transmission and creation, not an assertion of identical historical mechanisms or a reduction of predecessors to passive suppliers.

Mercury’s anomalous perihelion advance was identified in the nineteenth century. Special relativity in 1905 and general relativity in 1915 have distinct roles. Classical approximations depend on such conditions as low speed, weak field and required accuracy; microscopic phenomena also involve quantum theory. Gödel’s theorems prove neither character defects, empirical limits of physics nor civilizational lifespans. Non dubito means not wavering on the subject’s standing as an end, not merely a means; conduct remains open to criticism.

The apple story follows Stukeley’s 1752 memoir recalling the conversation of April 15, 1726. It contains no apple striking a head. The universe, brick, bridge, group portrait and final farmhouse garden are the author’s interpretive images. They neither exclude predecessors and collaborators nor supply new historical evidence.

Sources and further reading: The Newton Project: life and work chronology · Newton: the laws of motion in the Principia (1687) · Newton: General Scholium (1729 English translation) · The Newton Project: introduction to scientific, alchemical and religious manuscripts · Andrew Odlyzko: archival research on Newton and financial bubbles · Newton: draft account of the calculus priority report · The Royal Society: Hooke, Newton and the missing portrait · The Royal Mint Museum: Newton’s work and investigations · Newton manuscript catalogue: Chaloner’s case · Newton’s 1676 letter to Hooke, reproduced by Brewster · NASA: teaching materials on Newton, Einstein and Mercury · LIGO: What are gravitational waves? · Stukeley: Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752)

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives