Name: 牛頓和萊布尼茨。Crash Course History of Science #17 (Newton and Leibniz: Crash Course History of Science #17)
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The standard story of the Scientific Revolution culminates with the long life of one man:

Sir Isaac Newton—a humble servant of the Royal Mint, two-time parliamentarian, and

a scientific titan whose name, along with Einstein's, is synonymous with physics today.

I mean, it was the same guy, but this Newton was very different from the mythic, hyper-rational one.

This Sir Isaac Newton was also an alchemist, obsessed with the occult—with hidden, non-rational truths.

And every story's leading character has to have a foil, right?

Enter Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, an equally remarkable master of mathematics.

Together, these rival geniuses would change the worlds of math and science forever.

Ike was born prematurely on what was then—it's

a long story—Christmas Day in 1642 in the delightfully named hamlet of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth.

Which is known for… mostly just being the place where Isaac Newton was born.

His dad died, and his mom remarried and had a bunch more kids.

But he discovered that he loved learning, and so, to no one's surprise, he did fine

at Trinity College, Cambridge, on scholarship.

And by “did fine,” I mean that he first dreamed up the mathematical system that would

become calculus before he even graduated.

Calculus is the mathematics that describes how a thing change instantaneously, whether

that thing is velocity, acceleration, displacement, height, weight, volume, or whatever.

It provided a new mathematical connection between displacement, velocity, and acceleration—

all of which are required if you want to understand things like planetary motion.

This is all the more amazing because Ike was poor, he wasn't tutored at the best schools,

and—at the time he went there in 1661—Cambridge was a backwater college.

Fifty years after Bacon's new, experiment-focused science, Cambridge was still teaching Aristotle!

In 1666, soon after Newton graduated, Cambridge closed for the year due to fear of the bubonic

Newton went back home to Lincolnshire and had what we now call his annus mirabalis or

In one year, Newton… discovered the laws of gravity when an apple supposedly fell on

his head—although this probably didn't actually happen.

And he laid down the core ideas that would lead to his inventing calculus—or co-inventing it.

And he started to develop the theory of light and colors, which holds that white light

By any measure, Newton had an outstanding 1666.

That was not true of everyone, however: that fall, a Great Fire swept through London for four

But, like I mentioned, there was another side of this legendary thinker:

This almost created a professional problem for him, because for a while, Cambridge required

professors to become Anglican priests, and he wasn't exactly an orthodox Christian.

Newton thought the Holy Trinity was nonsense.

He believed he had unique access to a secret treasure of wisdom—both religious and scientific—passed

down from God to Noah, then Moses, then Pythagoras, and then himself.

Newton was also a major alchemist—as were his buddies, Robert Boyle and John Locke.

But Newton was obsessed with alchemy, or thinking philosophically about stuff by changing it.

While he didn't view alchemy as separate from his more scientific-looking investigations

into “what is stuff,” he didn't stray far from the alchemical mainstream.

He kept his furnaces burning for days on end, transmuting metals.

In fact, the largest section of his complete works concerns alchemy!

That said, Newton wasn't interested in trying to turn lead into gold.

He was just trying to understand everything.

Newton returned to work at Cambridge in 1667, continuing to work on his revolutionary insights.

He first published on optics, in 1672 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

With what became known as his “crucial experiment,” Newton showed that light is composed of rays

of different colors that can be split using a prism, and that these rays can't be further

And that the color of light can be brought back to white using a mirror.

Okay, this may not sound like a mic drop by today's standards.

But at the time, there was a lot of debate about the relationship between color and light.

Newton theorized that light is made of different colors that are visible only when refracted,

Newton's fellow science-genius, Robert Hooke, believed that light is wave, whereas Newton,

like René Descartes, believed light is a “corpuscle,” or particle.

Newton's paper on optics earned him membership in the Royal Society.

It also proved to be quite controversial.

Many of Newton's peers still believed in an Aristotelian version of optical physics,

and others believed in Descartes's version.

The debate went on for decades, leading Newton to shun public life.

Through his work on optics, Newton also developed the first functional reflecting telescope,

Newton's work on light was collected in the 1704 book Opticks.

By then, Newtonian optics had beaten out its Aristotelian and Cartesian competitors.

But that's not all, because it's Newton, so of course it's not.

He concluded Opticks with a series of “queries,” or questions.

Though they weren't really questions, but rhetorical statements meant to guide further research.

In the first edition, there were sixteen queries.

As he continued his own research, Newton added more queries in subsequent editions, up to

The queries went way beyond optical physics, concerning the nature and transmission of

heat, the possible cause of gravity, electricity, how God created matter “in the Beginning,”

the proper way to do science, and the ethical conduct of human beings.

As much as the work on optics itself, these queries influenced science for centuries.

But a new paradigm in optics isn't what Newton is best known for.

Nor for making the first calculation of the speed of sound.

Nor for all of his other brilliant ideas.

Newton is best known as the person who… one, mathematically perfected the astronomical

system of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, which we spent two episodes on;

Two, mathematically described how gravity works, setting the stage for classical mechanics;

and, three, introduced calculus to the world.

You may think this is too much to cram into one book—but then you wouldn't be Ike.

Newton dropped The Mathematical Principles

of Natural Philosophy, or simply Principia, in 1687.

Work on the book began a few years earlier, when Edmund Halley—the astronomer after whom Halley's