Isaac Newton: Gravity, Authority, and Hidden Papers
100 Lives That Shaped the World · Episode 37
- Historical Biographies
- 42 min
- Ages 12–99
- 10 chapters
About this audiobook
A biography of Newton spanning mathematics, optics, gravitation, alchemy, radical theology, institutional conflict, the Royal Mint, and the later making of a solitary genius.
Why it's worth a listen
It joins towering achievement to collaboration, secrecy, priority warfare, religious heterodoxy, state punishment, and forms of inquiry later biographies tried to separate.
A question to keep
How did Newton build unusually powerful systems of explanation, and what did his pursuit of certainty cost colleagues, rivals, and people under state power?
Chapters
- An Apple Remembered Later
- Woolsthorpe and Cambridge
- Plague Years Without the Miracle Myth
- Light Broken Apart
- Calculus and Priority
- Halley Makes the Principia Possible
- Alchemy and Unorthodox Faith
- President and Gatekeeper
- Master of the Mint
- Papers Too Large for the Statue