In fact, as Higgitt’s book convincingly shows, all these interests are going hand in hand and The period between 1820s and 1860s is marked, in England, by a growing interest in Newton’s papers (mostly unpublished at that time), by various attempts to understand and integrate Newton’s various pursuits (in mechanics, optics, mathematics, theology and history, as well as in alchemy) and by a growing interest in science and its exploits.

Higgitt goes through a number of early biographies of Isaac Newton, from the first “scientific biography,” properly speaking – published in 1822 by Jean Baptiste Biot – to the second attempt of David Brewster to compose a scientific (and properly documented) biography of his idol, in 1855. It is not very often that a dense and intricate historical reconstruction keeps you glued to your chair, and to the text, as keen to find out what is next as when you read an engaging novel. Recreating Newton tells us a fascinating story. Her book surveys some of the most important early biographies of Newton written in the nineteenth century in France and England by mathematicians, physicists, astronomers and philosophers. Rebekah Higgitt’s book tells us the story of how working scientists discovered Newton, engaged with his work, and felt the need to write his biography in order to both understand a much more complex personality and to vindicate a particular image of science. The fascination with Newton’s genius and the puzzling nature of his works were too strong for this carefully crafted but lifeless statue to endure. This was the public image of Newton that early modern science inherited but it did not last long. This was the inheritance of the eighteenth century eulogies, but also the image that Newton himself constructed with the help of his students and followers: that of a keen, humble, patient and assiduous investigator of nature, of “innate modesty and simplicity,” endowed with charity, generosity, temperance, piety, goodness & all other virtues, without a mixture of any vice whatsoever.” At least until mid-nineteenth-century, Newton was regarded as a model for the scientific life: a moral standard for any kind of life in pursuit of truth (or maybe of “the Truth”). It provided a model and constituted a genre all by itself. If in science ideas and theories are so much detached from their bearers, why are we so interested in scientific biographies?įor a longtime, there was a life scientists looked up to with the same reverence one can encounter in the case of philosophers’ attempts to know, model and emulate Socrates: The life of Isaac Newton. One has to admit that this is a nice story, even if it does not ring quite true. Isn’t it tempting to think that this is how science was born? By contrast, Galileo constructed a theory for which he had a number of proofs. Bruno was defending a theory for which there was no proof (the infinity of the universe). Gaston Bachelard once famously contrasted Galileo and Bruno in these terms. By contrast, scientists produced ideas and theories which inhabited a different world than that of their own biography. Philosophers were prepared to die for their ideas and had to to live according to their own preaching. ( Rebekah Higgitt, Recreating Newton: Newtonian biography and the making of nineteenth century history of science, Pickering & Chatto, London, 2007)įor a longtime, scholars claimed that one of the major differences between philosophy and science reflected their attitude towards biography.

Motto: It was the hemlock that made Socrates great.

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