3 Laws of Motion · Gravity · Calculus · Optics · Master of the Mint
December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727 · Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire
He was born premature, small enough to fit in a quart mug, and was not expected to survive the day. He invented calculus, decoded gravity, split white light into its spectrum, and wrote the most important scientific book ever published. He also spent more time on alchemy than physics, and destroyed anyone who disagreed with him.
Five acts. Eighty-four years. The most powerful mind in history and the most vindictive personality to wield it.
Born on Christmas Day, three months premature, small enough to fit in a quart mug. His father was already dead.
Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day 1642 — the same year Galileo died. His father, an illiterate farmer also named Isaac, had died three months before his birth. His mother Hannah remarried when Isaac was three and left him with his grandmother. He hated his stepfather with a fury he documented in his notebooks: "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them." At Trinity College, Cambridge, he was a sizar — a student who earned his keep by serving wealthier students. He was solitary, brilliant, and angry. The plague closed Cambridge in 1665, sending him home to Woolsthorpe for eighteen months that would change everything.
The plague closed Cambridge. Newton went home. In eighteen months of isolation, he invented calculus, decoded light, and conceived gravity.
When bubonic plague struck England in 1665, Cambridge closed. Newton retreated to Woolsthorpe Manor and spent eighteen months in the most productive intellectual isolation in history. He developed the method of fluxions (calculus). He split white light through a prism, proving that color is a property of light itself, not an artifact of the glass. He began formulating his theory of universal gravitation, allegedly prompted by watching an apple fall in his garden. He was 23 years old. He told no one. He put the notebooks in a drawer and went back to Cambridge when the plague ended.
Edmond Halley asked a question. Newton answered it by writing the most important scientific book ever published.
In 1684, Edmond Halley visited Newton and asked what shape the orbit of a planet would take under an inverse-square law of attraction. Newton answered immediately: an ellipse. He'd calculated it years ago. Halley was stunned and urged Newton to publish. What followed was eighteen months of obsessive writing — Newton barely ate, barely slept, and produced Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Published in 1687, funded by Halley (the Royal Society was broke from publishing a book about fish), the Principia laid out the three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, and the mathematical framework for classical mechanics. It explained planetary orbits, tides, the shape of the Earth, and the motion of comets. It was, and remains, the most important scientific publication in history.
He left Cambridge, took over the Royal Mint, became president of the Royal Society, and systematically destroyed his enemies.
In 1696, Newton left academia for the Royal Mint, where he pursued counterfeiters with terrifying zeal — personally interrogating suspects and sending several to the gallows. He became president of the Royal Society in 1703 and wielded the position as a weapon. The calculus priority dispute with Leibniz consumed him: Newton secretly wrote the Royal Society's "impartial" investigation into who invented calculus first, then cited it as independent proof of his own priority. He harassed Robert Hooke, suppressed credit to others, and ruled British science like a tyrant. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. He died in 1727, worth a fortune, universally feared, and having not published a major scientific work in forty years.
Newton had more enemies than friends. He made sure of it.
The case for Newton as the most important scientist who ever lived. And the case that he was a monster.
Historian accounts, physics analysis, fact checks, and scene pitches from 156 contributors.
He decoded the universe by candlelight. You can help tell his story.