The Life of Isaac Newton

One of the greatest scientists of all time, Isaac Newton left a body of work that marked the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, the intellectual transformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that ushered in the era of modern science. In The Life of Isaac Newton, Richard Westfall condenses his acclaimed biography Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton to present Newton's achievements in a manner accessible to a general audience. Westfall follows Newton from his boyhood in Lincolnshire to his career at Cambridge University, where he realized virtually all of his scientific achievements. There Newton studied mathematics and physics and immersed himself in alchemy, reading exhaustively in the literature of the Art, attempting to formulate his own statement of its procedures, and experimenting at the furnace that he erected in the garden outside his chamber in Trinity College. He also studied theology and left behind an enormous corpus of manuscripts in which he embraced unorthodox positions that would have shocked his contemporaries. In this richly detailed biography, Westfall captures both the personal life and the scientific career of Isaac Newton, presenting a fully rounded picture of Newton the man, the scientist, the philosopher the theologian, and the public figure.