Review by New York Times Review
LONDON before the mid-1600s was a general calamity. The streets were full of thieves, murderers and human waste. Death was everywhere: doctors were hapless, adults lived to about age 30, children died like flies. In 1665, plague moved into the city, killing sometimes 6,000 people a week. In 1666, an unstoppable fire burned the city to the ground; the bells of St. Paul's melted. Londoners thought that the terrible voice of God was "roaring in the City," one witness wrote, and they would do best to accept the horror, calculate their sins, pray for guidance and await retribution. In the midst of it all, a group of men whose names we still learn in school formed the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. They thought that God, while an unforgiving judge, was also a mathematician. As such, he had organized the universe according to discernible, mathematical law, which, if they tried, they could figure out. They called themselves "natural philosophers," and their motto was "Nullius in verba": roughly, take no one's word for anything. You have an idea? Demonstrate it, do an experiment, prove it. The ideas behind the Royal Society would flower into the Enlightenment, the political, cultural, scientific and educational revolution that gave rise to the modern West. This little history begins Edward Dolnick's "Clockwork Universe," so the reader might think the book is about the Royal Society and its effects. But the Royal Society is dispatched in the first third of the book, and thereafter, the subject is how the attempt to find the mathematics governing the universe played out in the life of Isaac Newton. Newton was a finicky, neurotic, off-scale brilliant character who seemed able to hold a problem in his mind, neither sleeping nor eating, "thinking on it continually," he said, until he'd solved it. In 1665, when plague took over London, Newton moved to his mother's farm and thought about the problem of motion. The math of the time could deal with a changeless, ideal world - consider the principles of geometry - but not with motion. Throw a stone, what is its path? Watch a comet, where is it going? Newton invented (and Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher, reinvented) the math of motion, calculus, the way of answering how fast, how far, how high? Then Newton used his calculus to show how an apple is pulled to the earth and how the earth pulls the moon into an orbit, and how these pulls are the same as the sun's on the planets. And this universal pull, this gravity, everywhere operates on the same math: the greater the masses of the bodies and the closer they are together, the stronger the pull. Newton didn't limit himself to explaining the solar system. Nor was he the only genius whose calculations and inventions described the underlying order of the universe in such a way that we needn't merely take the descriptions on faith. We can believe them; they're science. DOLNICK'S book is lively and the characters are vivid. But the story feels disjointed. For instance, you're never quite sure why, having just read about the Pythagorean theorem, you're now reading about Johannes Kepler. The story has also been told already and often, and you have to wonder what drew the author to it. Maybe the attraction was the history of the math; the author has an advanced degree in the subject and explains it with clarity and fizz. Another attraction must have been the thundering change that began in 1660. To go from sinful "curiositas" to productive "curiosity," from blind acceptance to open-eyed inquiry, from asking, "Why?" to answering, "How?" - this change, of all the world's revolutions, must surely be the most remarkable. Ann Finkbeiner is the author, most recently, of "A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 27, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
For this narrative of the seventeenth century's scientific revolution, Dolnick embeds the mathematical discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz in the prevailing outlook of their time. God was presumed integral to the universe, so discerning how it worked was a quest as theological as it was intellectual. By directing readers to the deistic drive in their famous achievements, Dolnick accents what otherwise strikes moderns as strange, such as Newton's obsession with alchemy and biblical hermeneutics. Those pursuits held codes to God's mind, as did motion and, especially, planetary motion, and Dolnick's substance follows the greats' progress in code-breaking, depicting Kepler's mathematical thought process in devising his laws, Galileo's in breaking out the vectors of falling objects, Newton's and Leibniz's in inventing calculus, and Newton's in formulating his laws of gravitation. Including apt biographical detail, Dolnick humanizes the group, socializes them by means of their connections to such coevals as the members of the nascent Royal Society, and captures their mental coexistence in mysticism and rationality. A concise explainer, Dolnick furnishes a fine survey introduction to a fertile field of scientific biography and history.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestselling author Dolnick (The Rescue Artist) focuses on the 17th century and the giants of early science-Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and particularly Newton and Leibniz, whose independent invention of calculus made it possible to describe the moving, changing world and opened up a literal universe of possibilities. Dolnick writes clearly and unpretentiously about science, and writes equally well about the tumultuous historical context for these men's groundbreaking discoveries: the English Civil War, the Thirty Years' War, and in 1665 and 1666 respectively, the Black Plague and the Great Fire of London. Dolnick also offers penetrating portraits of the geniuses of the day, many of them idiosyncratic in the extreme, who offer fertile ground for entertaining writing. (Newton's feuds with Leibniz and Robert Hooke, another scientific titan of the day, are almost as famous as his discoveries.) While Dolnick uncovers nothing new, he has an eye for vivid details in aid of historical recreation, and an affection for his subjects, which all translate into a light but informative read coming suitably on the heels of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. 8 pages of color photos. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Perhaps the most important thing a reader can take from this book is a sense of just how immense were the intellectual leaps that led to concepts like calculus and the theory of gravity. At first, it seems you're being taken in a completely different direction-nearly the first quarter of the book is spent on historical and cultural background to set the stage for subsequent revelations. Only later does Dolnick (The Forger's Spell; Down the Great Unknown) really begin to explore the work of the intellectual giants of this era. He returns frequently to their personal and religious motivations, highlighting especially the nearly lifelong rivalry between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Spinning his tale such that it seems to jump around almost at random, Dolnick nevertheless always has an interesting new insight to share, and the brief chapters enhance the feeling of a quick, fun read. VERDICT Those interested in the history of science or even just in exploring how the times in which someone lives shape his thought processes should find this volume fascinating.-Marcia R. Franklin, MLIS, St. Paul (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lively popular account of early science, culminating in Isaac Newton's gravitational theory.Dolnick (The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, 2008, etc.) puts Newton's achievement in the context of his times. England was just recovering from its civil war, dealing with the plague and the Fire of London, a short generation after Galileo nearly came to grief for claiming that the Earth moves. The author begins by showing the vast differences between Newton's times and the modern era. The nascent Royal Society was experimenting on powdered unicorn horn and magical remedies alongside the first serious research with microscopes and vacuum pumpsas much for entertainment as for the advancement of science. Having set the scene, Dolnick circles back through history to reflect on several areas of sciences, in particular physics, astronomy and mathematics, in which Newton's genius produced its most fruitful results. Math in particular was waiting for someone to discover a way to deal with motion and change, a task that required learning how to manipulate (or at least neutralize) infinities.The problemhad frustrated everyone from the Greeks to the Renaissance. Two men found the solution almost simultaneously: Newton and his great rival, Gottfried Leibniz. Newton, however, invented calculus completely on his own, isolated at his country home during the plague years of 166667, and kept the discovery to himself. Leibniz discovered it nearly a decade laterand then, bizarrely, he too sat on the knowledge for several years before publishing his findings. Eventually, Edmund Halley persuaded Newton to publish his theories of gravity and its mathematical underpinnings, creating a paradigm of scientific work that would last for nearly 200 years. Dolnick effectively paints the characters of the two great antagonists, as well as the men around them, the politics and personalities and the atmosphere in which they worked. While the discovery of calculus is a key theme of the book, no math beyond simple geometry is needed to follow it.Colorful, entertainingly written and nicely paceda fine introductory text on Newton and the scientific revolution.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
