Episode Details

Isaac Newton was born so premature his mother said he could fit in a quart mug, and he grew up abandoned by her and resentful of his stepfather. This episode looks past the falling apple to a fiercely competitive, secretive man whose academic rise began with beating up a school bully and then outranking him in class.

We explore his years as a subsizar at Cambridge, the plague years at Woolsthorpe where he developed calculus, optics and gravity, his empty lecture halls, the secret anti-Trinitarian beliefs that nearly cost him his post, and the Principia. We also cover his rivalries with Hooke and Leibniz, his 1693 breakdown, a library dominated by theology and alchemy, his work at the Royal Mint, and his burial in Westminster Abbey.

• How spite and a schoolyard fight launched Newton's academic career
• What he worked out during the plague years: calculus, the prism experiments and the cannonball thought experiment
• Why a royal exemption from King Charles II protected a secret heretic's Cambridge chair
• The possible insult hidden in standing on the shoulders of giants, written to Robert Hooke
• Why only a small share of his library covered physics while theology and alchemy filled much more