When a tiny and frail boy was born in the obscure Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe on Christmas Day 1642, the attendant maids did not believe he would survive the hour, let alone eighty-four years. As it was, Isaac Newton went on to become a Fellow of Trinity College and the Royal Society, Cambridge's second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the author of the Principia mathematica (1687) and the Opticks (1704), a member of Parliament, Master of the Royal Mint, a knight and President of the Royal Society. When he died in 1727, he was given a state funeral and buried in a place of honour at Westminster Abbey. His work in physics gave us universal gravitation, a mathematical explanation for the elliptical orbit of planets, and a precise celestial mechanics that still serves the world in the space age. His optical experiments confirmed the heterogeneous nature of white light, and he constructed the first practical...