| Description: |
|
Product Description
Unknown to all but a few, Newton was a practicing alchemist who dabbled with the occult, a tortured, obsessive character who searched for an understanding of the universe by whatever means possible. Sympathetic yet balanced, Michael White’s Isaac Newton offers a revelatory picture of Newton as a genius who stood at the point in history where magic ended and science began.
Amazon.com Review
Science writer Michael White's subtitle, The Last Sorcerer, echoes John Maynard Keynes's assertion in 1942 that Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was not the Olympian rationalist portrayed by his worshipful early biographers. Newton was a great scientist, the author acknowledges; he was also an "obsessive, driven mystic," deeply involved in the pseudoscience of alchemy, subscriber to a heretical sect of Christianity, and damaged survivor of childhood traumas that rendered him a difficult, egotistical, quarrelsome adult. White makes recent research accessible to the general reader in lucid prose that knocks the academic dust off a towering historical figure.
|
