This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Isaac Newton is typically portrayed as a solitary scientist with intense focus who was obsessed with power and deeply egotistical. But a new book by Caltech historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold takes a deeper look at Newton's life in the two decades leading up to the 1687 publication of his groundbreaking text, Principia Mathematica, when he was 44.
Using newly digitized scans of Newton's early writings, Buchwald and Feingold uncover a portrait of the young polymath as a curious and social scholar whose interests were often fleeting. "What struck me is the extent to which Newton was not always who he eventually came to be," says Feingold, the Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of the History of Science and the Humanities. "He's certainly a towering intellectual, a genius, if you want to use this cliché, but he's far more complex and interesting than many accounts portray.
He could be social and collegial and was a universal scholar in a sense, even though he lacked grounding in many things." Buchwald and Feingold's book, The Winding Trail to Newton's Principia Mathematica, was published Sept. 29 by Princeton University Press. The Principia is the first published work to establish the mathematical foundation for the theory of classical mechanics by explaining the fundamental physical laws governing motion and gravity. In addition to challenging the standard portrait of Newton in his early career, the authors argue that the foundations of the Principia's axioms—Newton's three laws of motion—were commonplace ideas of the time that Newton restructured.
In fact, the authors note, prior to a pivotal visit from astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley in 1684, Newton engaged only sporadically with celestial mechanics, or the study of the movement of astronomical objects, including the gravitational pull they can have on each other. During their discussions, Halley asked Newton a question about planetary orbits and set the Principia in motion. (Halley later used Newton's "new" laws to determine the orbits of comets and predicted the return of what would later be known as Halley's Comet.) "The Principia does not emerge in his head out of the sky," says Buchwald, the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History. "We've given a whole new view of how the route to the Principia evolved." Buchwald and Feingold have been friends and collaborators since they first joined the Caltech faculty in the early 2000s.
Longtime Newtonian scholars, they published their first book together in 2012, Newton and the Origin of Civilization. That book examined how Newton applied his unique ways of thinking, such as reading archaic texts through the lens of astronomy, to create a drastically revised timeline for ancient civilizations. The timeline was revealed in 1728, a year after his death, in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.
Along with a former student, Andrej Svorenčík (MS '08), Feingold spent more than a decade tracing first-edition versions of the Principia around the world. In a survey published in 2020, they described how they had unearthed nearly 200 previously uncounted copies. "At some point, maybe about five years ago, I started bugging Jed again about Newton," Feingold recalls.
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