Newton and His Physics

Abstract

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was born on Christmas Day, three months after the death of his father, a yeoman farmer after whom Isaac was named, to the former Hannah Ayscough at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Thee baby was frail and sickly, but he somehow managed to survive and grow stronger, even though he never enjoyed excellent health. Isaac did lot have a happy childhood because before he reached the age of two years, his mother married a wealthy minister named Barnabas Smith and, leaving Isaac to be raised by his grandmother, moved to the nearby village where Smith lived to help him raise his three children. Isaac was separated from his mother for nearly nine years until the death of his stepfather in 1653, and it is almost certain that her absence severely affected the development of his personality. It undoubtedly shaped his attitudes toward women; he had little to do with them throughout his life. He never married and, apart from a youthful romance, seems to have focused his attentions solely on his work and, to a lesser extent, on his critics: “The acute sense of insecurity that rendered him obsessively anxious when his work was published and irrationally violent when he defended it accompanied Newton throughout his life and can plausibly be traced to his early years.”¹

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the Peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own—to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human reasoning.

—Walter Bagehot