I finished reading The Life of Isaac Newton. It was dry to my taste, but still okay. It’s hard to read any history after experiencing David McCullough’s books.

I’m not sure many people appreciate how different the world was before and after Newton. His contributions weren’t the only ones that mattered, but they were profoundly significant. He used prisms to demonstrate that white light is composed of all the colors of the spectrum. He invented calculus (independently, though simultaneously, with Leibniz). He formulated the laws of motion. He discovered universal gravitation—an idea that sounds absurd at first: everything attracts everything else! Before him, the cosmos seemed governed by mysteries or divine intervention; after him, it was ruled by discoverable, mathematical laws. He also helped formalize the scientific method.

One thing the book does well is showing what a complicated person Newton was. He was smart, but also combative, suspicious, and vindictive. I would even go further and call his personality unpleasant. His obsession with quarrels was at odds with his intellect.

For example, he developed calculus in 1665–1666 but didn’t formally publish his results during his lifetime. Leibniz published his method in 1684, and Newton’s priority claim rested on his earlier, unpublished work. The dispute over who invented calculus first began in the 1690s and escalated in 1704, when Newton published some of his calculus-related material in the appendix of Opticks. The argument dragged on for many years, with both sides accusing the other of plagiarism, until Leibniz died in 1716.

This contrast between his achievements and his difficult personality makes reading his biography challenging but also more interesting. The challenging part comes from my brain’s desire to have a coherent picture of someone, but life is not like that.

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 seashore, 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.