Isaac Newton - the introduction

 Isaac Newton was born in 1642.
 I've always been in two minds about Newton. He was a brilliant scientist, but he was - by any standards - a loner, eccentric, and at times clearly suffering from a mental disorder. He was, for two centuries, the leading figure of physics, but he could also be ruthless in a way that would surely indicate psychopathology today. He was a historically fascinating man, but someone I definitely would not like to meet.
  This postng is really just a basic cover of the life of Newton - I will be posting more in-depth articles on his life, as there is just way too much to cover in a few paragraphs. He was a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant early physicisist, and he managed to get the problem with forgery in the English economy down at a time when it was threatening to destablise the economy.
 He was born into a time when science was just starting to flourish (Novum organum being published in 1620), Copernicus and Vesalius a century earlier, and these early scientists were getting used to what contemporary scientists take for granted as the scientific method - experimental observation, and using mathematical methods where possible to make a reasoned argument.
 And Newton was a brilliant mathematician - calculus (invented independently by Liebnitz) both differential and integral, infinite series, binomial theorem. His work on gravity and light means that, due to the importance of gravity and light in science, he was regarded as the definitive physicist until Einstein. Principia Mathematica, despite being impenetrable to a contemporary physicist, was pivotal - it gave the first precise deinfitions to mass, weight, force, the laws of motion, and of gravity.
 He was also a rampant egotist. His fight with Robert Hooke is infamous. He hated to tell the world about his results, but also felt the strong urge to get the results out there before someone else took credit for the work. He savaged Liebnitz for having the temerity to invent calculus at the same time. He got rich, became the head of the Royal Society, and was an insane alchemist who did not apply scientific principles to whatever nonsense he read. I mean really insane - some of the instructions for making lead into gold sound like a confused flu-ridden dream. Like Arthur Conan-Doyle, a brilliant man can believe in nonsense and shun the evidence AND be perfectly comfortable with this cognitive dissonance. And was it really cognitive dissonance? To us now, yes, but Newton was dealing with invisible, real forces in his professional life that he could measure. Without knowing that the stuff he was doing with alchemy was most likely impossible, his mind could make the slight leap to other equally invisible stuff - just that the evidence was maddingly elusive.
 Anyway, more on Newton later.