Isaac Newton - His Own Words

Isaac Newton - His Own Words: HOW to See Further

At twenty-six years old, working alone in his Cambridge rooms, he ground and polished his own mirrors and built the first reflecting telescope, a new design, far powerful than any existing refracting telescope that used only lenses. His design allowed mankind to see further and more clearly than ever before and is still, in essence, how we build the largest telescopes on Earth and in space today.

Using a glass prism on a beam of sunlight, he arrived at a claim that overturned centuries of accepted wisdom: "Colours in the Object are nothing but a Disposition to reflect this or that sort of Rays more copiously than the rest." Colour, he showed, was not painted onto things, it was a property of light itself, and objects merely reflected it. He carried that same relentless questioning all the way out to the night sky, wondering in print, "Are not the Sun and fix'd Stars great Earths vehemently hot?" - reasoning his way toward the nature of stars a century before anyone had the instruments to confirm his theory. He invented calculus and discovered the universal law of gravity, which governs a falling apple and the movement of planets alike.

The polymath behind the Principia was however no paragon of pure reason - he feuded for decades with bitter rivals Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton was also a self-taught detective who personally hunted counterfeiters through London's taverns and prisons as Warden of the Royal Mint. He worked so tirelessly that he once confessed to a friend that he had "neither ate nor slept well for the better part of a year".

This book strips away the centuries of legend and lets him speak entirely for himself: from his letters, the Opticks, Principia, the Mint papers and his private theological writings, cross-checked against verified public-domain sources. This book traces the man and the method through which he made so many discoveries, the wonder that never left him, the rivalries that consumed him, the faith that quietly shaped everything else, and the times when he reached his breaking point.

Sir Isaac Newton is remembered as the greatest polymath genius of his time, who allowed humanity to see further than ever before. Read his own words and you will feel as if you knew the great man yourself.