"Let us try to place ourselves in the position of a young man in
1661, eager for knowledge, though of wholly untested capacity, as the
new world of learning unrolled before his eyes. What an incredible
challenge to the imagination - a world undreamed of in rural
Lincolnshire, a world of many continents as extensive in their diversity
as in their number. To the north lay the frigid lands of mathematics
where one must breathe the bracing atmosphere of rigor. To the south lay
the fetid tropical jungles of alchemy with their strange mythical
fauna. Temperate lands for experimental investigation lay between.
Manifestly, the very vastness of the new world placed it beyond the
capacity of any one mind to grasp and to comprehend, finding an ordered
cosmos where only chaos appeared. Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps some
rare individual, one of the intellectual supernovae who have burst forth
intermittently but most infrequently into the visible heavens of a
startled world, might grapple effectively even with such a task. Other
worlds new to Newton also opened themselves to his gaze in Cambridge,
and his exploration of them played an important part in his life. Had he
limited himself to them, however, his name would have passed long since
into oblivion. As I said before, the only reason anyone writes a
biography of Newton is because he chose to enter a world not only new to
himself as to all undergraduates, but to man himself.
In
Cambridge, Newton discovered that a new world had been discovered. He
discovered as well something still more important. The early adventurers
had only scouted its coasts. Vast continents remained to be
explored....
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