"Isaac Newton" by James Gleick, Pantheon Books, 288 pages, $33 ("Isaac Newton: Hayav ve'olamo shel geon haruakh vehamada," translated into Hebrew by Emmanuel Lotem, Arieh Nir Books, 271 pages, NIS 89)

What is it about the creative geniuses of the world that makes them special? Is their genius inborn, or is it something that can be developed and enhanced? If so, what are the environmental factors that have the power to encourage creativity? These questions, which are critically important for educational theory, and for training scientists and artists in contemporary society, came to mind as I read James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton. With its interesting exploration of the historical and cultural surroundings in which Newton's multiple talents took shape, this book is the perfect launching pad for such a discussion.

Newton's importance almost defies description. What made him one of the greatest thinkers and scientists of all times? For over 1,500 years, Aristotle's treatises on physics and metaphysics shaped man's approach to physical reality. In the 15th century, cracks began to appear in this approach, which was based on selective thinking and logic. Certain principles were disproved through experiments and observation. Aristotle's dictum that "nature abhors a vacuum" ("horror vacui"), for example, collapsed when growing urbanization led to the excavation of deep wells, during which water failed to rise to the top of the drill pipe. In the 17th century, Galileo did experiments with pendulums and rolling balls that moved down inclined planes, which refuted the Aristotelian claim that heavy objects fall more quickly than light objects.

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This made it necessary to develop a new paradigm to describe the world, one founded not on speculative metaphysics, but on proven experiments and observations. This new paradigm reached its peak with the discoveries of the English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Newton's interests went beyond mathematics and physics. He studied and published articles on a wide array of subjects from alchemy and mysticism to Scripture and the Temple, but there is no question that his major contributions were the laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation, and infinitesimal calculus - the mathematical infrastructure for his ideas.

Newton recognized that without the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others, he could never have developed his theories. He acknowledged this by saying: "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." But the laws proposed by Newton were groundbreaking in that they went beyond man's immediate surroundings. They explained with amazing accuracy how planets revolved around the sun, and the moon revolved around the earth. The verse "The heavens are the Lord's, but the earth he has given to the children of men" (Psalm 115:16) took on a whole new meaning thanks to him. Newton, a pious Christian, brought the heavens down to earth, and made them accessible to human thought and study. God was given a new task: transferring the gravitational force between celestial bodies through the "semi-divine" ether. Newton would have happily changed the words of Isaiah "melo kol ha'aretz kvodo" ("His presence fills all the earth") into "melo kol ha'aretz kevidato" ("His gravitation fills all the earth").

Fundamental disputes

Gleick does a good job of explaining the consolidation of Newtonian mechanics in Chapters 4, 11 and 12, although readers who are not experts in mathematics and physics may have trouble understanding certain sections. His account of Newton's many fundamental disputes with other thinkers of his generation is particularly interesting. Gleick offers an intriguing, though occasionally sketchy, glimpse of his battles with English physicist Robert Hooke on the subject of optics, and Wilhelm Leibniz on the properties of space and time.

The dispute with Leibniz revolved around Newton's second law of mechanics, which posits that force applied to a body causes it to move, with the acceleration proportional to the degree of force applied. This law is based on the assumption that acceleration is measurable, but the question is "relative to what?" because we need absolute space and time to measure acceleration.

Newton believed that space and time represented a manifestation of the divine: "He endures always and is present everywhere, and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space. Since each and every particle of space is always, and each and every indivisible moment of duration is everywhere, certainly the maker and lord of all will not be never or nowhere." Hence space and time could not be relative to anything else (in this context, it is interesting that one of the Hebrew names for God is makom, which means "place").

Leibniz disagreed, and in his prolific correspondence with Newton's assistant, he proposed several interesting theories to disprove the perception of space and time as absolute. Gleick's discussion of this important controversy is brief and does not go deep enough into its philosophical aspects and implications for the future of physics. When Albert Einstein developed his theory of relativity in the early 20th century, backing it up with many observations and experiments, it became clear that there is no such thing as absolute space and time, and Newton's understanding of space and time was wrong.

The dispute between Newton and Hooke over the properties of light is treated much more seriously. Newton believed that a ray of light is composed of tiny corpuscles that moved in keeping with his laws of mechanics. On the basis of this "corpuscular theory," he succeeded in explaining the reflection of light from a mirror, the refractions of light beams from one transparent medium to another (i.e., light passes from air to water and as a result, a pencil in a glass of water will look broken), and the breakdown of white rays into rainbow hues when they pass through a transparent prism.

Hooke claimed that light was a kind of pulse or oscillating wave that passes through the massless, transparent ether that fills the universe, but he offered no clear explanation for this oscillation. In contrast to Newton, he insisted that the prism adds color to the light passing through it, in the same way that an organ pipe and a violin string add vibrations to the air.

In retrospect, it turns out that both of them were right. The British scientist Thomas Young carried out a series of experiments in 1805 showing that rays of light "interfered" (combined) with one another like two waves rippling on a pool of water. Later, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves on the basis of these waves. With the birth of quantum theory in the 20th century, physicists reached the conclusion that light rays are indeed composed of massless photons, each of which contains a specific amount of energy. In certain respects, therefore, they may be considered a kind of particle.

Gleick's book, as we have said, offers a treasure trove of information on the factors that influenced Newton's work and creative thinking, his vast store of knowledge on a broad range of topics, his tireless persistence in developing his theories, and his interest in matters that seem to be at odds with his scientific inclinations, such as alchemy, mysticism and biblical exegesis. It was this wonderful combination of philosophy for its own sake and painstaking experimentation, I think, that contributed to Newton's trailblazing genius and is identifiable in the biographies of other geniuses.

Thus it is not surprising that Newton left such a strong impression on those that came after him. No one can replace Newton, Albert Einstein observed in 1919. His lucid principles will retain their unique importance for generations to come, as the basis of the whole modern conceptual framework for the philosophy of nature.

Prof. Yakir Shoshani is a physicist researching the philosophical foundations of reality and cognition. He is chairman of the Council of Academic Organizations of Institutions of Higher Learning.