Sullivan's Newton

The late John William Navin Sullivan was an able mathematician, a gifted and lucid interpreter of physics, a lover of music, a searcher for beauty in both music and science. A lonely and meditative man himself, he regarded Beethoven as the greatest of all musicians, Newton as the greatest of all scientists. His life of Beethoven is one of his best-known books. A few days before he died last August in Surrey, England, of disseminated sclerosis, he completed his Isaac Newton. Last week this book was published in the U. S.*

Sullivan's biography does not bring to light any new material about Newton, and he draws freely on other biographers. But Sullivan was fascinated by the human being which harbored such a magnificent mind, and from the available material he tried to draw, with fair success, a clearer picture of the 17th Century's greatest scientist as a person.

Newton's greatest gifts were in mathematics and physics, but he was frequently bored with or indifferent to these branches of learning, and spent most of his time on alchemy, history, theology and mysticism. He edited geographical works, made telescopes and ear trumpets, dissected animal organs and studied cider-making. Newton was not stimulated by passing winds of criticism and discussion. In fact they annoyed him so much, by taking up his time and disturbing his quiet, that he often took refuge from the world by keeping his work to himself.

Says Sullivan: "From all the passions which give direction to most men's lives, sexual love, paternity, friendship, citizenship, religious aspirations, the desire for fame, the desire to benefit humanity, Newton seems to have been free. From the point of view of most men his life, in spite of its prodigious achievements, would seem pointless. . . . His life was one long meditation, but his interest in the subject of his meditations was exhausted in the act of understanding it."

Isaac Newton, a prematurely born, posthumous son of a "wild, extravagant and weak" father, showed some aptitude for science in boyhood, went to Cambridge as a "poor scholar." In his twenties he made three of the greatest discoveries in human history: the Law of Gravitation, the system of mathematics called calculus, and the fact that white light is a composite of colored light. But he did not publish his Principia until two decades later, and then only at the urging of Halley, the comet man. After finishing the Principia, Newton almost lost his mind, but recovered and retained his faculties until he died at 85. But for the. last 40 years of his life his contributions to physics and mathematics were almost nil.

Probably true, according to Sullivan, is the legend that a falling apple started the massive machinery of Newton's mind rolling toward the Law of Gravitation. Voltaire reported this incident, and Voltaire had it from Newton's niece.

-*Macmillan ($2.50).

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