He had some relatives that drowned, and he thought that it was because gravity pulled them down. Interestingly, he thought of gravity as an evil scourge. And Roger Babson based his market research on Newtonian principles, using the idea that for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. She was married to a man who got rich predicting the crash of 1929. There’s also Grace Babson, who created the largest collection of Newton objects and papers in America. So the way Adams and Stokes dealt with it was to say that, “His power of writing a beautiful hand was evidently a snare to him.” Basically, they said he didn’t like this stuff, he just liked his own writing. And I think it was disappointing to see your intellectual father copying this stuff over and over. Sometimes he would produce six or seven copies of the same thing. Newton spent a long time writing a lot of unfinished treatises. But he also wrote about alchemy and even more about religious matters. When actually confronted with Newton’s paper, they were horrified and dismayed. So these two guys get the papers, and then they sit on them for 16 years they basically procrastinate. And Stokes was just as great a physicist, but he wrote everything down. And the two men given to sorting them were John Couch Adams and George Stokes. WIRED: Did you have any particular favorite episodes in the history of Newton’s papers?ĭry: When the papers came to Cambridge in the late 1800s, they were unsorted and chaotic. But that’s what people have felt in the past. One of my hopes is that this book will inspire people to go and look at the papers. So when he published his biography, it included much of the heresy and alchemy, despite the fact that Brewster was a good orthodox Protestant. But he was also one of these Victorians that had to tell the truth. He fought long and hard to resuscitate Newton’s reputation. One person was David Brewster, who wrote a biography of Newton during the Victorian Era. I was more interested in the papers and the characters that worked on them. The alchemical stuff is technical, the scientific stuff is technical, the religious stuff is technical. One of the first editors of the papers said an older man should take up the task, because he’d have less to lose than a younger man.

And one of the messages of the book is that getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health. It’s more about how others have made sense of all this work. WIRED: Did you read through all this work yourself?ĭry: The book isn’t really about the contents of the paper. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math. There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.ĭry: A huge amount. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. But Newton also studied alchemy and religion. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.Įven in his lifetime, Newton was hailed as an eminent scientist and mathematician of unparalleled genius. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers.

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