Olivia: Alright Jackson, pop quiz. Close your eyes and picture Isaac Newton. What’s the first thing that comes to mind from your high school history class? Jackson: Oh, easy. An apple falls on his head, he yells "Eureka!"—or maybe "Gravity!"—and then proceeds to invent physics in a single afternoon. Also, he had fantastic, flowing white hair. Like, truly epic wig game. Olivia: The wig game was undeniable. But that image—the apple, the instantaneous flash of genius—is exactly the myth we're going to dismantle today. It’s a great story, but it’s maybe ten percent of the real, much stranger, and far more interesting man. Jackson: I'm intrigued. If it’s not just about the apple, then what is it about? Olivia: It’s about a mind so complex it’s almost a contradiction. And we're diving into it with one of my favorite biographies, Isaac Newton by James Gleick. What’s fantastic about this book is that Gleick is a master science writer. He’s not just giving us a dry, academic timeline; his whole mission is to get inside the head of this famously reclusive, difficult, and brilliant human being. The book is widely acclaimed for being this concise, powerful, and almost poetic look at his life. Jackson: Okay, so Gleick is our guide to the man behind the wig and the apple. So if the cartoon version is wrong, where do we even begin with the real Isaac Newton?

Olivia: We start where the legend does, but with the real details. It’s the 1660s, the Great Plague is ravaging England, and Cambridge University shuts down. So Newton, a young, unknown student in his early twenties, retreats to his family’s isolated farmhouse in Woolsthorpe. Jackson: So he’s basically in quarantine. A situation some of us might be familiar with. But I’m guessing he did a bit more than just bake sourdough and watch TV. Olivia: Just a bit. In about eighteen months of intense, solitary thought, he lays the groundwork for calculus, revolutionizes the science of optics, and formulates his laws of motion and universal gravitation. It’s often called the most productive intellectual period in human history. Jackson: That is absolutely insane. He just… decided to invent modern physics because he was bored? Olivia: Essentially. And this is where the apple story comes in. He didn't get bonked on the head. Gleick describes him sitting in the garden, seeing an apple fall. The genius wasn't in observing the fall, but in the question he asked next: if the force of gravity can pull that apple from the branch, does that same force extend further? Does it reach all the way to the top of the atmosphere? Does it reach… the Moon? Jackson: Hold on. So before Newton, people thought the rules on Earth were different from the rules in space? Olivia: Completely. The old Aristotelian view was that the heavens were perfect and unchanging, governed by their own divine laws. The Earth was corrupt and chaotic, with its own set of rules. Newton’s radical idea was that the same, single, universal law governed both the falling apple and the orbiting moon. He unified the heavens and the Earth with one mathematical equation. Jackson: Wow. When you put it like that, it’s not just about an apple, it’s about tearing down two thousand years of thinking and replacing it with a single, elegant idea. Olivia: Exactly. And that idea became the heart of his masterpiece, the Principia Mathematica. It’s probably the most important scientific book ever published. It lays out the laws of motion and gravity, and basically describes the universe as a giant, predictable, mechanical clock. A clockwork universe. Jackson: A book that big must have been a huge deal for the scientific community at the time. Olivia: You would think! But here’s a fantastic story from the book that shows how fragile progress can be. The Royal Society, England’s main scientific body, was supposed to publish it. But they were broke. They had just spent all their money publishing a lavishly illustrated book called The History of Fishes, which had been a commercial disaster. Jackson: You cannot be serious. They couldn't afford to publish the laws of the universe because they blew their budget on a fish book? Olivia: A fish book. So Newton’s friend, the astronomer Edmond Halley—the guy Halley’s Comet is named after—stepped in. He believed so strongly in Newton's work that he paid for the entire publication out of his own pocket. The Royal Society, as a thank you, offered to pay Halley his salary in… leftover copies of The History of Fishes. Jackson: That is the most brutal, nerdy, 17th-century insult I have ever heard. But thank goodness for Halley. Without him, we might not have the Principia. Olivia: We might not. And the Principia cemented this image of Newton as the ultimate rationalist. The man who, as the poet Alexander Pope wrote, brought light to a world where "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night." He even did it literally with his work on optics. He conducted what he called the Experimentum Crucis, the "Crucial Experiment," using prisms in a dark room to prove that white light isn't pure, but is actually a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. He unwove the rainbow, as the poet John Keats would later complain. Jackson: Okay, so the picture is clear. He's a solitary, hyper-rational genius. He figures out gravity, motion, light, calculus… he builds the entire foundation of modern science. He seems almost inhuman in his logic.

Olivia: That's the perfect word. Inhuman. Because the human part of Isaac Newton is where the story takes a very, very strange turn. The man who gave us the clockwork universe, the ultimate symbol of the Age of Reason, likely spent more of his life studying alchemy than he ever did studying physics. Jackson: Wait, what? You're kidding me. Alchemy? As in, trying to turn lead into gold and find the philosopher's stone? The guy who invented calculus believed in that? Olivia: Believed in it? He was obsessed. He wrote over a million words on alchemy, most of it in secret. Gleick describes his hidden laboratory, a shed in his garden where he’d work for days on end, tending his furnaces, convinced he could unlock the secrets of matter. He believed matter wasn't dead, but was animated by a "vegetable spirit." He was searching for a universal life force. Jackson: That doesn't compute. How can the same mind that produced the cold, hard math of the Principia also believe in a "vegetable spirit"? Olivia: Because for Newton, it wasn't a contradiction. He was looking for the ultimate, unifying laws of the universe, and he believed God had hidden them in multiple places—in the language of mathematics, yes, but also in ancient scripture and in the mystical transformations of matter. He even created a secret anagram of his Latin name, Isaacus Neuutonus, to sign his alchemical notes: Jeova sanctus unus. It means "Jehovah, the one holy God." Jackson: So it’s less about getting rich from gold and more like he was trying to find the universe's source code, but he thought it was hidden in these mystical, ancient texts? Olivia: Precisely. He was, as the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said after studying Newton's private papers, "not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." And this hidden, obsessive, and secretive side wasn't just confined to his lab. It defined his personality. He was not a nice man, Jackson. Jackson: I’m starting to get that feeling. Olivia: He was vindictive, paranoid, and absolutely ruthless in a fight. The most famous example is his bitter, decades-long war with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz over who invented calculus. Jackson: The great calculus controversy! I’ve heard of this. Olivia: They both developed it independently around the same time. But Newton, who was famously reluctant to publish his work, accused Leibniz of plagiarism. And when Newton later became the powerful President of the Royal Society, he used his position to systematically destroy Leibniz's reputation. He appointed an "impartial" committee to investigate the matter, packed it with his own supporters, and then secretly wrote the committee's final report himself, which officially declared Leibniz a fraud. Jackson: Whoa. That's not a solitary scholar. That is a ruthless political operator. It completely changes how you see him. He sounds terrifying. Olivia: He was. He was a man of terrifying focus. When he later became Warden of the Mint, he personally hunted down counterfeiters, interrogated them in the Tower of London, and sent dozens to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He showed no mercy.

Olivia: And that's the stunning paradox that Gleick presents so brilliantly in the book. The man who gave us a predictable, mechanical, rational universe was himself driven by a belief in a world full of hidden spirits, secret codes, and divine messages. He wasn't the first modern scientist; he was a bridge, with one foot in the new world of reason and the other planted firmly in the ancient world of magic. Jackson: It makes you realize you can't separate the two sides of him. The same obsessive, paranoid, relentless focus that made him a monster to his rivals was also what allowed him to sit alone for decades and crack the code of the cosmos. The genius and the magician were the same person. Olivia: Exactly. You don't get one without the other. And it makes his own words, spoken late in his life, so incredibly powerful and resonant. He said, "I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, 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." Jackson: That's incredible. After all that, after changing the world forever, he still felt like he was just getting started. It makes you wonder what 'great oceans' we're all standing in front of without even realizing it. We'd love to hear what you think. Does knowing this other side of Newton change how you see him? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.