QI The Book of the Dead

Fatio de Fuillier. The end of their affair caused Newton to have the first of a series of nervous breakdowns, and he almost certainly died a virgin.
    Despite these personal failures, the public man was a notable success. He was the first natural philosopher to be knighted and was for many years President of the Royal Society despite achieving nothing of great scientific worth after 1696. In that year, he accepted the post of Warden of the Royal Mint. Instead of accepting this as the purely honorific position it was meant to be,Newton took his new role very seriously and attacked it with his customary fanaticism. He spent his days reforming the currency to save the British economy from collapse. In the evenings he lurked in bars and brothels tracking down counterfeiters – whom he then personally arranged to have hanged, drawn and quartered. He was twice elected MP for Cambridge University but the job held no interest for him: the only comment he made during his entire political career was a request for someone to open the window.
    But Newton also had a second, secret life. He was a practising alchemist. Of the 270 books in his library, more than half were about alchemy, mysticism and magic. In the seventeenth century, alchemy was considered heresy and a hanging offence. In conditions of utmost secrecy, he spent the bulk of his working life trying to calculate the date of the end of the world as encoded in the Book of Revelation, unravel the meaning of the prophecies of the Book of Daniel and relate the chronology of human history to the population cycle of the locust. Rather like Freud assuming he would be feted as a great scientist, Newton believed that it would be for his religious theories, rather than for his work on optics or motion, that he would be remembered. After his death, Newton’s family discovered vast trunks of these religious and mystical writings containing over a thousand pages covered with one and a half million words of notes, as well as two completed books. They were so embarrassed about it that they either destroyed them or kept them hidden without admitting to their existence. A huge cache came to light as recently as 1936.
    It would be easy to dismiss Newton’s mystical writings as the ravings of a man who had lost his intellectual bearings. In fact, it was his belief in a creator-god that ‘governs all things and knowsall that is or can be done’ that drove his scientific breakthroughs as well as his biblical and alchemical studies. Had he not been open to the notion of an unseen mystical force controlling the universe he might not have made his most famous discovery: the mathematical proof of the existence of gravity.

     
    If Newton paid for his lonely, fatherless childhood with a debilitating social awkwardness, it also left him peculiarly equipped for intense, solitary work. The mathematician and engineer Oliver Heaviside (1850–1925) provides an even more extreme example of this. While not quite in the Newton league in terms of scientific achievement, without Heaviside we would have no long-distance telephones and a much less precise understanding of the behaviour of electrical and magnetic fields. Though he isn’t a household name, Heaviside did for electromagnetism what Newton did for gravity: describing observable physical phenomena using mathematical equations.
    Heaviside was born into poverty in Camden Town, London. His father was a gifted engraver, producing the woodcuts that illustrated the serialisation of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in the Strand magazine, but the house was poky, cold and dark, with most of the windows boarded up because of window tax. Thomas Heaviside was prone to violent outbursts, and tended to pick on Oliver, the youngest of his four sons, because he refused to behave like other children. Some of this was due to Oliver’s partial deafness caused by catching scarlet fever as a toddler, but the following, heartbreakingly short school essay by the young Heaviside paints a dismal picture of life at home:

    The following story is true – There was a little boy, and his father said, ‘Do try to be like other people, don’t frown.’ And he tried and tried but he could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions .
     
    His deafness also meant it was hard for him to play easily with other children, so he attended the all-girls school run by his mother. He disliked most academic subjects but was encouraged in a love of