To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg Page A

such a historic role! Newton never traveled outside a narrow strip of England, linking London, Cambridge, and his birthplace in Lincolnshire, not even to see the sea, whose tides so much interested him. Until middle age he was never close to any woman, not even to his mother. * He was deeply concerned with matters having little to do with science, such as the chronology of the Book of Daniel. A catalog of Newton manuscripts put on sale at Sotheby’s in 1936 shows 650,000 words on alchemy, and 1.3 million words on religion. With those who might be competitors Newton could be devious and nasty. Yet he tied up strands of physics, astronomy, and mathematics whose relations had perplexed philosophers since Plato.
    Writers about Newton sometimes stress that he was not a modern scientist. The best-known statement along these linesis that of John Maynard Keynes (who had bought some of the Newton papers in the 1936 auction at Sotheby’s): “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.” * But Newton was not a talented holdover from a magical past. Neither a magician nor an entirely modern scientist, he crossed the frontier between the natural philosophy of the past and what became modern science. Newton’s achievements, if not his outlook or personal behavior, provided the paradigm that all subsequent science has followed, as it became modern.
    Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 at a family farm, Woolsthorpe Manor, in Lincolnshire. His father, an illiterate yeoman farmer, had died shortly before Newton’s birth. His mother was higher in social rank, a member of the gentry, with a brother who had graduated from the University of Cambridge and become a clergyman. When Newton was three his mother remarried and left Woolsthorpe, leaving him behind with his grandmother. When he was 10 years old Newton went to the one-room King’s School at Grantham, eight miles from Woolsthorpe, and lived there in the house of an apothecary. At Grantham he learned Latin and theology, arithmetic and geometry, and a little Greek and Hebrew.
    At the age of 17 Newton was called home to take up his duties as a farmer, but for these he was found to be not well suited. Two years later he was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a sizar, meaning that he would pay for his tuition and room and board by waiting on fellows of the college and on those students who had been able to pay their fees. Like Galileo at Pisa, he began his education with Aristotle, but he soon turned away tohis own concerns. In his second year he started a series of notes, Questiones quandam philosophicae , in a notebook that had previously been used for notes on Aristotle, and which fortunately is still extant.
    In December 1663 the University of Cambridge received a donation from a member of Parliament, Henry Lucas, establishing a professorship in mathematics, the Lucasian chair, with a stipend of £100 a year. Beginning in 1664 the chair was occupied by Isaac Barrow, the first professor of mathematics at Cambridge, 12 years older than Newton. Around then Newton began his study of mathematics, partly with Barrow and partly alone, and received his bachelor of arts degree. In 1665 the plague struck Cambridge, the university largely shut down, and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe. In those years, from 1664 on, Newton began his scientific research, to be described below.
    Back in Cambridge, in 1667 Newton was elected a fellow of Trinity College; the fellowship brought him £2 a year and free access to the college library. He worked closely with Barrow, helping to prepare written versions of Barrow’s lectures. Then in 1669 Barrow resigned the Lucasian chair in order to devote himself entirely to theology. At