{"id":13673,"date":"2020-08-05T11:02:11","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T15:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/?post_type=collection&p=13673"},"modified":"2021-03-29T11:31:33","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T15:31:33","slug":"the-unknown-newton","status":"publish","type":"collection","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/collections\/the-unknown-newton","title":{"rendered":"The Unknown Newton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sir Isaac Newton (1642\u20131727) is one of the greatest figures in the history of science. From his laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation to his optical experiments and his calculus, Newton\u2019s discoveries helped to usher in the era of modern science, and even today they do not cease to astound us for their elegance and insight. He is deservedly seen as one of the heroes, if not the hero, of early modern science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born and raised in the English countryside, Newton attended and later became a fellow and professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. His landmark scientific publications were the 1687 book Philosophi\u00e6 Naturalis Principia Mathematica<\/em><\/a> (commonly shortened to Principia<\/em>) and the 1704 book Opticks<\/em><\/a>. For the last three decades of his long and productive life, Newton was first Warden and then Master of the Mint, helping to reform Great Britain\u2019s currency and prosecuting counterfeiters, while at the same time, beginning in 1703, also serving as president of the world\u2019s most important scientific organization, the Royal Society of London. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patrick Arrasmith<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Although Newton is a familiar cultural figure \u2014 who doesn\u2019t know the story of his encounter with the apple? \u2014 many facets of his life and thought have remained obscure. For example, while most biographical books and essays will at least mention Newton\u2019s religious writings and his work on alchemy, they rarely offer anything but a superficial explanation of his thinking, and no real understanding of how these pursuits might have fit together with his contributions to science. Outside of scholarly circles, these important aspects of Newton\u2019s life remain in shadow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, until the second half of the twentieth century, even scholars had difficulty accessing Newton\u2019s vast corpus of private writings on theology and Church history, alchemy and prophecy. Not until the late 1960s did a majority of his unpublished manuscripts become available in university libraries. Some ended up in surprising locations; it is one of the lovely quirks of history that some pages on which Newton wrote about the Apocalypse and mentioned Jerusalem today bear the stamp of the library in Jerusalem that is their institutional caretaker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only in the last few years have many of Newton\u2019s writings become accessible to the general public. The scholars and staff of The Newton Project<\/a> \u2014 a nonprofit organization at the University of Sussex dedicated to publishing all of Newton\u2019s writings, online, for free \u2014 have been working since 1998 to transcribe (and sometimes translate) many shelves\u2019 worth of Newton\u2019s forbidding writings. The Newton Project, in collaboration with the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project<\/a> at Indiana University, the Newton Project Canada<\/a> at King\u2019s College, Halifax, the Cambridge University Digital Library<\/a>, and the National Library of Israel<\/a>, has thus far published over six million of Newton\u2019s words, equivalent to about eight King James Bibles. This mammoth undertaking presents many of Newton\u2019s writings to the public for the very first time and gives scholars around the world better access to what the Irish poet Henry Jones called<\/a> Newton\u2019s \u201call capacious Mind.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mind disclosed by these writings proves that the common image of Newton as a scientific hero is woefully incomplete. We can begin now to see the unknown Newton: a staunch but untraditional Christian, a Church historian who wrote thousands of pages of biblical interpretation, a thinker more in tune with Renaissance tradition than Enlightenment skepticism, and a scientific genius who strove with equal vigor to unlock both the principles of physical motion and the arcane secrets of alchemy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this symposium, we have asked five leading Newton scholars to unveil the unknown Newton: <\/p>\n\n\n\n