Skip to main content

Life After Gravity - Patricia Fara ***

Patricia Fara has a way of making history of science different by looking at what may be a familiar topic from an unexpected angle. In this partial biography of Isaac Newton, dealing with his time in London, she takes this approach with mixed success.

The best thing is that we see more of this time in Newton's life, which tends to be dealt with relatively quickly in standard scientific biographies, as his focus was primarily dealing with the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. That the word 'royal' appears twice here is no coincidence, as we see a picture of a new Newton emerging, getting away from his near-monastic scientific life at Cambridge to become a more social creature, with a distinct interest in keeping in with high society, including the royal family. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was the way that Fara brings in a topic that I've rarely seen mentioned in Newton biographies - slavery. Newton might not have been actively involved, but the slave trade was pervasively connected to the wealth of the nation and it misses a significant aspect of what shaped his life and wealth (just as does the discussion of Newton's politics).

Unfortunately, for me, the whole didn't work brilliantly. The text felt quite fragmented and rambling, in part because of Fara's framing approach, which is to use a Hogarth painting of children putting on a play in John Conduitt's drawing room as a way of exploring different aspects of Newton's life, even though the painting dates from after Newton's death. The relevance of the painting is partly that a bust of Newton features in it, partly that Conduitt married Newton's niece, who had lived in Newton's London household, and also that Conduitt took on Newton's role as Master of the Mint. (There are also royalty and aristocracy in the painting, reflecting the social climbing.) 

It's true that the painting does reflect some links to aspects of Newton's London life - but still the use of it feels forced, not helped by the atrocious quality of the black and white on-page reproduction of the painting in the book. Such images have improved in quality over the years, but this was so murky you could hardly make out that there were people in it. It wasn't until I got half way through the book and realised that all the on-page images were duplicated in a colour plates section that I could see the painting and even there it was too small (it would have been far better to just have had the plates).

Although it's important to describe those around Newton to give his life context, there seemed too much on other people, either because they're in the painting or were influential in his life - I wanted more Newton. It's also the case that Fara's politics came through quite heavy-handedly, for example in the strange comment that in a largely ungendered English language it's notable that countries are feminine - I've never heard anyone refer to a country as 'she'. Similarly, while the exploration of the relevance of the slave trade to the life of the well-off of the period was one of the best parts of the book, Fara mostly made it seem as if this was all about Europeans capturing Africans to make them slaves, rather than purchasing those who had been enslaved by other Africans: this wasn't a one-sided trade.

Overall, then, there are good elements here, and I welcome attempts to look at creative ways to frame scientific history - but all creativity involves a risk of failure, and for me this one didn't quite come off.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more