I picked up this Japanese language child’s novelization of Isaac Newton’s life for about a dollar at a used book sale. I think we’ve all heard of Newton and his famous discovery of gravity, but other than that, I didn’t remember much about Newton.
I really enjoyed this retelling of his life. I was surprised at the adversity he faced growing up and in spite of that the enormous impact he had on scientific knowledge of his time. Not only did his father die before he was born, and he grew up mostly cared for by his grandmother after his mother left to be remarried, but his mother was widowed after remarriage and Isaac was pulled out of boarding school to work in the fields and help support his 3 younger half siblings for two years. (He was so ill suited to it that he ended up returning to school.) He was always quite obsessed with learning about natural forces such as wind and water power, and built a lot of devices out of his own curiosity, but at first he quite failed at school because he wasn’t interested in it and didn’t study at all. One day, his classmate broke his homemade water wheel and he finally had enough and stood up for himself, and decided to apply himself to school. From that point, he excelled in all his studies but he was still quite helpless in other areas of life and found himself so absorbed in his interests that he lost track of what he was doing. It’s very likely in my opinion that in today’s society he would’ve been considered autistic or ADHD due to his obsession with his particular interests and difficulty focusing on anything that he didn’t find interesting.
Not only did Newton discover gravity, he didn’t think at the time that it was worth presenting to the world. It was 20 years before he published his findings, which he only did at the encouragement of someone else. He had a very humble attitude about his research which I found refreshing but I’m also glad that he was finally convinced to publish it. In addition to his work with gravity he also studied light and invented a much more accurate telescope than what had been previously available in his day.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Newton: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
星女 