Isaac Newton

Overview

Daniel Waterhouse’s roommate at Cambridge, sometime friend, lifelong source of anxiety. Stephenson portrays Newton as the greatest intellect in human history — and also as paranoid, vindictive, secretive, and strange. Not the marble bust. The actual man.

In the Novel

• Book 1 — We meet him as Daniel’s roommate at Trinity College in the early 1660s. He experiments with prisms, sticks bodkins behind his own eyeballs to study optics, develops the foundations of calculus, barely eats, rarely speaks. His quarrel with Robert Hooke over the nature of light scars him badly enough that he retreats from public science for years.
• Book 3 — His alchemy and biblical chronology obsessions come to the fore. His 1693 nervous breakdown (historically real, never fully explained) is a turning point. By the end he’s transitioning to his role at the Royal Mint, pursuing counterfeiters with the same intensity he once brought to optics.
• 1713 frame — The Newton-Leibniz calculus dispute is the reason Daniel is summoned back to England.

What’s real

Almost everything. Stephenson’s Newton tracks the historical record closely:

• The personality — He was a known stutterer. Lectured to empty rooms when no students showed up. Lukewarm or hostile to the few friends he had. Had a nervous breakdown at 50. Simon Baron-Cohen has argued he showed signs of Asperger syndrome.
• The vindictiveness — As Royal Society president, he destroyed rivals’ careers. Forced Astronomer Royal Flamsteed to publish prematurely, then savaged the work. Blocked electricity pioneer Stephen Gray from publishing because Gray was Flamsteed’s friend. Secretly authored the Royal Society’s “impartial” report on the calculus priority dispute.
• The alchemy — Not a quirky hobby. He wrote over a million words on alchemy — more than on any other subject. He genuinely believed in transmutation and saw his Mint work as connected.
• The secret heresy — Privately an Arian (denied the Trinity). Would have been a scandal at Trinity College.

Key relationships

• Daniel Waterhouse — His roommate, reluctant friend, and the only person trusted by both Newton and Leibniz.
• Leibniz — The great rivalry. Newton describes how things work; Leibniz insists on explaining why. Not petty academic politics (though it becomes that) — a genuine disagreement about what science should be.
• Robert Hooke — The experimentalist whose criticism of Newton’s optics drove him into seclusion.
• Nicolas Fatio de Duillier — The closest thing Newton has to an intimate companion. Their relationship and its mysterious end is one of the novel’s recurring puzzles.