Isaac Newton: The Last Magician

'I do not know what I may appear to the world

'but to myself,

'I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,

'amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble

'or prettier shell than ordinary,

'while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

Isaac Newton is considered by many

to be the greatest genius of all time.

His virtues proved him a saint

and his discoveries might well pass...

..for miracles.

He was revered as a scientific demigod in his own lifetime.

Now the keenness of his sublime intellect

has allowed us to penetrate the dwellings of the gods

and ascend the heights of heaven!

If anybody was a genius,

Newton was.

Newton revealed the nature of light,

allowing us to explore the universe.

He enabled us to calculate motion

and predict change.

He distilled the force that unites the whole universe

into a precise mathematical formula -

the Universal Law of Gravity.

Newton is celebrated as the rational genius

who propelled us out of medieval darkness

and into the Enlightenment.

But Isaac Newton was also a complex,

difficult and secretive man.

He wasn't communicative.

He didn't want to work with anybody else.

He was easily offended.

Spiteful and swayed by those who were worse than himself!

In vulgar modern terms,

Newton was profoundly neurotic.

Newton's deepest obsession would only be revealed

200 years after his death,

an occult world of heretical religion and alchemy.

There is a vital agent, diffuse through everything in the earth,

a mercurial spirit,

extremely subtle and supremely volatile.

But Newton's secret obsessions

would transform the way we understand the universe.

Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason.

He was the last of the magicians.

BOMBASTIC MUSIC

In 1705, Sir Isaac Newton was 63 years old

and a pillar of the British Establishment.

He had just been knighted.

He was recognised across Europe as the master of the Enlightenment.

He did not suffer from self-doubt.

He rather liked to think of himself as the new Messiah,

a sort of scientific Christ

who was bringing a new kind of knowledge to save the world.

This messiah had a low opinion of lesser mortals.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies

but not the madness of people.

Newton's estrangement from humanity began from the moment he was born

at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire,

on Christmas morning, 1642.

When I was born, I was so little they put me in a quart pot,

and so weakly, they did not think I would live.

I was a little fellow.

The 1640s were the most tumultuous decade in English history.

The English Civil War left one-in-ten men dead.

King Charles I was beheaded.

Oliver Cromwell's puritanical government

waged war against Catholicism in the monarchy.

Bubonic plague was rampant.

People genuinely believed the world was coming to an end.

This time of chaos and upheaval marked Newton for life.

Newton craved certainty.

All of Newton's work is about finding certainty,

finding the truth

and the things that you can absolutely believe in.

His home was anything but a haven.

His father died a few months before he was born.

He was then rejected by his mother.

She abandoned him to start another family when he was three years old.

Newton grew up in tune with the Protestant spirit of the age,

anti-Catholic, Bible-reading and introspective.

He made a list of childhood sins, written in code.

The list begins innocently.

"Making pies on Sunday night...

"..making a mousetrap on Thy Day,

"squirting water on Thy Day..."

Then a darker side is revealed.

"Striking Minnie,

"punching my sister...

"..threatening my Father and Mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."

He was so obsessive.

He was a man who lived his entire life inside his head, and that's how he did what he did.

You look at the papers he left behind

and there are millions of words, of scribbling.

They are not words written to impress anybody.

They're not words written for publication.

They're words written because that was how Newton thought. That's what he did.

The 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes

was fascinated by the man behind the scientific legend.

Geniuses are peculiar -

the uneasiness, the melancholy, the nervous agitation...

In vulgar modern terms,

Newton was profoundly neurotic.

Newton relied on no-one...

-..but himself.

-CLOCK TICKS

He has almost a sort of visceral dislike

of following other people.

He has a very strong belief in his own originality.

As a schoolboy,

Newton's innovative mind was already at work.

He decided to invent his own way to tell the time.

Newton turned the attic into a giant astronomical clock.

It was like a sundial.

He plotted the sun's movement every 15 minutes

as it moved across the walls of his room.

He could go into any room and he could tell what time it was

by looking at the shadows on the walls.

Light, space and time

were already his playthings.

Newton's teenage notebooks mention no friends.

Instead, they reveal his efforts to find his own answers to practical problems,

like alleviating wind.

Steep horse dung, especially a stone-horse,

in ale.

Then take it out, strongly express the juice

and drink it.

But Newton's fertile mind was almost stifled

before it could flourish.

His estranged mother pulled him out of school when he was 17 to run the family farm.

His mother intended he apply himself to the management of the estate

but his genius could not brook such an employment.

Newton was the most useless manager of a farm you can possibly imagine,

and it was his mother's brother who suggested that Newton was too good,

too talented to be kept away from his destiny,

which was university.

Isaac was soon packed off to Trinity College, Cambridge.

CLOCK TICKS

He was drawn to natural philosophy,

the study of the physical world,

what we now call science.

In the late 17th century, when Newton was a student,

science was not held in any particular esteem at all.

There was no degree in science, there was no career in science.

Science hadn't so far produced...

..any useful results.

Newton's professors taught Aristotle's concept

of gravity and levity.

You know, they would've said an apple has some gravity.

And how do we know? Because it has a tendency to fall down.

They would've said fire and smoke have levity

because they rise to the heavens.

That's what Aristotle taught them.

But Newton was ready to reject 2,000 years

of scientific orthodoxy.

He thought and believed that what other people wrote was wrong.

It's as if he believed, even at this early period -

he's 21, 22 -

that he was destined to be the person to reform natural philosophy.

Newton only believed

what he could prove himself.

Natural philosophy should not be founded on metaphysical opinions.

Its conclusions can only be proved by experiment.

He wanted to know everything.

He had an insatiable curiosity.

He was handed this interesting, complicated world

and he could almost see the gears turning

and he wanted to figure them out.

By 1664,

aged only 21,

Newton devised a curriculum for himself -

45 topics that obsessed him for the rest of his life.

He called them

"Certain Philosophical Questions".

Of time and eternity,

of the sun and planets and comets,

of air,

of meteors,

of atoms, of density,

of vacuum,

of reflection,

of attraction - magnetical,

of attraction - electrical,

of light,

of colours, of heat and cold,

of gravity and levity,

of vision...

Newton was obsessed by the mysteries of vision and light.

He went to extraordinary lengths

to examine the mechanics of how the eye works.

I looked upon the sun in a looking glass with my right eye,

and then turned my eyes into a darker corner of my chamber and winked

to observe the impression made and the circles of colours which encompassed it

and how they decayed and at last vanished.

He's trying to work out

how much of what we see is due to the will, so to our mind,

and how much of it is due to what there is in the outside world.

In a few hours time, I had brought my eyes to such a pass

that I could look upon no bright object.

I only saw the sun before me!

I could neither write nor read.

To recover the use of my eyes,

I shut myself up in my darkened chamber for three days.

DOOR CLOSES & LOCKS

Newton was prepared to risk blindness

to ensure his findings were correct.

In his notebooks, there are some wonderful diagrams

of him putting a bodkin, which is a long toothpick,

as close to the back of his eye as he could get.

Betwixt my eye and the bone,

as near to the back of my eye as I could,

and pressing it with the end of the bodkin,

there appeared several bright dark circles of colours.

What he's doing with the eye experiments, he's trying to work out

how much the imagination, what he calls the will or the fancy,

contributes towards vision.

Newton's mathematical mind

was driven to search for bigger answers

to ever bigger questions.

In 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague swept through England,

killing 100,000.

Newton took refuge in his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor.

More isolated than ever,

he continued his compulsive questioning.

Newton realised there were certain problems,

mostly motion and falling objects,

that you just couldn't solve with the classical mathematics.

He invented the means to compute virtually any rate of change...

..the moon's path around the earth...

..the growth pattern of a spiral shell...

..the trajectory of a projectile fired from a cannon.

A new type of mathematics was born.

Calculus.

Calculus is used today

in every branch of the mathematical sciences and engineering.

Every time you have a changing quantity -

say, for example, the acceleration on a car,

how much petrol is being injected into the engine -

there's a changing quantity there

so you have to use calculus.

Without the least help or instruction from any person,

he laid the foundation of all his discoveries

before he was 24 years old.

Newton was now the world's leading mathematician

but no-one else knew it.

He kept his great inventions to himself.

Instead he started an entirely new set of experiments,

this time...

..with light.

In August, 1665,

Sir Isaac bought at Stourbridge Fair a prism

to try some experiments on Descartes' book of colours,

and when he came home, he made a small hole in the window shutters

and darkened the room.

..the celebrated phenomena of colours...

Having darkened my chamber

and made a hole in my window shuts

to let in a convenient quantity of the sun's light,

I placed my prism at its entrance

that it might be refracted to the opposite wall.

It was a very pleasing divertissement

to view the vivid and intense colours produced.

For centuries, white light was considered

the purest form of energy in the universe,

a symbol of God's power.

Newton was about to prove that white light...

..was not pure.

Everybody knew that if you let sunlight shine through a prism,

the prism divides it into a spectrum of colours.

What they didn't know was what happens next

if you put a second prism into a piece of the beam.

Newton showed that the colours of the spectrum

could not be split any further.

They were elemental.

White light was composite.

Newton saw right away that white itself is not pure.

White is a mixture.

Newton had shattered one of the most fundamental beliefs of his time

with demonstrable proof.

Before Newton, a prism was just a toy.

Now he had made it into a tool

that would transform the study of our world

and outer space.

90 percent or more of our knowledge of the universe

has come from collecting light from the sky and stars and planets,

and splitting it, effectively, through a prism.

They can tell us about the composition of planetary atmospheres

or the composition of stars.

They can tell us about the rotation rates of planets.

All of that derives from Newton's looking at the colours.

And yet Newton still seemed destined for obscurity.

He showed no interest in publishing his findings

and seemed to despise the acclaim it could bring.

I do not see what is desirable in public esteem,

were I able to acquire and maintain it.

It would only increase my acquaintance,

the thing I chiefly study to decline.

Newton's reclusiveness was about to be shattered,

thanks to his obsession with light

and a practical little invention.

By the mid-1660s,

telescopes were simple tubes, up to 20-feet-long,

using a series of lenses to magnify the image.

Newton tried a radical new approach.

The reflecting telescope uses mirrors inside a much shorter tube

so that the beam of light is bent often enough

that the lenses can be much closer together.

That's wonderful. Now you can take it on-board ship,

and, indeed, you can carry it around the country.

Newton was extremely proud of his telescope.

-I did it myself.

-HE CHUCKLES

If I had waited for others to make my tools and things for me,

I would never have made anything.

Newton's reflecting telescope was only six-inches-long,

yet it was as powerful as lens telescopes

ten-times the length.

It was totally portable

and ready to revolutionise navigation.

The telescope and the clock are what is needed

to tell you where you are at sea.

And until GPS,

it was still the way that it was done if you were on a sailing ship.

In 1671, Newton's mathematics don Isaac Barrow

finally brought Newton to the attention

of the world's first scientific organisation,

the Royal Society in London.

Its members included great minds of the time

such as Christopher Wren and astronomer Edmund Halley,

as well as a fair few eccentrics.

They are a collection of gentlemen and nobility

and what they are interested in covers the spectrum,

from the ludicrous to the high-powered.

They are interested in looking at their own sperm,

which they found completely fascinating

and I'm sure they went away and tried at home.

You have Edmund Halley writing a paper on cannabis.

You have How to Develop a Better Apple,

How to Wash Your Laundry

and How to Deal With the Gout.

You're in a world of magical mystery...

..nonsense and science, all mixed up together.

There is nothing that is off-limits for the early Royal Society.

Newton's compact telescope was a hit.

The man who lived in his head was hailed by the Royal Society

for what he had made with his hands.

Newton was delighted.

I was surprised to see so much care taken

about securing an invention of mine

for which I had hitherto had so little value.

Newton was accepted into the Royal Society

in January, 1672,

and he finally published his findings from the prism experiments

as his Theory of Light and Colours.

Newton was in no doubt about the importance of his work.

My theory of light and colour is the oddest,

if not the most considerable detection which has been made

in the operations of nature.

Newton's paper would now have to be reviewed

by the curator of experiments at the Royal Society,

Robert Hooke.

Hooke was a highly respected natural philosopher and inventor,

famous for his drawings of insects, lice and house flies

as seen through his homemade microscope.

Hooke would rule on the credibility

of Newton's Theory of Light and Colour.

I have perused Mr Newton's discourse about colours and refractions,

and I was not a little pleased

with the niceness and curiosity of his observations.

Yet as to his hypothesis of solving the phenomena of colours thereby,

I confess, I cannot see yet

any undeniable argument

to convince me of the certainty thereof.

Robert Hooke peer-reviewed it

and said it was worthless.

I don't think Newton ever forgave him for that.

I've been peer-reviewed.

You do never forgive the person who rejected your paper!

Am I bound to satisfy YOU?

It seems you thought it not enough to make objections

unless you could also insult me for my ability to answer them.

He's very, very quick to defend his intellectual property,

and he does it in a kneejerk way, I think,

with people like Robert Hooke.

There's certainly an element of paranoia that derives, I think,

from his own self-belief.

Newton regretted having ever permitted his paper to be published.

I find from what little use I have made of the press

that I shall not enjoy my former serene liberty till I have done with it.

I intend to be solicitous no further!

Every time anybody criticised him, any time anybody dared disagree with him,

he went into retreat.

-I told the Royal Society that I was busy in some

-other

-subject,

some business of my own.

His deepest instincts were profound shrinking from the world,

a paralysing fear that his thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries

would be exposed to the criticism of the world.

Newton withdrew back inside his mind.

Locked in his Cambridge rooms,

he became a virtual hermit for the next 12 years.

The work he produced there was considered so dangerous

that it would be locked away for two centuries.

This was his deepest obsession.

It lay waiting in the dark

until, like some mythical dragon,

Isaac Newton's secret

could be released back into the world.

A bunch of impoverished English nobility

needed to raise some money,

and started selling papers

that had been sitting in storage for centuries.

In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes

bought some of Newton's secret papers at auction -

one great mathematician admiring another.

Sotheby's was auctioning the stuff off

and Keynes was righteously horrified.

I mean, this is, excuse me, but it's England's birthright,

and the idea that these very important and revealing papers

were going to go into private hands

kind of disgusted him.

What he found...

..revealed an utterly different Newton,

not the rational scientist we thought we knew.

What Newton does in a very, very large project

beginning in the late 1670s,

he goes back to as many classical sources as he can find -

Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldean -

and he reads into them

the idea that these people knew about Newtonianism.

Newton alleged that these ancient cultures

had always known that the earth and comets travel round the sun.

They understood God's power,

the invisible force that shaped the universe.

And now he would, too.

He was the last of the magicians,

the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians,

the last great mind that looked out on the visible world with the same eyes

as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance

10,000 years ago.

Newton believed he'd been put on earth

to reveal these great truths to humanity.

I think there's something extremely arrogant and ambitious

about how Newton sees himself,

and he sees himself in a lineage

that goes from Noah to Moses to Christ

and ends in himself.

Newton believed that these ancient civilisations

all shared one scientific religion.

That first religion was the most rational of all others,

till the nations corrupted it.

Newton was convinced he'd found the source of the corruption.

He believed something that most Christians,

whether they're Protestant or Catholic,

would find deeply reprehensible, disgusting,

probably even worse than atheism.

Newton denied

that God was a Trinity.

There is one God,

the Father ever-living, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty,

the maker of Heaven and Earth,

and one mediator between God and Man,

the Man, Christ Jesus.

This went beyond even the most radical Protestantism.

This was heresy.

But Newton had studied the Bible more thoroughly

than any scientific question.

He concluded that false texts had been inserted into the Bible in the 4th century

to assert Christ's divinity.

Anti-Trinitarianism was illegal.

It was outlawed. In principle, you could be put to death for it.

This was a dreadful secret

that Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life.

Newton concealed more than heresy.

He was also following a mystical quest

that went back to the Greeks and Egyptians -

the study...

of alchemy,

the search for the divine ingredient

that could not only turn lead into gold

but give the power of life itself.

Newton was searching for The Philosopher's Stone.

This was the vital substance that, if introduced into a chemical potion,

could turn that from just a lump of metal

into something alive.

There is a vital agent,

diffuse through everything in the earth,

a mercurial spirit,

extremely subtle and supremely volatile,

which is dispersed through every place.

The idea that you could have God's power,

the power of life and death

distilled into a substance,

made it seem so dangerous

that it had to be illegal.

The fire scarcely went out night or day -

he sitting up one night and I another,

till he had finished his chemical experiments.

Newton was always precise.

He meticulously recorded his results,

even when pursuing the magical goals of alchemy.

Today, we call it the Scientific Method.

He was most accurate, strict and exact.

What his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into,

but his pain, his diligence,

made me think he was aiming for something

beyond the reach of human art and industry.

He was not just a crazy obsessive alchemist.

He was the peerless alchemist of Europe.

There was no better alchemist.

Newton's alchemical studies

inspired him beyond even his scientific abilities.

His intuition led him to describe a seemingly magical transformation

that would only be understood 200 years later.

The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies,

is very conformable to nature,

which seems delighted with transmutation.

This transmutation

anticipated Einstein's great breakthrough in physics in 1905.

Mass and energy are interchangeable,

or as Einstein puts it,

E = MC2.

Actually, it does sound very like Einstein.

He is exactly saying that body and light are interchangeable

in the same way that mass and energy

are interconvertible or interchangeable.

So Newton is saying, you know, all the things in the world

can be transformed into everything else.

Newton's quest for transformations

is now at the heart of modern physics and chemistry.

Alchemy is at the root of today's practical magic.

By being open to ancient wisdom,

Newton was able to go beyond the thinking of his own time

and into the future.

The documents in the trunk

finally reunited the two sides of Newton's genius.

It was... centuries

before history of science

could tolerate a Newton who did both alchemy and astronomy.

That's why it looks as if he's a fractured figure.

It is actually that...

..the alchemical works were buried, literally hidden from view.

We imagine that there's a clear line to draw

between Newton the scientist and rationalist,

and Newton the mystical theologian,

but he was only one man.

In 1684,

Newton was just an obscure academic,

hiding from the world.

Newton's wilderness years,

his 12 years of studying alchemy,

come to a sudden stop

with a chance visit from Edmund Halley,

the astronomer from London.

In 1684, I came to visit him in Cambridge

and I asked him what he thought the curve would be -

described by the planets -

supposing the force of attraction toward the sun

to be reciprocal to the square of the distance from it.

Sir Isaac replied immediately, "It would be an ellipse."

I was struck with joy and amazement!

I asked him how he knew. "Oh why..." said he, "..I've calculated it."

I asked him for his calculations without any further delay

and he promised to re-do it and send it to me!

Well, Halley was agog by this.

He had actually said that if you could understand why the planets moved,

you would have perfected astronomy.

That would be it. Subject finished, full stop, go home.

All the great minds of the day

were trying to explain the movements of the planets,

from Christopher Wren to Newton's old adversary

Robert Hooke.

He was particularly intrigued to do this

because Robert Hooke couldn't.

So here was an opportunity to prove once and for all

who was the best mathematician.

He, er, sometimes would take a turn or two around his garden,

suddenly stood still,

turned about and back up the stairs like Archimedes with a "Eureka!"

and began writing at his desk while standing,

without drawing a chair to sit down!

Now I was upon this subject,

I would gladly know the bottom of it before I publish my papers.

Newton worked relentlessly for over two years,

drawing on everything he had ever discovered.

He's not so much content

with coming up with possible explanations,

he wants THE explanation.

I kept the subject constantly before me,

until the first dawnings opened slowly,

little by little, into the full and clear light.

The result was a mathematical way to predict how forces affect movement -

Newton's Three Laws of Motion.

Every body continues in its state of rest,

or in uniform motion in its right line,

unless it is affected by an external force.

This change in motion is in proportion to the external force,

and is made in the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction,

the mutual action of two bodies upon each other are always equal,

and directed to contrary parts.

These three laws managed to explain the mechanics

of how virtually everything moves.

But Newton realised there was another invisible element involved

that kept the planets orbiting the sun.

From his alchemy,

he was quite comfortable with the idea

of spirits pervading space,

influencing things without contact.

And he transmuted those ideas into one of forces.

Newton deduced that these forces acted at a distance,

across space, between all things.

The sun attracts Jupiter and the other planets.

Jupiter attracts its satellites

and, for the same reason,

all planets act mutually, one upon the other.

Newton's masterstroke

was realising that the same force that attracted the planets to one another

also existed on earth.

It is now established

that this force is gravity.

Newton's search for a vital agent,

a single magical force that runs through the universe,

had finally been fulfilled.

Newton had combined mysticism and mathematics

to prove that a single power

affects every object in the universe.

It pulls a raindrop to earth

and a river to the sea,

carving the earth as it flows.

Gravity holds the sea to the earth,

and the moon and the sun

pulls the earth into tides.

Gravity makes the moon go round the earth

and the earth go around the sun.

Just one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy,

the Milky Way...

..just one more galaxy going round

with the 200 trillion stars of the Virgo Supercluster,

all of it held together

by gravity.

Why do I call him a magician?

Because he looked on the universe and all that is in it

as a riddle,

as a secret which could be read

by applying pure thought to mystic clues

which God had laid about the world

like a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt.

There are two kinds of geniuses.

There are ordinary geniuses and there are magicians.

An ordinary genius is someone who, once you understand what they've done,

you say, "Oh, OK! If I were just a lot smarter,

"I could've done that."

But a magician is someone who, even after you see what they've done,

even after you understand it, you think it's a complete mystery.

And Newton was a magician.

He was somebody who seemed to pull ideas out of nowhere.

Isaac Newton finally published his magnum opus in 1687,

500 pages of densely-packed words, diagrams and calculations -

The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,

the Principia.

The few people who could understand Newton's maths were in raptures.

A divine treatise,

exalting human reason to such a pitch

by this... this utmost effort of the mind!

Newton's precise calculations

gave the world a way to predict the motion of virtually...

..everything.

Comets and eclipses were no longer omens of doom.

They could be accurately forecast.

Tides could be explained.

The forces holding up buildings could be worked out

and weight distribution computed.

Eventually, aeroplanes could be designed

and rockets launched...

..all due to the ability to calculate forces and motion.

The Newtonian Age had arrived.

But publication also brought controversy,

once again from Robert Hooke,

who claimed he was the originator

of the Theory of Universal Gravitation.

I conceived that discovery of the cause of celestial motions,

to which Mr Newton, nor any other, has any right to claim.

I now conceive it to be one of the greatest discoveries yet made

in natural history.

It's true that Hooke was working on the same thing,

and Halley was interested, and all of these...

..the knowledge that all these other people were working on it was a part of what made it possible

for him to discover what he discovered.

Newton was prepared to admit that he built on other people's work,

but not the work of people like Hooke.

If I have seen further,

it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Some believe this was really a cutting reference to Hooke's short stature.

Newton was not interested in sharing credit for his discovery.

He rejected Hooke's claim

and said that Hooke was too poor a mathematician

to even understand the calculations involved.

He does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things.

He should rather excuse himself by reason of his inability.

Those properties of gravity,

which I myself first discovered

and showed to this society many years since,

Mr Newton has done me the favour

to print and publish as his own inventions.

Interest has no conscience.

Hooke's reputation never recovered.

He was soon eclipsed by Newton's fame.

Newton's time had come.

The Age of Enlightenment was in its glory

and he was famous.

Even his extreme Protestantism was more acceptable

under the new King William of Orange.

Newton became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge in 1692.

But Newton revealed nothing about his alchemy.

Instead, he began to popularise his ideas,

starting with gravity.

The apple... Musing in the garden,

it came to mind that the power of gravity,

which brought an apple from the tree to the ground,

was not limited to a certain distance from the earth.

This power must extend much further than was usually thought.

"Why not as high as the moon?" I said to myself,

"And if so, that must influence her motion."

The story caught on

and soon became better known than the science that inspired it.

Did it actually happen? We only have Newton's word for it.

He told the story four times shortly before he died,

so for the majority of his life he never mentioned it.

Eventually, the apple was shown falling on Newton's head

like a moment of divine inspiration.

It's become a scientific myth.

It frames, it governs how we think about science.

We really like to think that there's great geniuses

who suddenly are inspired by God.

But just as the world began to recognise his genius,

Newton retreated once again.

Somewhere about his 50th birthday,

he suffered what one we now term a severe nervous breakdown.

Sleeplessness, melancholia,

fear of persecution...

The cause of his mental collapse

remains the greatest mystery of his life.

Theories abound.

The particular breakdown

or collapse, or whatever it was, of 1693,

it does coincide with a period

when he's corresponding with Robert Boyle

about some very specific alchemical experiments,

and it does involve close-up use of a lot of mercury.

It may be that part of the reason for his breakdown

was that he realises that he cannot urge

the alchemical work to fruition,

that perhaps there's nothing in this after all.

It may also be that Newton had not been as solitary

as is commonly believed.

It is absolutely no coincidence that

shortly before he had the so-called breakdown,

his friendship with a young man called Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss mathematician, broke off,

and de Duillier went back to Switzerland

and Newton hardly ever saw him again,

whereas before that, for the space of a year or two,

they'd been writing to each other and staying in each other's houses for protracted periods of time.

So it seems quite clear to me

that there was a very strong emotional bond between them.

Newton never married,

nor is he known to have had any relations with women.

He began to imagine that his friends were mocking him.

He writes to John Locke letters...

..that lead Locke to think that Newton's mind is deranged.

Sir, being of the opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women,

and by other means,

I was so much affected with it,

that when someone told me you were sickly and would not live,

I answered it were better if you were dead.

He lost, in his own words, the former consistency of his mind.

He never again concentrated after the old-fashioned,

or did any fresh work.

Three years later, he packed up his papers and left Cambridge.

Newton was about to perform his strangest transformation.

The hermit and academic

became a man of power.

In recognition of his international fame,

he was awarded a position at the heart of the Establishment

as Warden of the Mint at the Tower of London.

Newton also took his place

at the top of the scientific elite.

He becomes President of the Royal Society at the end of 1703,

and then within the scientific world and pretty much within Europe, as well,

he becomes the dominant intellectual figure,

the dominant scientific politico.

This power that he has

brings out the nastier side of his personality.

Robert Hooke had died earlier that year.

Newton seemed determined to obliterate his rival's place in history

and ensure his own.

One of the first things he did

when he became President of the Royal Society

was to donate his own portrait,

and this was also the time

when Robert Hooke's picture went mysteriously missing.

Nobody has ever been able to find a portrait of Robert Hooke. No portrait exists.

There's no proof, but it's a bit suspicious.

Newton promoted his supporters

and crushed the doubters.

He also demanded deference.

He ordered the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed,

to supply him with data.

A complete catalogue of the fixed stars

should be composed by observations to be made at Greenwich,

and the duty of your place is to furnish such observations.

Your speedy compliance is expected.

He treated Flamsteed shabbily and he wanted the data.

Flamsteed thought, "I'm the Royal Astronomer.

"Don't just use me, collaborate with me."

You know, you can see how Flamsteed's feelings would've been hurt.

He called me all the ill names he could think of!

I put him in mind of his passion

and asked him to govern it and keep his temper.

This made him rage worse!

I soon perceived that he planned only to force me to comply with his will

and flatter him and praise him as Dr Halley did.

Flamsteed makes Newton out to be a psychopath

who was intent only on getting idolaters,

and one has to say

that Flamsteed has captured something of Newton's personality.

Psychopath and genius,

visionary and misanthrope,

revered scientist

and lonely old man...

..Isaac Newton lived out his final years

as an autocratic civil servant,

Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society.

He revised some of his earlier work but produced little new.

The storm of his genius

had blown itself out.

On Saturday March 18th, 1727,

Newton made his final retreat into himself.

Aged 84, he slipped into a coma.

That evening, he grew weaker

and all Sunday was quite insensible

and seemed to be quiet and free from pain.

On Monday 20th, at one in the morning,

he died.

Isaac Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey

with unprecedented pomp and ceremony.

He became a new kind of national hero -

the scientific genius.

For such a lonely, isolated guy,

he did achieve an unparalleled measure of fame

for someone who was merely an intellectual.

I mean, he had a state funeral.

No-one had had a state funeral before

who had no noble connections or artistic achievements,

whose achievements were purely in the realm of the mind.

Over the next 200 years,

Newton's fame as the titan of rationalism grew

thanks, in part, to the conspiracy by his admirers

to safeguard that reputation.

BOMBASTIC MUSIC

All his manuscripts were bundled up and put into two large trunks,

and from time to time during the 18th and 19th centuries,

people who were writing about Newton would go and rummage through these two trunks.

Whenever they found anything to do with alchemy or religion,

they shoved it back into the trunk

because they thought that might damage Newton's reputation.

When John Maynard Keynes uncovered them in 1936,

Newton's passion for alchemy was revealed.

Newton the magician had been buried under his fame as the scientist.

Keynes realised that Newton was much more complex a man

than history had allowed.

He has become the sage and monarch of the Age of Reason,

THE Sir Isaac Newton of orthodox tradition,

Newton, whose secret heresies had been the study of a lifetime!

Isaac Newton, scientist and magician,

always asked the big questions,

questions we still haven't answered.

We still don't know what is the nature of life.

What is the difference between me when I'm dead and me when I'm alive?

We don't really have an answer to that question.

We still don't really know what light and gravity and electricity and magnetism are.

We've got mathematical equations that can describe them,

but the natural philosophical question -

Why are they there? What are they? how does gravity operate? -

I don't think we really have the answers to those big questions.

Maybe the most important thing to remember about Newton in the end

is that he did not think he had finished anything.

He did not think he had solved a problem for all time, any problem.

He thought he had opened a door

and that people would continue to walk through it.

'I do not know what I may appear to the world,

'but to myself,

'I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,

'amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble

'or prettier shell than ordinary,

'while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

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