Isaac Newton (born December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New Style],

Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], 1727, London) was an

English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific
Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white
light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and laid the foundation
for modern physical optics. In mechanics, his three laws of motion, the basic principles of
modern physics, resulted in the formulation of the law of universal gravitation.
In mathematics, he was the original discoverer of the
infinitesimal calculus. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematics (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687) was one of the most
important single works in the history of modern science .

Formative influences
Born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton was the only son of a local yeoman, also Isaac
Newton, who had died three months before, and of Hannah Ayscough. That same year, at
Arcetri near Florence, Galileo Galilei had died; Newton would eventually pick up his idea of a
mathematical science of motion and bring his work to full fruition. A tiny and weak baby,
Newton was not expected to survive his first day of life, much less 84 years. Deprived of a
father before birth, he soon lost his mother as well, for within two years she married a
second time; her husband, the well-to-do minister Barnabas Smith, left young Isaac with his
grandmother and moved to a neighbouring village to raise a son and two daughters. For nine
years, until the death of Barnabas Smith in 1653, Isaac was effectively separated from his
mother, and his pronounced psychotic tendencies have been ascribed to this traumatic
event. That he hated his stepfather we may be sure. When he examined the state of his soul
in 1662 and compiled a catalog of sins in shorthand, he remembered “Threatning my father
and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.” The acute sense of insecurity
that rendered him obsessively anxious when his work was published and irrationally violent
when he defended it accompanied Newton throughout his life and can plausibly be traced to
his early years.

After his mother was widowed a second time, she determined that her first-born son should
manage her now considerable property. It quickly became apparent, however, that t his
would be a disaster, both for the estate and for Newton. He could not bring himself to
concentrate on rural affairs—set to watch the cattle, he would curl up under a tree with a
book. Fortunately, the mistake was recognized, and Newton was sent back to the grammar
school in Grantham, where he had already studied, to prepare for the university. As with
many of the leading scientists of the age, he left behind in Grantham anecdotes about his
mechanical ability and his skill in building models of machines, such
as clocks and windmills. At the school he apparently gained a firm command of Latin but
probably received no more than a smattering of arithmetic. By June 1661 he was ready
to matriculate at Trinity College, Cambridge, somewhat older than the other undergraduates
because of his interrupted education.
Influence of the Scientific Revolution
When Newton arrived in Cambridge in 1661, the movement now known as the Scientific
Revolution was well advanced, and many of the works basic to modern science had
appeared. Astronomers from Nicolaus Copernicus to Johannes Kepler had elaborated
the heliocentric system of the universe. Galileo had proposed the foundations of a
new mechanics built on the principle of inertia. Led by René Descartes, philosophers had
begun to formulate a new conception of nature as an intricate, impersonal, and inert
machine. Yet as far as the universities of Europe, including Cambridge, were concerned, all
this might well have never happened. They continued to be the strongholds of
outmoded Aristotelianism, which rested on a geocentric view of the universe and dealt with
nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.
Like thousands of other undergraduates, Newton began his higher education by immersing
himself in Aristotle’s work. Even though the new philosophy was not in the curriculum, it
was in the air. Some time during his undergraduate career, Newton discovered the works of
the French natural philosopher Descartes and the other mechanical philosophers, who, in
contrast to Aristotle, viewed physical reality as composed entirely of particles of matter in
motion and who held that all the phenomena of nature result from their mechanical
interaction. A new set of notes, which he entitled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae”
(“Certain Philosophical Questions”), begun sometime in 1664, usurped the unused pages of a
notebook intended for traditional scholastic exercises; under the title he entered the slogan
“Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas” (“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my
friend, but my best friend is truth”). Newton’s scientific career had begun.

The “Quaestiones” reveal that Newton had discovered the new conception of nature that
provided the framework of the Scientific Revolution. He had thoroughly mastered the works
of Descartes and had also discovered that the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi had
revived atomism, an alternative mechanical system to explain nature. The “Quaestiones”
also reveal that Newton already was inclined to find the latter a more attractive philosophy
than Cartesian natural philosophy, which rejected the existence of ultimate indivisible
particles. The works of the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle provided the foundation for
Newton’s considerable work in chemistry. Significantly, he had read Henry More, the
Cambridge Platonist, and was thereby introduced to another intellectual world, the
magical Hermetic tradition, which sought to explain natural phenomena in terms of
alchemical and magical concepts. The two traditions of natural philosophy, the mechanical
and the Hermetic, antithetical though they appear, continued to influence his thought and in
their tension supplied the fundamental theme of his scientific career.

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Although he did not record it in the “Quaestiones,” Newton had also begun his mathematical
studies. He again started with Descartes, from whose La Géometrie he branched out into the
other literature of modern analysis with its application of algebraic techniques to problems
of geometry. He then reached back for the support of classical geometry. Within little more
than a year, he had mastered the literature; and, pursuing his own line of analysis, he began
to move into new territory. He discovered the binomial theorem, and he developed
the calculus, a more powerful form of analysis that employs infinitesimal considerations in
finding the slopes of curves and areas under curves.

By 1669 Newton was ready to write a tract summarizing his progress, De Analysi per
Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas (“On Analysis by Infinite Series”), which circulated
in manuscript through a limited circle and made his name known. During the next two years
he revised it as De methodis serierum et fluxionum (“On the Methods of Series and Fluxions”).
The word fluxions, Newton’s private rubric, indicates that the calculus had been born.
Despite the fact that only a handful of savants were even aware of Newton’s existence, he had
arrived at the point where he had become the leading mathematician in Europe.
Work during the plague years

When Newton received the bachelor’s degree in April 1665, the most remarkable
undergraduate career in the history of university education had passed unrecognized. On his
own, without formal guidance, he had sought out the new philosophy and the new
mathematics and made them his own, but he had confined the progress of his studies to his
notebooks. Then, in 1665, the plague closed the university, and for most of the following two
years he was forced to stay at his home, contemplating at leisure what he had learned.
During the plague years Newton laid the foundations of the calculus and extended an earlier
insight into an essay, “Of Colours,” which contains most of the ideas elaborated in
his Opticks. It was during this time that he examined the elements of circular motion and,
applying his analysis to the Moon and the planets, derived the inverse square relation that
the radially directed force acting on a planet decreases with the square of its distance from
the Sun—which was later crucial to the law of universal gravitation. The world heard
nothing of these discoveries.

Career of Isaac Newton

The optics
Inaugural lectures at Trinity
Newton was elected to a fellowship in Trinity College in 1667, after the university reopened.
Two years later, Isaac Barrow, Lucasian professor of mathematics, who
had transmitted Newton’s De Analysi to John Collins in London, resigned the chair to devote
himself to divinity and recommended Newton to succeed him. The professorship exempted
Newton from the necessity of tutoring but imposed the duty of delivering an annual course of
lectures. He chose the work he had done in optics as the initial topic; during the following
three years (1670–72), his lectures developed the essay “Of Colours” into a form which was
later revised to become Book One of his Opticks.Beginning with Kepler’s Paralipomena in
1604, the study of optics had been a central activity of the Scientific Revolution. Descartes’s
statement of the sine law of refraction, relating the angles of incidence and emergence at
interfaces of the media through which light passes, had added a new mathematical
regularity to the science of light, supporting the conviction that the universe is constructed
according to mathematical regularities. Descartes had also made light central to the
mechanical philosophy of nature; the reality of light, he argued, consists of motion
transmitted through a material medium. Newton fully accepted the mechanical nature of
light, although he chose the atomistic alternative and held that light consists of
material corpuscles in motion. The corpuscular conception of light was always a speculative
theory on the periphery of his optics, however. The core of Newton’s contribution had to do
with colours. An ancient theory extending back at least to Aristotle held that a certain class
of colour phenomena, such as the rainbow, arises from the modification of light, which
appears white in its pristine form. Descartes had generalized this theory for all colours and
translated it into mechanical imagery. Through a series of experiments performed in 1665
and 1666, in which the spectrum of a narrow beam was projected onto the wall of a
darkened chamber, Newton denied the concept of modification and replaced it with that of
analysis. Basically, he denied that light is simple and homogeneous—stating instead that it is
complex and heterogeneous and that the phenomena of colours arise from the analysis of
the heterogeneous mixture into its simple components. The ultimate source of Newton’s
conviction that light is corpuscular was his recognition that individual rays of light have
immutable properties; in his view, such properties imply immutable particles of matter. He
held that individual rays (that is, particles of given size) excite sensations of individual
colours when they strike the retina of the eye. He also concluded that rays refract at distinct
angles—hence, the prismatic spectrum, a beam of heterogeneous rays, i.e., alike incident on
one face of a prism, separated or analyzed by the refraction into its component parts—and
that phenomena such as the rainbow are produced by refractive analysis. Because he
believed that chromatic aberration could never be eliminated from lenses, Newton turned
to reflecting telescopes; he constructed the first ever built. The heterogeneity of light has
been the foundation of physical optics since his time.
There is no evidence that the theory of colours, fully described by Newton in his inaugural
lectures at Cambridge, made any impression, just as there is no evidence that aspects of his
mathematics and the content of the Principia, also pronounced from the podium, made any
impression. Rather, the theory of colours, like his later work, was transmitted to the world
through the Royal Society of London, which had been organized in 1660. When Newton was
appointed Lucasian professor, his name was probably unknown in the Royal Society; in
1671, however, they heard of his reflecting telescope and asked to see it. Pleased by their
enthusiastic reception of the telescope and by his election to the society, Newton
volunteered a paper on light and colours early in 1672. On the whole, the paper was also
well received, although a few questions and some dissent were heard .

Controversy
Among the most important dissenters to Newton’s paper was Robert Hooke, one of the
leaders of the Royal Society who considered himself the master in optics and hence he wrote
a condescending critique of the unknown parvenu. One can understand how the critique
would have annoyed a normal man. The flaming rage it provoked, with the desire publicly to
humiliate Hooke, however, bespoke the abnormal. Newton was unable rationally to
confront criticism. Less than a year after submitting the paper, he was so unsettled by the
give and take of honest discussion that he began to cut his ties, and he withdrew into virtual
isolation.

In 1675, during a visit to London, Newton thought he heard Hooke accept his theory of
colours. He was emboldened to bring forth a second paper, an examination of the colour
phenomena in thin films, which was identical to most of Book Two as it later appeared in
the Opticks. The purpose of the paper was to explain the colours of solid bodies by showing
how light can be analyzed into its components by reflection as well as refraction. His
explanation of the colours of bodies has not survived, but the paper was significant in
demonstrating for the first time the existence of periodic optical phenomena. He discovered
the concentric coloured rings in the thin film of air between a lens and a flat sheet of glass;
the distance between these concentric rings (Newton’s rings) depends on the increasing
thickness of the film of air. In 1704 Newton combined a revision of his optical lectures with
the paper of 1675 and a small amount of additional material in his Opticks.

A second piece which Newton had sent with the paper of 1675 provoked new controversy.
Entitled “An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light,” it was in fact a general system of
nature. Hooke apparently claimed that Newton had stolen its content from him, and Newton
boiled over again. The issue was quickly controlled, however, by an exchange of formal,
excessively polite letters that fail to conceal the complete lack of warmth between the men.

Newton was also engaged in another exchange on his theory of colours with a circle of
English Jesuits in Liège, perhaps the most revealing exchange of all. Although their
objections were shallow, their contention that his experiments were mistaken lashed him
into a fury. The correspondence dragged on until 1678, when a final shriek of rage from
Newton, apparently accompanied by a complete nervous breakdown, was followed by
silence. The death of his mother the following year completed his isolation. For six years he
withdrew from intellectual commerce except when others initiated a correspondence, which
he always broke off as quickly as possible.
Influence of the Hermetic tradition
During his time of isolation, Newton was greatly influenced by the Hermetic tradition with
which he had been familiar since his undergraduate days. Newton, always somewhat
interested in alchemy, now immersed himself in it, copying by hand treatise after treatise
and collating them to interpret their arcane imagery. Under the influence of the Hermetic
tradition, his conception of nature underwent a decisive change. Until that time, Newton had
been a mechanical philosopher in the standard 17th-century style, explaining natural
phenomena by the motions of particles of matter. Thus, he held that the physical reality of
light is a stream of tiny corpuscles diverted from its course by the presence of denser or
rarer media. He felt that the apparent attraction of tiny bits of paper to a piece of glass that
has been rubbed with cloth results from an ethereal effluvium that streams out of the glass
and carries the bits of paper back with it. This mechanical philosophy denied the possibility
of action at a distance; as with static electricity, it explained apparent attractions away by
means of invisible ethereal mechanisms. Newton’s “Hypothesis of Light” of 1675, with its
universal ether, was a standard mechanical system of nature. Some phenomena, such as the
capacity of chemicals to react only with certain others, puzzled him, however, and he spoke
of a “secret principle” by which substances are “sociable” or “unsociable” with others. About
1679, Newton abandoned the ether and its invisible mechanisms and began to ascribe the
puzzling phenomena—chemical affinities, the generation of heat in chemical
reactions, surface tension in fluids, capillary action, the cohesion of bodies, and the like—to
attractions and repulsions between particles of matter. More than 35 years later, in the
second English edition of the Opticks, Newton accepted an ether again, although it was an
ether that embodied the concept of action at a distance by positing a repulsion between its
particles. The attractions and repulsions of Newton’s speculations were direct
transpositions of the occult sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic philosophy—as
mechanical philosophers never ceased to protest. Newton, however, regarded them as a
modification of the mechanical philosophy that rendered it subject to exact mathematical
treatment. As he conceived of them, attractions were quantitatively defined, and they
offered a bridge to unite the two basic themes of 17th-century science—the mechanical
tradition, which had dealt primarily with verbal mechanical imagery, and
the Pythagorean tradition, which insisted on the mathematical nature of reality. Newton’s
reconciliation through the concept of force was his ultimate contribution to science .

The Principia of Isaac Newton

Planetary motion
Newton originally applied the idea of attractions and repulsions solely to the range
of terrestrial phenomena mentioned in the preceding paragraph. But late in 1679, not long
after he had embraced the concept, another application was suggested in a letter from
Hooke, who was seeking to renew correspondence. Hooke mentioned his analysis
of planetary motion—in effect, the continuous diversion of a rectilinear motion by a central
attraction. Newton bluntly refused to correspond but, nevertheless, went on to mention an
experiment to demonstrate the rotation of Earth: let a body be dropped from a tower;
because the tangential velocity at the top of the tower is greater than that at the foot, the
body should fall slightly to the east. He sketched the path of fall as part of a spiral ending at
the centre of Earth. This was a mistake, as Hooke pointed out; according to Hooke’s theory of
planetary motion, the path should be elliptical, so that if Earth were split and separated to
allow the body to fall, it would rise again to its original location. Newton did not like being
corrected, least of all by Hooke, but he had to accept the basic point; he corrected Hooke’s
figure, however, using the assumption that gravity is constant. Hooke then countered by
replying that, although Newton’s figure was correct for constant gravity, his own assumption
was that gravity decreases as the square of the distance. Several years later, this letter
became the basis for Hooke’s charge of plagiarism. He was mistaken in the charge. His
knowledge of the inverse square relation rested only on intuitive grounds; he did not derive
it properly from the quantitative statement of centripetal force and Kepler’s third law, which
relates the periods of planets to the radii of their orbits. Moreover, unknown to him, Newton
had so derived the relation more than 10 years earlier. Nevertheless, Newton later confessed
that the correspondence with Hooke led him to demonstrate that an elliptical orbit entails
an inverse square attraction to one focus—one of the two crucial propositions on which the
law of universal gravitation would ultimately rest. What is more, Hooke’s definition of
orbital motion—in which the constant action of an attracting body continuously pulls
a planet away from its inertial path—suggested a cosmic application for Newton’s concept of
force and an explanation of planetary paths employing it. In 1679 and 1680, Newton dealt
only with orbital dynamics; he had not yet arrived at the concept of universal gravitation.
Universal gravitation
Nearly five years later, in August 1684, Newton was visited by the British
astronomer Edmond Halley, who was also troubled by the problem of orbital dynamics.
Upon learning that Newton had solved the problem, he extracted Newton’s promise to send
the demonstration. Three months later he received a short tract entitled De Motu (“On
Motion”). Already Newton was at work improving and expanding it. In two and a half years,
the tract De Motu grew into Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematics, which is not only
Newton’s masterpiece but also the fundamental work for the whole of modern science.

Significantly, De Motu did not state the law of universal gravitation. For that matter, even
though it was a treatise on planetary dynamics, it did not contain any of the three Newtonian
laws of motion. Only when revising De Motu did Newton embrace the principle
of inertia (the first law) and arrive at the second law of motion. The second law, the force
law, proved to be a precise quantitative statement of the action of the forces between bodies
that had become the central members of his system of nature. By quantifying the concept
of force, the second law completed the exact quantitative mechanics that has been
the paradigm of natural science ever since.

The quantitative mechanics of the Principia is not to be confused with the mechanical
philosophy. The latter was a philosophy of nature that attempted to explain natural
phenomena by means of imagined mechanisms among invisible particles of matter. The
mechanics of the Principia was an exact quantitative description of the motions of visible
bodies. It rested on Newton’s three laws of motion: (1) that a body remains in its state of rest
unless it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it; (2) that the change of
motion (the change of velocity times the mass of the body) is proportional to the force
impressed; (3) that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The analysis of
circular motion in terms of these laws yielded a formula of the quantitative measure, in
terms of a body’s velocity and mass, of the centripetal force necessary to divert a body from
its rectilinear path into a given circle. When Newton substituted this formula into Kepler’s
third law, he found that the centripetal force holding the planets in their given orbits about
the Sun must decrease with the square of the planets’ distances from the Sun. Because the
satellites of Jupiter also obey Kepler’s third law, an inverse square centripetal force must
also attract them to the centre of their orbits. Newton was able to show that a similar
relation holds between Earth and its Moon. The distance of the Moon is approximately 60
times the radius of Earth. Newton compared the distance by which the Moon, in its orbit of
known size, is diverted from a tangential path in one second with the distance that a body at
the surface of Earth falls from rest in one second. When the latter distance proved to be
3,600 (60 × 60) times as great as the former, he concluded that one and the same force,
governed by a single quantitative law, is operative in all three cases, and from
the correlation of the Moon’s orbit with the measured acceleration of gravity on the surface
of Earth, he applied the ancient Latin word gravitas (literally, “heaviness” or “weight”) to it.
The law of universal gravitation, which he also confirmed from such further phenomena as
the tides and the orbits of comets, states that every particle of matter in the universe attracts
every other particle with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres.
When the Royal Society received the completed manuscript of Book I in 1686, Hooke raised
the cry of plagiarism, a charge that cannot be sustained in any meaningful sense. On the
other hand, Newton’s response to it reveals much about him. Hooke would have been
satisfied with a generous acknowledgment; it would have been a graceful gesture to a sick
man already well into his decline, and it would have cost Newton nothing. Newton, instead,
went through his manuscript and eliminated nearly every reference to Hooke. Such was his
fury that he refused either to publish his Opticks or to accept the presidency of the Royal
Society until Hooke was dead.

International prominence of Isaac

Newton
The Principia immediately raised Newton to international prominence. In their continuing
loyalty to the mechanical ideal, Continental scientists rejected the idea of action at a distance
for a generation, but even in their rejection they could not withhold their admiration for the
technical expertise revealed by the work. Young British scientists spontaneously recognized
him as their model. Within a generation the limited number of salaried positions for
scientists in England, such as the chairs at Oxford, Cambridge, and Gresham College, were
monopolized by the young Newtonians of the next generation. Newton, whose only close
contacts with women were his unfulfilled relationship with his mother, who had seemed to
abandon him, and his later guardianship of a niece, found satisfaction in the role of patron to
the circle of young scientists. His friendship with Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss-born
mathematician resident in London who shared Newton’s interests, was the most profound
experience of his adult life
.

Warden of the mint

Almost immediately following the Principia’s publication, Newton, a fervent if
unorthodox Protestant, helped to lead the resistance of Cambridge to James II’s attempt
to Catholicize it. As a consequence, he was elected to represent the university in the
convention that arranged the revolutionary settlement. In this capacity, he made the
acquaintance of a broader group, including the philosopher John Locke. Newton tasted the
excitement of London life in the aftermath of the Principia. The great bulk of his creative
work had been completed. He was never again satisfied with the academic cloister, and his
desire to change was whetted by Fatio’s suggestion that he find a position in London. Seek a
place he did, especially through the agency of his friend, the rising politician Charles
Montague, later Lord Halifax. Finally, in 1696, he was appointed warden of the mint.
Although he did not resign his Cambridge appointments until 1701, he moved to London and
henceforth centred his life there.

In the meantime, Newton’s relations with Fatio had undergone a crisis. Fatio was taken
seriously ill; then family and financial problems threatened to call him home to Switzerland.
Newton’s distress knew no limits. In 1693 he suggested that Fatio move to Cambridge, where
Newton would support him, but nothing came of the proposal. Through early 1693 the
intensity of Newton’s letters built almost palpably, and then, without surviving explanation,
both the close relationship and the correspondence broke off. Four months later, without
prior notice, Samuel Pepys and John Locke, both personal friends of Newton, received wild,
accusatory letters. Pepys was informed that Newton would see him no more; Locke was
charged with trying to entangle him with women. Both men were alarmed for Newton’s
sanity; and, in fact, Newton had suffered at least his second nervous breakdown. The crisis
passed, and Newton recovered his stability. Only briefly did he ever return to sustained
scientific work, however, and the move to London was the effective conclusion of his creative
activity.

As warden and then master of the mint, Newton drew a large income, as much as £2,000 per
annum. Added to his personal estate, the income left him a rich man at his death. The
position, regarded as a sinecure, was treated otherwise by Newton. During the great
recoinage, there was need for him to be actively in command; even afterward, however, he
chose to exercise himself in the office. Above all, he was interested in counterfeiting. He
became the terror of London counterfeiters, sending a goodly number to the gallows and
finding in them a socially acceptable target on which to vent the rage that continued to well
up within him.

Interest in religion and theology

Newton found time now to explore other interests, such as religion and theology. In the early
1690s he had sent Locke a copy of a manuscript attempting to prove
that Trinitarian passages in the Bible were latter-day corruptions of the original text. When
Locke made moves to publish it, Newton withdrew in fear that his anti-Trinitarian views
would become known. In his later years, he devoted much time to the interpretation of the
prophecies of Daniel and St. John, and to a closely related study of ancient chronology. Both
works were published after his death.
Leader of English science
In London, Newton assumed the role of patriarch of English science. In 1703 he was elected
President of the Royal Society. Four years earlier, the French Académie des
Sciences (Academy of Sciences) had named him one of eight foreign associates. In
1705 Queen Anne knighted him, the first occasion on which a scientist was so honoured.
Newton ruled the Royal Society magisterially. John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, had
occasion to feel that he ruled it tyrannically. In his years at the Royal Observatory at
Greenwich, Flamsteed, who was a difficult man in his own right, had collected an unrivalled
body of data. Newton had received needed information from him for the Principia, and in the
1690s, as he worked on the lunar theory, he again required Flamsteed’s data. Annoyed when
he could not get all the information he wanted as quickly as he wanted it, Newton assumed a
domineering and condescending attitude toward Flamsteed. As president of the Royal
Society, he used his influence with the government to be named as chairman of a body of
“visitors” responsible for the Royal Observatory; then he tried to force the immediate
publication of Flamsteed’s catalog of stars. The disgraceful episode continued for nearly 10
years. Newton would brook no objections. He broke agreements that he had made with
Flamsteed. Flamsteed’s observations, the fruit of a lifetime of work, were, in effect, seized
despite his protests and prepared for the press by his mortal enemy, Edmond Halley.
Flamsteed finally won his point and by court order had the printed catalog returned to him
before it was generally distributed. He burned the printed sheets, and his assistants brought
out an authorized version after his death. In this respect, and at considerable cost to himself,
Flamsteed was one of the few men to best Newton. Newton sought his revenge by
systematically eliminating references to Flamsteed’s help in later editions of
the Principia.In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician,
Newton met a contestant more of his own calibre. It is now well established that Newton
developed the calculus before Leibniz seriously pursued mathematics. It is almost
universally agreed that Leibniz later arrived at the calculus independently. There has never
been any question that Newton did not publish his method of fluxions; thus, it was Leibniz’s
paper in 1684 that first made the calculus a matter of public knowledge. In
the Principia Newton hinted at his method, but he did not really publish it until he appended
two papers to the Opticks in 1704. By then the priority controversy was already
smouldering. If, indeed, it mattered, it would be impossible finally to assess responsibility
for the ensuing fracas. What began as mild innuendoes rapidly escalated into blunt charges
of plagiarism on both sides. Egged on by followers anxious to win a reputation under
his auspices, Newton allowed himself to be drawn into the centre of the fray; and, once his
temper was aroused by accusations of dishonesty, his anger was beyond constraint. Leibniz’s
conduct of the controversy was not pleasant, and yet it paled beside that of Newton.
Although he never appeared in public, Newton wrote most of the pieces that appeared in his
defense, publishing them under the names of his young men, who never demurred. As
president of the Royal Society, he appointed an “impartial” committee to investigate the
issue, secretly wrote the report officially published by the society, and reviewed it
anonymously in the Philosophical Transactions. Even Leibniz’s death could not allay
Newton’s wrath, and he continued to pursue the enemy beyond the grave. The battle with
Leibniz, the irrepressible need to efface the charge of dishonesty, dominated the final 25
years of Newton’s life. It obtruded itself continually upon his consciousness. Almost any
paper on any subject from those years is apt to be interrupted by a furious paragraph
against the German philosopher, as he honed the instruments of his fury ever more keenly.
In the end, only Newton’s death ended his wrath.

Final years of Isaac Newton

During his final years Newton brought out further editions of his central works. After the
first edition of the Optics in 1704, which merely published work done 30 years before, he
published a Latin edition in 1706 and a second English edition in 1717–18. In both, the
central text was scarcely touched, but he did expand the “Queries” at the end into the final
statement of his speculations on the nature of the universe. The second edition of
the Principia, edited by Roger Cotes in 1713, introduced extensive alterations. A third
edition, edited by Henry Pemberton in 1726, added little more. Until nearly the end, Newton
presided at the Royal Society (frequently dozing through the meetings) and supervised the
mint. During his last years, his niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, and her husband lived with
him.