BBC: Isaac Newton: The Last Magician

'I do not know what I may appear to the world

'but to myself,

'I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,

'amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble

'or prettier shell than ordinary,

'while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

Isaac Newton is considered by many

to be the greatest genius of all time.

His virtues proved him a saint

and his discoveries might well pass...

..for miracles.

He was revered as a scientific demigod in his own lifetime.

Now the keenness of his sublime intellect

has allowed us to penetrate the dwellings of the gods

and ascend the heights of heaven!

If anybody was a genius,

Newton was.

Newton revealed the nature of light,

allowing us to explore the universe.

He enabled us to calculate motion

and predict change.

He distilled the force that unites the whole universe

into a precise mathematical formula -

the Universal Law of Gravity.

Newton is celebrated as the rational genius

who propelled us out of medieval darkness

and into the Enlightenment.

But Isaac Newton was also a complex,

difficult and secretive man.

He wasn't communicative.

He didn't want to work with anybody else.

He was easily offended.

Spiteful and swayed by those who were worse than himself!

In vulgar modern terms,

Newton was profoundly neurotic.

Newton's deepest obsession would only be revealed

200 years after his death,

an occult world of heretical religion and alchemy.

There is a vital agent, diffuse through everything in the earth,

a mercurial spirit,

extremely subtle and supremely volatile.

But Newton's secret obsessions

would transform the way we understand the universe.

Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason.

He was the last of the magicians.

In 1705, Sir Isaac Newton was 63 years old

and a pillar of the British Establishment.

He had just been knighted.

He was recognised across Europe as the master of the Enlightenment.

He did not suffer from self-doubt.

He rather liked to think of himself as the new Messiah,

a sort of scientific Christ

who was bringing a new kind of knowledge to save the world.

This messiah had a low opinion of lesser mortals.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies

but not the madness of people.

Newton's estrangement from humanity began from the moment he was born

at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire,

on Christmas morning, 1642.

When I was born, I was so little they put me in a quart pot,

and so weakly, they did not think I would live.

I was a little fellow.

The 1640s were the most tumultuous decade in English history.

The English Civil War left one-in-ten men dead.

King Charles I was beheaded.

Oliver Cromwell's puritanical government

waged war against Catholicism in the monarchy.

Bubonic plague was rampant.

People genuinely believed the world was coming to an end.

This time of chaos and upheaval marked Newton for life.

Newton craved certainty.

All of Newton's work is about finding certainty,

finding the truth

and the things that you can absolutely believe in.

His home was anything but a haven.

His father died a few months before he was born.

He was then rejected by his mother.

She abandoned him to start another family when he was three years old.

Newton grew up in tune with the Protestant spirit of the age,

anti-Catholic, Bible-reading and introspective.

He made a list of childhood sins, written in code.

The list begins innocently.

"Making pies on Sunday night...

"..making a mousetrap on Thy Day,

"squirting water on Thy Day..."

Then a darker side is revealed.

"Striking Minnie,

"punching my sister...

"..threatening my Father and Mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."

He was so obsessive.

He was a man who lived his entire life inside his head, and that's how he did what he did.

You look at the papers he left behind

and there are millions of words, of scribbling.

They are not words written to impress anybody.

They're not words written for publication.

They're words written because that was how Newton thought. That's what he did.

The 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes

was fascinated by the man behind the scientific legend.

Geniuses are peculiar -

the uneasiness, the melancholy, the nervous agitation...

In vulgar modern terms,

Newton was profoundly neurotic.

Newton relied on no-one...

..but himself.

He has almost a sort of visceral dislike

of following other people.

He has a very strong belief in his own originality.

As a schoolboy,

Newton's innovative mind was already at work.

He decided to invent his own way to tell the time.

Newton turned the attic into a giant astronomical clock.

It was like a sundial.

He plotted the sun's movement every 15 minutes

as it moved across the walls of his room.

He could go into any room and he could tell what time it was

by looking at the shadows on the walls.

Light, space and time

were already his playthings.

Newton's teenage notebooks mention no friends.

Instead, they reveal his efforts to find his own answers to practical problems,

like alleviating wind.

Steep horse dung, especially a stone-horse,

in ale.

Then take it out, strongly express the juice

and drink it.

But Newton's fertile mind was almost stifled

before it could flourish.

His estranged mother pulled him out of school when he was 17 to run the family farm.

His mother intended he apply himself to the management of the estate

but his genius could not brook such an employment.

Newton was the most useless manager of a farm you can possibly imagine,

and it was his mother's brother who suggested that Newton was too good,

too talented to be kept away from his destiny,

which was university.

Isaac was soon packed off to Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was drawn to natural philosophy,

the study of the physical world,

what we now call science.

In the late 17th century, when Newton was a student,

science was not held in any particular esteem at all.

There was no degree in science, there was no career in science.

Science hadn't so far produced...

..any useful results.

Newton's professors taught Aristotle's concept

of gravity and levity.

You know, they would've said an apple has some gravity.

And how do we know? Because it has a tendency to fall down.

They would've said fire and smoke have levity

because they rise to the heavens.

That's what Aristotle taught them.

But Newton was ready to reject 2,000 years

of scientific orthodoxy.

He thought and believed that what other people wrote was wrong.

It's as if he believed, even at this early period -

he's 21, 22 -

that he was destined to be the person to reform natural philosophy.

Newton only believed

what he could prove himself.

Natural philosophy should not be founded on metaphysical opinions.

Its conclusions can only be proved by experiment.

He wanted to know everything.

He had an insatiable curiosity.

He was handed this interesting, complicated world

and he could almost see the gears turning

and he wanted to figure them out.

By 1664,

aged only 21,

Newton devised a curriculum for himself -

45 topics that obsessed him for the rest of his life.

He called them

"Certain Philosophical Questions".

Of time and eternity,

of the sun and planets and comets,

of air,

of meteors,

of atoms, of density,

of vacuum,

of reflection,

of attraction - magnetical,

of attraction - electrical,

of light,

of colours, of heat and cold,

of gravity and levity,

of vision...

Newton was obsessed by the mysteries of vision and light.

He went to extraordinary lengths

to examine the mechanics of how the eye works.

I looked upon the sun in a looking glass with my right eye,

and then turned my eyes into a darker corner of my chamber and winked

to observe the impression made and the circles of colours which encompassed it

and how they decayed and at last vanished.

He's trying to work out

how much of what we see is due to the will, so to our mind,

and how much of it is due to what there is in the outside world.

In a few hours time, I had brought my eyes to such a pass

that I could look upon no bright object.

I only saw the sun before me!

I could neither write nor read.

To recover the use of my eyes,

I shut myself up in my darkened chamber for three days.