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Newton, who was the culminating figure of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, was born on Jan. 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. He never knew his biological father. His mother remarried within a couple years of his birth, and when the couple moved to a nearby village to raise a family, his stepfather left him behind to stay with his grandmother. Newton came to loathe his stepfather, and the traumatic events of his youth appear to have impacted his later life. He was often insecure, anxious, and violently defensive of his work. (During his career, he became engaged in tempestuous arguments with the likes of Robert Hooke, concerning inverse square relation of universal gravitation, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, concerning the development of calculus.)
As a student at Cambridge University (1661–65), Newton encountered the scientific revolution, a movement in the 16th and 17th centuries in which scientists challenged and rejected the Greek view of nature that had long dominated scientific thought. He was introduced to the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo, and René Descartes. He immersed himself in the study of philosophy, learned of chemistry through the work of Robert Boyle, and read of the alchemy and magic that formed the basis of the Hermetic tradition.
The contrast and unresolved tension between the mechanical and magical philosophies significantly influenced Newton’s work, including his Principia. This masterpiece of Newton’s was published in 1687, but the mathematical concepts and insights that it contained originated early in his career, most likely sometime around 1666, which the man himself described as “the prime of my age for invention.” Indeed, between 1665 and 1667, Newton laid the foundations of the calculus, examined circular motion, investigated the phenomena of light and colors, and derived equations that would later come to bear on the law of universal gravitation. It was a tremendous volume of work, and none of it was...