The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture

Curated by Mordechai Feingold. At The New York Public Library until 5 February 2005.

Page proofs? A first edition of Principia Mathematica with Newton's handwritten notes on the left page. Credit: CAMBRIDGE UNIV. LIBRARY

Isaac Newton is rarely out of the news these days. Last year there was the publication of Isaac Newton, James Gleick's elegant distillation of Newton's character and science. Last month came the final instalment of The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's rollicking trilogy of novels, in which Newton plays a pivotal role. Now he gets the scholarly treatment in The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, an exhibition at The New York Public Library.

Curated by Mordechai Feingold of the California Institute of Technology, the exhibit presents maps, prints, books and models from the library's collection, and manuscripts from the Cambridge University library. Newton's death mask, once owned by Thomas Jefferson, is also on display. The narrative focuses on Newton as “innovator and icon of the Enlightenment”, and traces the reception of his ideas in their historical context.

Who would not be moved by the sight of one of Newton's early notebooks, remarkably well preserved, or an early edition of the Principia Mathematica (1687) with handwritten notes for proposed revisions? Bibliophiles will enjoy the different editions of the Principia, and Opticks (1704), translated into a variety of languages. Some of these are adorned with a dramatic allegorical frontispiece celebrating Newton's mastery of celestial and terrestrial mechanics and his revelatory insights into light and colour.

But if the exhibition emphasizes the apotheosis of Newton, it makes clear that his was not an easy road to glory. For every Voltaire — whose Elements of Newton's Philosophy was one of the most successful popularizations of newtonian thought — there was a Celestino Cominale (Anti-Newtonianism pars prima), or an Etienne Simon de Gamaches, who held fast to his compatriot Descartes' theory of vortices in the face of Newton's theory of universal gravitation. And there was a long-running dispute between Newton and Leibniz over which of them deserved the credit for discovering the calculus.

Feingold also presents the texts and drawings of important figures whose work and world-views were affected by Newton: William Blake and his illustrations of reason and imagination; Alexander Pope (“God said Let Newton be! and All was Light”); as well as Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Denis Diderot. All of these were forced to confront the revolution in mathematical rigour that Newton had launched.

Newton's passion for mathematics also fuelled his idiosyncrasies. Accompanying his diagrams is a floor-plan of Solomon's Temple, whose dimensions he painstakingly derived from biblical descriptions. Newton kept this obsession, among others, carefully concealed during his lifetime.