14/11/2018

The greatest of all, Isaac Newton was not a great human being.

University of Cambridge/Divulgação

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

Years ago, it was fashionable to publish books with lists of the "100 most important" or "most influential" people of all time. Lately I haven't seen any, but a quick internet search shows that the trend hasn't passed. Generally, the top spots are occupied by the founders of major religions: Moses, Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad. Next comes a scientist: Isaac Newton.

Born in 1642 and died in 1726, according to the Julian calendar then in use, Newton was said to have "advanced all areas of mathematics that existed." His greatest work, "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy," published in 1687, laid the foundations for a new conception of the world, scientific and rational. A world whose daily life does not need to be managed by divinity, as it is perfectly determined by mathematical laws.

Not that Newton shared this view. A religious man, he believed that the universe needs regular divine intervention to remain stable. He would have been shocked to hear one of his greatest followers, the Frenchman Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), reply "I didn't need that hypothesis" when Napoleon Bonaparte questioned why his "Treatise on Celestial Mechanics" didn't mention God.

Newton was a paradoxical figure in more than one aspect: the greatest scientist of all time was far from being a great human being.

He discovered mathematical calculus, an extraordinary tool at the service of science. But it took him three decades to publish, allowing the German Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) to get ahead of him.

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