I’m too thick to understand Newton’s mathematical/scientific work, but heard he was an interesting chap so got Michael White’s biography second-hand for 50 pence on Amazon, and lugged it around for years from Germany to Italy, before finally reading it this summer. It’s a good enough work, mostly because Newton’s life & character were so astonishing it would be hard to write a dull biography of the man. Far from just sitting under an apple tree then retiring to Cambridge chambers for his entire life, he was also Warden of the Mint and became a spymaster, running espionage rings to uncover forgeries & forgers. The austere, seemingly asexual mathematical/scientific genius would be the boss Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent reports to after shooting a bunch of counterfeiters in In The Line of Fire:

Despite being stupid, I found White’s accounts of Newton’s scientific/mathematical work fascinating. One has something of the received glow of intellect which, I think, draws non-philosophers to Wittgenstein. Curiously, they both attended Trinity College, and both lived there for years; I’d be interested to know how close their rooms were, over the centuries.

White’s subtitle – The Last Sorcerer – refers to Newton’s decades-long study of alchemy:

Venerated by alchemists throughout history, it was said of Hermes Trismegistus that he ‘saw the totality of things. Having seen, he understood. Having understood, he had the power to reveal and show. And indeed what he knew, he wrote down. What he wrote he mostly hid away, keeping silence rather than speaking out, so that every generation coming into the world had to seek out these things.’

A Wittgensteinian resonance here, the opening and close of the Tractatus. The apparent foibles and silliness (as Auden would say) of many great thinkers is not a contradiction but rather the precondition for their achievements; hence the mystical impulse in Wittgenstein, the alchemical quest of Newton, join onto their more practical efforts:

Newton had acquired the information he needed to verify his lunar mechanics, and used it in the second edition of the Principia. It was this work that lay at the heart of computer programs employed by NASA scientists guiding the first spaceships to the Moon almost 300 years later. 

The biography is quite serviceable, though there is occasionally a sense of the immense gap between the subject and biographer; White is a second-rater, not terrible, just nothing special, and he also launches into unfounded assertions (e.g. that Newton was probably having sex with X) and anti-Catholic vitriol, e.g.:

[Alexander] Pope’s opposition to Newtonianism sprang from a rich vein of religious bigotry.

I googled White, curious to see if his real name was Weiss, and found he was a second-rate pop star in the 80s, and wrote a biography of Tolkien; and surprise surprise the Tolkien biography is full of assertions like “Tolkien was a fanatical Catholic idiot who hated X because he was a Protestant”.

It’s amusing to speculate, what would Isaac Newton have thought of an ex-80s pop star writing his biography, in the last years of the 20th Century?