Playing dirty

摘要

We don't generally expect our geniuses to be genial, but few are as downright misanthropic as the version of Isaac Newton now in vogue in science histories. He is the villain in Lisa Jardine's The Curious Life of Robert Hooke (HarperCollins, 2003) who tried to more or less erase the hapless Hooke from history. He is an elusive, forbidding presence in James Gleick's popular recent biography Isaac Newton (Pantheon, 2003). And Stephen Hawking, who now occupies Newton's chair at Cambridge, has accused him of being vindictive, arrogant and prone to petty arguments.