QI The Book of the Dead

bottom of the class. Some measure of his unhappiness can be seen in the long list of sins he made as a teenager: ‘Putting a pin in John Keys hat to prick him’, ‘Stealing cherry cobs from Edward Storey’ and ‘Denying that I did so’, ‘Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter’ and the revealing ‘Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them’.
    Reverend Smith died when Newton was seventeen and his mother responded by pulling him out of school so he could farm their land. He hated farming even more than school. It bored him. So, asked to watch the sheep, he would end up building a model of a waterwheel while the sheep wandered off and damaged the neighbours’ fields. On one occasion he was walking a horse home when it slipped its bridle; Newton didn’t notice and walked back with the bridle in his hands. All he wanted to do was study. His mother gave up and sent him back to school, where he astonished everyone by graduating with top marks.
    From there he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. His Cambridge career, while not a disaster, was hardly a sparkling success – probably because he spent most of his time reading Descartes, Copernicus and Galileo, men whose radical ideas fellwell outside the curriculum. When the university closed as a precaution against plague in 1665, Newton returned to his farmhouse in Lincolnshire. Over the next eighteen months, entirely on his own, he went on to discover the laws of gravity and motion and formulate theories of colour and calculus that changed the world for ever. His discoveries in mechanics, mathematics, thermodynamics, astronomy, optics and acoustics make him at least twice as important as any other scientific figure who has ever lived, and the book that eventually contained all his most original work, Principia Mathematica (1687), is arguably the most important single book in the history of science. When he returned to Cambridge, still only twenty-six years old, he was elected the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a position now held by Stephen Hawking). Three years later, in 1672, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and acclaimed as one of the most brilliant men of the age.
    Quite what happened to Newton over those two years staring out across the Fens remains a mystery. His obsessiveness suggests he may have suffered from a mild form of autism, such as Asperger’s Syndrome. Whether that’s true or not, Newton was certainly odd . He often forgot to eat and, when he did, he did so standing at his desk. At times he would work in his laboratory for six weeks at a time, never letting the fire go out. Frequently, when entertaining guests, he would go into the study to get a bottle of wine, have a thought, sit down to record it, and become so preoccupied that he forgot all about the dinner party. He was obsessed with the colour crimson. An inventory of his possessions lists a crimson mohair bed with crimson curtains, crimson drapes, crimson wall hangings, a crimson settee with crimson chairs and crimson cushions. He was famously paranoid, keeping a box filledwith guineas on his windowsill to test the honesty of those who worked for him. He had a nerdish dislike of the arts, calling poetry ‘ingenious nonsense’, and on the one occasion he went to the opera he left before the performance ended. Yet he was vain enough to sit for more than twenty portraits and his sense of his own uniqueness was never in doubt. He once constructed an anagram, Jeova sanctus unus , out of the Latin version of his name, Isaacus Neutonus. It means ‘God’s Holy One’.
    There are obvious connections here with the confidence and self-absorption of Leonardo, and with the absent-mindedness of a later thinker, like Einstein. All three took themselves very seriously; all three may have had neurological quirks; all three either missed out on or hated formal education. Significantly, of the three, Newton had the toughest childhood and he was also the one who found friendship hardest. All the contemporary accounts reveal a cold, austere and exasperating man. Even his servant only recalled him laughing once, when he was asked what was the use of studying Euclid. The slightest criticism of his work drove him into a furious rage, and his life was blighted by vicious feuds with other eminent mathematicians such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Robert Hooke. He had one love in his life – a young Swiss mathematician named Nicholas