A. Born the poor son of an illiterate Lincolnshire yeoman, Newton stood against his mother’s attempts to make a farmer of him as he hated farming. His master at the King’s School persuaded his mother to give the boy a chance to complete his education. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student. Newton arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a subsizar — a category of scholar who paid for his education by waiting on others as a servant.

B. The curriculum of medieval scholasticism remained the basis of Cambridge education, as was the case in the other great European universities. Education was not a question of discovery or invention; it was based instead on mastering the knowledge of past authorities, especially Aristotle. Science, to the limited extent it appeared at all, was ‘natural philosophy’ based on the writings of the ancient Greeks.

C. Newton, the first scientist to be knighted for his work, established the authority of a new science and attitude towards knowledge since his discoveries about gravity and motion transformed both the scholarly and popular view of the physical world. Later he also developed the calculus which could measure velocity and rates of change. His quarrel with the German mathematician Leibnitz about who first invented the calculus, although an ugly episode helped to put science in the forefront of public awareness.

D. Newton changed the mental furniture of his time but his age was also ready to receive him since he lived during the initial stages of the Enlightenment, the European movement which condemned fanaticism and superstition and stood for reason, tolerance and debate. He therefore escaped the accusations of magic and heresy leveled against earlier scientists. ‘Rational’ and ‘irrational’, however, existed side by side in Newton’s own mind.

E. ‘Rational’ and ‘irrational’, however, existed side by side in Newton’s own mind. He treated alchemy seriously, took a literalist view of Biblical prophecy, and wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. Newton’s sense of an ultimate mystery, a divine unity, was profound and is basic to his idea of an ordered universe.

F. Newton graduated in 1665 but then had to return home for two years because plague closed the university. During this period he worked out his fundamental ideas about nature according to an ‘experimental philosophy’. The French philosopher Rene Descartes followed Aristotle, but showed a more impersonal universe in which what mattered was the calculation and measurement of rates of movement and change. For Newton this was a great advance.

G. Newton’s understanding of mass, force and motion was revolutionary and stimulated other scientific discoveries. Newton was a solitary genius and his achievements were based on a specifically Protestant interest in the individual experience. But Newtanianism as a system of knowledge helped western European countries to organize themselves collectively for global expansion and dominance.