A curious thing happened to Isaac Newton on the way to a grand new exhibition at the New York Public Library, "The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture." He seems to have gone through a time machine—backwards.
On display is what must be the most impressive collection of Newtoniana ever assembled in the United States: early notebooks and manuscript fragments, antique scientific instruments and rare books, portraits and at least one death mask. Even looking through quarter-inch Plexiglas, you can feel the power of the books and papers. Especially awesome are the rare editions of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the book that revealed Newton's System of the World, and the notebook pages covered edge to edge with the words and figures that flowed from Newton's quill in his astonishingly tiny and elegant hand.
But it's a 19th-century Newton who's been dusted off here: Sir Isaac, powdered and bewigged, the genius of rationality and order, who created—and who came to personify—modern science. "The acme of human possibility," in the words of the exhibit's curator, Mordechai Feingold, a history professor at the California Institute of Technology. Up to a point, this is fine. Newton really did write down the rules of the universe we live in, a universe of science and industry and reason, in which humans have managed to achieve a fair degree of control over unruly Nature.
Still, it is only a partial, bowdlerized picture of the man. We know much more now, thanks to long-buried papers that began coming to light during the 20th century. We know about Newton's pathological aloneness, his brush with madness, his obsession with alchemy and theological heresies—none of which is so much as hinted at in this exhibition, let alone explored.
When Newton died in 1727, at the age of 84, he was already an iconic figure, celebrated in verse and portraiture. His ornate tomb at Westminster Abbey was inscribed, "Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race." But most of the millions of words he had written in his lifetime remained hidden. His passionate religious convictions were a dangerous secret: With all his heart he disbelieved in the Holy Trinity, and this was heresy. He enjoyed the fame and riches that came to him, but for most of his life he had preferred seclusion to participation in England's burgeoning scientific community.
Newton never married, apparently never had a lover, and never even had a real friend, as we use the word in our sociable times. He never had a scientific collaborator; indeed, he fought bitterly and ruthlessly with other great philosophers. Having been a fellow and professor at Trinity College, Cambridge, for most of his adult life, he left behind not a single person who claimed to have been his student. When he made his greatest discoveries, his instinct was not to publish them but to keep them to himself.
Newton's legacy is more than the sum of his discoveries. His flaws, his errors, and his scheming, too, changed the direction of science in profound ways. A case in point: Visitors streaming through the library's Gottesman Exhibition Hall may stop to examine two peculiar pages, faded and stained, regarding a dispute over who invented the calculus. But they aren't likely to realize that these pages are the damning evidence—the smoking gun—of one of the most delicious frauds in the annals of science.
Newton had, in fact, invented most of the mathematical machinery we now call the calculus. He accomplished this in the 1660s, as a very young man alone in a farmhouse during the plague years, and revealed it to no one. Meanwhile, in Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also invented the calculus—which is to say, much of the same mathematics, though with a different emphasis and a different form of notation. Leibniz's form is the one we use today. Leibniz was entirely happy to publicize his discovery, and by 1712, when they were both old men, he and Newton were embroiled in an ugly international dispute, each accusing the other of outright theft.
The Royal Society of London, with Sir Isaac presiding, appointed a committee of scholars to adjudicate the matter. Their report found no doubt whatsoever. It vindicated Newton and condemned Leibniz. In addition to the report itself, the Royal Society published an anonymous review of the report, and this, too, righteously denounced Leibniz. "It lies upon him, in point of Candor," it declared, "to make us understand that he pretended to this Antiquity of his Invention with some other Design than to rival and supplant Mr. Newton."
Candorindeed! We now understand, from the surviving handwritten drafts, that the author of the report and the author of the review were the same man—Newton—writing about himself in the third person.