Nearer the Gods

Biographers and other commentators have never given us a consensus view of
Newton’s character. His contemporaries either saw him as all but divine or all
but monstrous, and opinions depended a lot on whether the author was friend
or foe. By the nineteenth century, hagiography had set in, and Newton as paragon
emerged. In our time, the monster model seems to be returning.
On one assessment there should be no doubt: Newton was the greatest creative
genius physics has ever seen. None of the other candidates for the superlative
(Einstein, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Gibbs, and Feynman) has matched Newton’s
combined achievements as theoretician, experimentalist, and mathematician.
Newton was no exception to the rule that creative geniuses lead self-centered,
eccentric lives. He was secretive, introverted, lacking a sense of humor, and prudish.
He could not tolerate criticism, and could be mean and devious in the treatment
of his critics. Throughout his life he was neurotic, and at least once
succumbed to breakdown.
But he was no monster. He could be generous to colleagues, both junior and
senior, and to destitute relatives. In disputes, he usually gave no worse than he
received. He never married, but he was not a misogynist, as his fondness for
Catherine Barton attests. He was reclusive in Cambridge, where he had little
admiration for his fellow academics, but entertained well in the more stimulating
intellectual environment of London.
If you were to become a time traveler and meet Newton on a trip back to the
seventeenth century, you might find him something like the performer who first
exasperates everyone in sight and then goes on stage and sings like an angel. The
singing is extravagantly admired and the obnoxious behavior forgiven. Halley,
who was as familiar as anyone with Newton’s behavior, wrote in an ode to Newton prefacing the Principia that “nearer the gods no mortal can approach.” Albert
Einstein, no doubt equal in stature to Newton as a theoretician (and no paragon),
left this appreciation of Newton in a foreword to an edition of the Opticks:
Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science! He who has time and tranquility
can by reading this book live again the wonderful events which the great
Newton experienced in his young days. Nature to him was an open book, whose
letters he could read without effort. The conceptions which he used to reduce
the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience
itself, from the beautiful experiments which he ranged in order like playthings
and describes with an affectionate wealth of details. In one person he
combined the experimenter, the theorist, the mechanic and, not least, the artist
in exposition. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone: his joy in creation
and his minute precision are evident in every word and in every figure.