A man of gravitas

FOLLOWING Plutarch and John Aubrey, Peter Ackroyd has embarked on a 10-book series titled "Ackroyd's Brief Lives," of which "Newton" is the third, after "Chaucer" and "Turner." A prolific novelist as well as a biographer, Ackroyd has been called -- by academics -- a practitioner of "British historiographic metafiction." Ordinary folks prize his novels ("Hawksmoor," "Chatterton," "The Lambs of London") for bringing their subjects to life in the context, and sometimes the language, of their times. Likewise, his biographies tend toward the novelistic ("I just think of them as other novels," he told fellow novelist Patrick McGrath). That's not to say he makes things up. "Newton" is both impeccably researched and a wonderful read. An afternoon in the backyard hammock with "the grand autocrat of science."

Isaac Newton is known to children (and a few adults) as the man who discovered gravity after an apple fell on his head. To many more of us, he is known for having set the world on its feet by formulating three laws of motion that still hold and have enabled us to visit the rest of the solar system some 300 years after he devised them. With regard to the apple-generated epiphany -- let's get that out of the way right now -- this "pious misunderstanding" was instigated by Newton himself, in "four separate versions," Ackroyd writes, "for the simple reason that Newton recounted different versions to four separate people." But "it did not happen like that." Between the time Newton reclined in the orchard and the time he managed to establish the universality of gravity (he did not discover it; the idea had been around for a while) "much labour of thought and of calculation" had intervened.

He was also a not very endearing eccentric -- "isolated and secretive, unwilling to share his knowledge, ever vulnerable and suspicious." His gnarly disposition may have been rooted in early unhappiness. Newton's father died before he was born; his mother remarried, leaving him to be raised in rural isolation by his maternal grandmother. "It is often said that brilliant mathematicians tend to have solitary childhoods," Ackroyd writes, "in which they can explore the visionary world of numbers."