Isaac Newton’s Life Greatest Lessons

Yvon Manzi
Sep 6, 2018 · 11 min read

His contribution to the world can never be overestimated. Some call him a genius; I call him a capital-G Giant. If you were to walk through Westminster Abbey — — provided of course you were not visiting the Queen — — you would find His grave and monument. And If unlike me, you have an eye for detail, on the foot of the monument, you would see and read the words:

Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726.

Putting aside the known in favor of the unknown, Sir Isaac Newton voyaged territories no other human being had ever walked before. Today, science as we know it owes a whole lot to this Giant whose name is and will forever be written among the stars.

Remember to have fun as you read and find your way through Newton’s world and 80-years life. A life of Magic, Physics, Chemistry, Alchemy, and the Man’s search for meaning.

I try to avoid tiring myself digging into my subjects’ biological details like their genealogies and all that kind of stuff. But for Newton, a few facts matter:

He was born in a somewhat middle class-ish family. Only his mother could write, or rather scribble; his father couldn’t sign his name. In the Newton’s entire family — — great grandfathers to his father — — -, Westfall writes in Never At Rest, Isaac Newton seems to be the first one educated.

One more detail about Newton’s upbringing:

Born prematurely, he saw the world for the first time three months after his father’s death. He was raised by a single mother. Three year later, Newton’s mother remarried and was left without a parent. His mother left him and went to live at her new husband’s estate. I can’t begin to imagine how hard that must have been for a boy of three years old.

Now, Isaac.

One story goes that Isaac was a loner from the beginning. One can speculate the reason to be his upbringing that I just summarized above. Once he left home for a grammar school at 12, he began to live with another family — — his lodgers. He did not get along well with the new family’s boys, which meant more time alone.

He started playing with building things. Nearby his school, a windmill was built, a creation that was new to all people in the village.

(This might as well be that famed windmill built in Newton’s neighborhood.)

photo by Lorenzo-spoleti

Everyone looked at the windmill in awe. Isaac went a step further as to build a version of it, only his was a little bit better. His model was powered, in part, by a mouse on a treadmill. He tied a string on the mouse’s tail and a corn a few inches from its mouth, hence the forward-and-back movement on the treadmill. Crazy, right?

He built his own car to take him to school. He built a lantern for his walks from the school at night. Not just a lantern, though. The boy had more ideas: his lantern would be folded and put inside his shorts’ pockets (it was made in papers.) Plus, his lanterns could fly on kites, giving marketers a sight on market days. Hahaa.:)

(Paper lantern like Newton’s.)

photo by leon-contreras

You could say that for a boy with his age, this was genius. And you would be right. After all, you wouldn’t be the first one to say so. The poet Alexander Pope, in an exaggeration you could argue, put it this way:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

So there is no doubt about genius. But it is certainly a different type of genius. Most of those who speak about Newton and Einstein, for that matter, are well-meaning people. They give credit to where it’s due. These guys were super awesome. What almost everyone misses or gets wrong is the road to amazingness.

It wasn’t some almost divine powers, I came to learn. It’s a genius that is way less appreciated.

It turns out, many of these inventions, Isaac had read them from The Mysteryes of Nature and Art by John Bate. Well, none of his classmates knew anything about these though; and I think that’s what makes a great genius great. Remember his quote:

If I ever looked further, it is by standing on shoulders of giants.

John Bate was the first Giant Newton ever set a foot on. This curiosity to go bury himself in books, literally, and immerse himself in a subject with a lunatic passion of a man possessed with demons (good imagery:))is what Newton’s genius was about.

I. It’s never too late to find new interests

If Newton is well known for the Law of Gravity and mechanics, he is perhaps as equally known for half-read books and unfinished pursuits. His interests in astrology, medicine, literature, and phonetics were all half-done, half-walked paths. He would read, or precisely put, partly-read a work, make a few advancements on it, and then forever ignore it for good.

One good example is his fascination with phonetics and the idea of creating a single universal language. He read a book or two about it…George Dalgarno’s Ars Signorum (Art of Sign.) After reading this, the young man at Cambridge University, Newton, suggested a few improvements and changes on the field, and dropped the whole thing entirely. He never looked back to it ever again. (I guess it bored him so much, or whatever.)

The point: if something aint catching your heart, Newton’s life seems to suggest to drop it and move to something else.

One thing to consider, however: Newton never abandoned something without a considerable knowledge about it. There is a myth that has sadly become so common in young people about following their passion. As a result, they quit too early. They try for a short period of time, and after the sugar of beginning is no more, they quit. Why? They lack the courage to stay at it until they reach mastery. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Newton. He would know enough about something that he would be able to make modifications about it and then pivot.

How do you know it is time to go for something else?

When you know enough to make advancements on a subject, and still isn’t interested in it, then it is the time to find something else.

II. Incandescent Intensity

One thing I certainly found after reading a few biographies is how talent is largely overestimated. You can’t overestimate the curiosity and obsession, but most people get it wrong when it comes to what truly made a few individuals stand out from the crowds of their peers.

You look at Einstein and it has almost become a legend; his story has grown into some idealized genius tale. the result: none aspires to be like the hero in that tale, not anymore. The reason: ’cause people think he was innately talented. They assume that he was this God-given, esoteric human being only born once in centuries. I came to realize that if that kind of thinking continues, of course we won’t have anyone as brave enough to plant giant leaps for mankind. Instead of trying a few things here and there and then quitting that you haven’t found your passion, one has to dive full force, noz down, and with a laser-like focus. That’s how Newton did it.

This story is worth telling:

When Isaac was a young student in Cambridge, the boy found out about colors and natural philosophy. He obsessed the notion of colors that he would stare at the sun until darkness would look blue and pale read. Using bodkin, Newton would then try to distort his retina of the eye by pushing the whole thing’s length inside his eyes to see how his altered retina would react to the light. This level of immersion is what I think is going to produce a new Isaac Newton. Not that I think everyone should literally insert a bodkin inside their eyes, but that level of obsession is an absolute necessity if any significantly better progress is to be made.

III. Persistence

This little story is worth telling word by word. “He bought Descartes Geometry and read it by himself when he was got over 2 or 3 pages he could understand no farther than he began again and got 3 or 4 pages farther till he came to another difficult place, than he began again and advanced further and continued so doing till he made himself Master of the whole without having the least light or instruction from any body.” (98)

The miracle lay in the incredible program of study undertaken in private and prosecuted alone by a young man who thereby assimilated the achievement of a century and placed himself at the forefront of European mathematics and science.

Here you can ask, but how can I learn to persevere and don’t keep falling off the track in my daily life? I know I have to work harder and run longer to achieve my goals and dreams in life, but I just can’t get myself to follow through. And of course that would be a legitimate question. There is no short answer, there hardly ever is, of course. I’ll tell you this. Newton is a pretty complex character. When he was a young boy, he, some days, annoyed his teachers. They used to sit on wooden desks in class. The loner kid he was, he would sign his name onto the desks. He knew too well that writing with a chalk or something would be easily erasable, so he just carved Isaac Newton in the wood. You could say that this a prank that any other boy would have done, right? But at the time, with the strict nature of education, not so many pupils would have dared to do so. What’s the point of this story?

Newton found meaning in his scientific endeavors. His research and studies served a purpose, which in my own theory was to make any impact in the world, some sort of legacy for himself. And as the saying goes, if you know the why, the how will always follow you. It comes back to sitting down and really finding some incomplete but surely firm reason for why you do what you do. Before you know it, you will find it easier to work on your projects or ideas than not to.

Bonus: Luck Favors the Prepared mind (The falling apple story.)

I am sure if you knew something about Isaac Newton before this post, it is likely the apple story, right? Come on, you have heard of an exhausted dude sitting in the shade of his mother’s apple trees. As the fame-fated fruit made its way to the ground, the dude wakes up and bummm, GRAVITY!!! How fascinating! Wrong.

The story is nothing other than the BS that does nothing other than discourage today’s young scientists from believing that them too can make a significant impact to the world.

The fruit, yes fell from the tree, but that’s beside the point. After all, fruits had fallen, fell then, and always will fall. Newton had spend the previous four years studying and thinking about forces and all type of motions like a maniac. The idea of gravity was not new at all at the time. It was called “heaviness.” Even after the legendary apple fell, there was no “aha” moment. What followed were long years of agonizing, contrasting, and refining. Wastefall’s quote is worth mentioning here:

Some idea[gravity] floated at the borders of his consciousness, not yet fully formulated, not perfectly focused, but solid enough not to disappear.

If you think you can lay down under a tree and discover gravity, you are making a big mistake. Success meets the prepared mind at a late hour, some old saying goes.

Similarly, the spectrum of light through a prism experiment that Newton is also famous for was somewhat a lucky discovery. He didn’t know all the colors were just gonna pop up behind the prism in advance. After all if he did know, what would be the point of the experiment? He had everything there was to read about colors and light from Hooke and Boyle and Descartes. He had developed theories of his own, and saying that it was just a serendipitous discovery would be to make a big mistake. Also, saying that it was a result of anything else such as innate genius would be another huge mistake. It took lots of work and thinking. When asked about how he comes up with his ideas and theories, this he had to say:

I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

Standing on shoulders of giants

Isaac Newton read Descartes and Galileo…his first law of motion and his law of gravity were nothing new at all. Gravity was then called heaviness, only without the mathematics. His first law of motion, or the law of inertia is solely based on the Descartes’ idea of impact or collision of bodies…We all stand on shoulders of giants, only Newton was humble enough to admit it.

Humble enough to admit using other people’s ideas and insights, but also confident enough to prove them wrong and take the less traveled paths. You have to understand the context here: Newton lived in 1600s. This is the world before enlightenment and industrial revolution. It’s safe to say that this was the age still dominated by Platonic notions. Let me make it simple: Aristotle and Plato were like demigods at the time. None dared to question them. Their words were set in stones.

For Newton, however, to go even further, he had to question his masters. It’s this nature of rebelliousness that made people like him, Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk stand out. They were free enough question their masters’s assumptions.

Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas.

Roughly translated: Plato is my friend, Aristoteles is my friend, but the truth is my best friend. He was willing to divorce Plato and Aristoteles, some of the most brilliant minds that were revered, to go further than they did. And far he went.

More stories like this can be found on my blog sikervita.com


I used Never At Rest biography of Newton. Huge thanks to Westfall for putting Newton’s life into words.

Yvon Manzi

Written by

I am working on my blog sikervita.com to study life and people. My goal is to try to be useful to someone other than me. I am Sophomore at Columbia University.

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