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Isaac Newton
by: James Gleick

Off The Bookshelf's Price: £7.99

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Used Price: £2.75
Third Party New Price: £2.49

Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 509
EAN: 9780007163182
ISBN: 0007163185
Label: HarperPerennial
Manufacturer: HarperPerennial
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: June 07, 2004
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Studio: HarperPerennial
Sales Rank: 131021

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.co.uk Review:
It is a brave writer who tackles a biography of the world famous pioneer mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton and James Gleick has acquitted himself superbly well in his new bookIsaac Newton. Accolades to Newton were piling up even during his early lifetime in the 17th century when such fame was usually confined to royalty, popes and archbishops and certainly not to ordinary mortals born in 1642 of yeomen stock in deepest rural England. According to Gleick, Newton was the first person whose attainment "lay in the realm of the mind" to have a state funeral and be buried in Westminster Abbey. A Latin inscription proclaimed his "strength of mind almost divine" with "mathematical principles peculiarly his own" and declared that "mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race"--not bad for a farm boy from Lincolnshire.

Sensibly, Gleick, a well-known American science writer and author of the acclaimed Chaos, focuses a great deal on how such a transformation could happen to anyone with such humble beginnings at that time in British history. There is no doubt Newton's innate talent and genius but he was also lucky in that he had excellent schooling and through the intervention of a relative he was able to go to the University of Cambridge and went on to stay there most of his professional life. His mother supplied him with "a chamber pot; a notebook of 140 blank pages... a quart bottle and ink to fill it, candles for many long nights, and a lock for his desk". Try sending your child to university so equipped today.

Of course the critical achievements of Newton's life were in his scientific achievements and here is the real problem: how to explain them for the general reader when even academic mathematicians today find much of the detail of Newton's work hard to comprehend. This is largely because Newton did not have today's familiar technical language or standard units of measurement available to him; he really was exploring terra incognita and feeling his way. But this is exactly what Gleick manages to get over so well and there is so much more. Aside from it being an eminently accessible biography, illustrations, extensive notes, bibliography and index make this an invaluable source for anyone who wants to enter the wonderful and arcane world of Sir Isaac Newton. --Douglas Palmer

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Sound but unspectacular
James Gleick writes well and tells the story of Newton's life in a readable fashion, but this book didn't really add anything to what I already knew about the great man. It would be a good introduction if you don't already know about Newton's life and work, but not worth bothering if you do know something of the subject.

And I agree that the notes should have been included in the text!

Charlie T.

Rating:

- A concise book, an enjoyable read
I enjoyed this book. As usual Gleik does an excellent job of covering difficult topics in a way that lets the layman appreciate the achievements, without using equations, or spoiling the flow of the book. The contradictory aspects of Newton's character, mystic and scientist, recluse and credit seeker are all well covered. Notes and background are tucked away in the back of the book, but provide excellent justification for the authors views, and add authority to the work.

I give it four stars and not five because it is rather brief for the amount of material covered - this also means that those already familiar to some degree with the life of Newton may find little that is new to them.

But for someone new to the life ... Read More:

Rating:

- Brilliant Brain of Newton!
From one of the best writers on science, a remarkable portrait of Isaac Newton. The man who changed our understanding of the universe, of science, and of faith. Isaac Newton was the chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion; he effectively discovered gravity; he salvaged the terms 'time', 'space', 'motion' and 'place' from the haze of everyday language, standardized them and married them, each to the other, constructing an edifice that made knowledge a thing of substance: quantative and exact. Creation, Newton demonstrated, unfolds from simple rules, patterns iterated over unlimited distances. What Newton learned remains the essence of what we know. Newton's laws are our laws. When we ... Read More:

Rating:

- Issac Newton
Isaac Newton is argueably one of the most important figures in physics. Living during the times of the scientific revolution where science was distancing itself from art, Newton is credited with playing a major part in creating and documenting the new scientific theories with his book Principia Mathematica. Surprisingly however there are few biographies of this important father of science available and James Gleick fills the gap with an account that is both incredibly readable and informative.

This biography of Newton takes us from his birth as a son of an illiterate farm worker through to his death bed, when he said that if he had seen further than other men, it was only by standing on the shoulders of giants. This book not only summarises ... Read More:

Rating:

- A universal mind
With almost poetic grace, Gleick portrays the life and thinking of history's most expansive mind. Works on Newton aren't as common as might be expected. The task of addressing such a monumental mentality is formidable, to say the least. Only the most ambitious or analytical could attempt it. Gleick's effort encompasses the major facets of Newton's life, including his academic, political and religious aspects. He avoids the modern approach of delving into Newton's psyche or recapitulating three centuries of scholarly disputation. Even the "falling apple" story is redrawn as Newton's realisation that apparent size compared with distance expressed a relationship needing explanation. The result is a clean, unobstructed view of a complex man - and his ... Read More:

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