Isaac Newton, The Asshole Who Reinvented the Universe by Florian Freistetter (PDF)

Description

A blunt and humorous profile of Isaac Newton focusing on his disagreeable personality and showing that his offputting qualities were key to his scientific breakthroughs.Isaac Newton may have been the most important scientist in history, but he was a very difficult man. Put more bluntly, he was an asshole, an SOB, or whatever epithet best describes an abrasive egomaniac. In this colorful profile of the great man—warts and all—astronomer Florian Freistetter shows why this damning assessment is inescapable.Newton’s hatred of fellow scientist Robert Hooke knew no bounds and he was strident in expressing it. He stole the work of colleague John Flamsteed, ruining his career without a second thought. He carried on a venomous battle with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the invention of calculus, vilifying him anonymously while the German scientist was alive and continuing the attacks after he died. All evidence indicates that Newton was conniving, sneaky, resentful, secretive, and antisocial. Compounding the mystery of his strange character is that he was also a religious fanatic, a mystery-monger who spent years studying the Bible and predicted the apocalypse.While documenting all of these unusual traits, the author makes a convincing case that Newton would have never revolutionized physics if he hadn’t been just such an obnoxious person. This is a fascinating character study of an astounding genius and—if truth be told—an almighty asshole as well.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The title of this review comes from a quote by John Maynard Keynes: “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians”*I like this quote because Newton devoted much of his time to alchemy and mysticism, and was not a scientist in the way we think of today, although he helped establish science as we know it today. The reason he was such an important figure in science is that he was a great mathematician and the first important mathematical physicist. It was he who placed ideas swirling in the sciences on the mathematical foundation we use today.But, once having done so, he wanted full credit for the ideas, even if others had inklings of them before him. His most famous feud was with Leibniz, who co-invented calculus, one of the key tools Newton used to revolutionize how we view and understand physics. Newton misused his position with the Royal Society to fake a report claiming that Leibniz plagiarized him, which is all but certainly not true.He feuded with others, as well, notably Robert Hooke. Hooke began to understand that gravity was universal, that the gravitational force was centripetal, and also to have a basic sense of inertia and momentum. But he lacked the mathematical wherewithal to codify his insights into the physics we understand today. Newton provided that insight. Then, having done so, Newton couldn’t share the credit. He worked hard to bury Hooke’s important contributions. A book more sympathetic to Hooke and his contemporaries is

⭐.The author of this book, while not excusing Newton’s behavior, leans in the direction of arguing that Newton deserves most of the credit because his mathematical approach was the key to modern science, and that his success was a piece with his noxious personality. I am less sympathetic to that viewpoint, feeling that it was ideas bubbling from the natural scientists of the time combined with Newton’s mathematical prowess that came together to reinvent the universe, to steal from the subtitle of the book.This book is amusing and a quick read, but not the whole story.To provide context for this review, I have Ph.D. in physics.* This quote appears on page 137 of the current book; 137 is notorious in physics as the (approximate) inverse of the fine structure constant. Something for the mystic to ponder.

⭐I thought this was going to be a silly picture book full of quips and snarky illustrations, but this book brings the content and keeps you interested. Perhaps that is what makes Newton so compelling, that while being a total jerk he also is a fascinating creature.Newton persecuted counterfeiters. He toiled around with magic and the alchemy. He stuck a needle into his own eye, he stared at the sun and then convinced he ruined his sight, locked himself in a dark room for 3 days until he felt like he recovered. He had limited social skills, seemed often depressed and prickly in mood.While learning all of these things, I found myself more and more fascinated with the man and learning about the things he accomplished. Well done book, well done.

⭐As can be seen from the title, this is not a serious book. It’s entertaining, and certainly has some worthwhile ideas, but the author is an Austrian blogger who wrote the book in German, and that shows. It’s like reading a bunch of blog posts, with bad jokes and superficial analysis mixed up with personal anecdotes and results of research and thinking. All with a German tone to it, somehow different from American books.Indeed, the book seems an extended version of the “science slams” popular in Germany (and I guess this author’s native Austria), but not popular here. Sort of TED-talkish, but a little different. Having a comedic hook to your science topic is not a bad thing when you write about science for a general audience, but for me it soon got very old.Isaac Newton definitely is an interesting person, and Florian Freistetter has done a lot of research. But the record left by Isaac Newton is pretty sketchy. I think a lot of speculation is done on very little fact. Kind of like paleontologists who have a tooth fossil and from that speculate all about an animal. How much is fact and how much fiction? Hard to tell.Like the idea that Isaac Newton never saw the ocean. How can we know that? I remember his famous analogy where he compared himself to a boy playing by the seashore: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”While I enjoyed reading the book and learned some new things (like the fact that Isaac Newton’s pretty niece got him the job as head of the Mint, not his scientific work), I don’t recommend it. I think it’s too shallow, and the application of lessons from Newton’s life to modern scientists too pat. Too bloggish for me, and I rarely read blogs.Still, I did think Florian Freistetter gave Isaac Newton his deserved place in scientific history as a genius who changed the world of science. Now if we could only correct the misapprehension of biologists that Charles Darwin somehow did the same thing. Best to class Darwin with Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx as brilliant men who didn’t get it right, and not with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein (another great scientist who was a bit of a jerk) as geniuses who did.

⭐In a conversational tone, Freistetter covers the life of Isaac Newton including his scientific genius, his self-centered and irritating personality, his interest in alchemy and theology, and his relationships with other scientists, politicians, theologians, educators, and the world around him. His scientific and mathematical discoveries not only greatly influenced his times but are still influencing science today. His theories are spoon fed to us in terms a layman can understand.

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