Sir Isaac Newton: Unhappy Scientific Genius | Full Documentary | Biography

[music playing] GROUND CONTROL: You guys are up there, and who's driving? ASTRONAUT: That's a good question. I think Isaac Newton's doing most of the driving right now.

ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: "It is enough that gravity does really exist and act according to the laws which we have explained and abundantly serves to account for all motions of the celestial bodies and our seas," Isaac Newton. Newton showed, without any shadow of a doubt, that the natural world is mathematical and that you could apply mathematical laws to explain everything from the tides to the falling of apples off trees. ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: The true cause of the length of the image was detected to be no other than light consists of rays of different refrangibility.

Newton's ideas on light were very revolutionary. I mean, what he discovered and now accepts was that normal light is made up of different colors of light. This particular discovery concerning light and colors explain why the sky is blue, why there's a brilliant red sun at sunset, and so on.

ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. This is a colossus. Men like Einstein, when they picked up Newton's works were overwhelmed.

One is overwhelmed with the capacity to assimilate this vast knowledge. RICHARD S. WESTFALL: He was a genius of extraordinary caliber.

In my understanding of things, genius of that order imposes certain penalties. [music playing] [crickets chirping] NARRATOR: There was little cheer to be found in England on Christmas day 1642. The country was at war with itself.

The forces of King Charles the first and Oliver Cromwell were waging a fight for the hearts and souls of a divided people. At Woolsthorpe Manor in the county of Lincolnshire, the birth of a premature baby was greeted with a sense of impending doom. Only three months earlier, the child's father had died, and he was given little chance to live.

To everyone's surprise, the frail child survived. His mother, Hannah, baptized him Isaac Newton, after his deceased father. In the hope of securing a more stable future for herself and her child, Hannah accepted a proposal of marriage from Barnabas Smith, the rector of the adjoining parish of North Witham.

Isaac, now only three years old, was left with his grandparents. For the next eight years, Isaac saw little of his mother. On the death of his stepfather, Isaac's mother returned to Woolsthorpe.

Now financially secure, Hannah made plans for Isaac's education as a future gentleman farmer. He was sent away to King's Grammar School in Grantham. An introverted and reclusive student, he made few friends and appeared to take little interest in his studies.

Being a smaller boy in the school, he was attacked by the school bully. But in spite of his small stature, he rounded on the bullet and gave the bully a thrashing. So there is an incredible, steely toughness that runs through him.

NARRATOR: Isaac roomed with Mr Clark, who ran an apothecary shop. Seeing Isaac's interest in the mysteriously labeled bottles and bubbling cauldrons, Clark showed him how to mix potions and gave him access to his books. Isaac's favorite book became "The Mysteries of Nature and Art" by John Bates-- a book full of recipes and schematics for mechanical toys.

Soon he was hand building kites, model windmills, and even a water clock. Newton had discovered a refuge from the misery of his loveless, lonely life. He began to excel at school and quickly rose to the top of his class.

When Isaac turned 17, Hanna recalled him to Woolsthorpe to run the farm. Henry Stokes, Isaac's teacher, aware of his budding genius, pleaded with her to let him stay on and apply for university. Reluctantly, Hannah agreed.

In 1660, Stokes' star pupil was enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge. Teaching in Cambridge in those days probably wasn't very advanced or sophisticated by present standards. And many students would have to learn things by themselves.

I think the formal instruction was rather limited, and Newton probably learnt much of what he did on his own. NARRATOR: With no financial support from his mother, Newton had to work his way through college, performing menial chores. While other students indulged in a vigorous social life, Newton rarely socialized.

Instead, he pursued his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. In the course of his endeavors, he came across the mechanical philosophy of Rene Descartes. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: Everything should be thought of in terms of a machine, working parts in contact with one another. So, for example, the planets were thought to move in gigantic swirling vortices of some sort of invisible matter.

NARRATOR: Newton's interest in Cartesian philosophy brought him into contact with Isaac Barrow, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. And with Barrow's gentle tutelage, Newton was introduced to Galileo's ideas on motion and gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and Descartes' revolutionary work in algebra, "La G om trie. " SIR MICHAEL ATIYAH: Geometry has concerned itself with shapes and triangles, and what Descartes did was to regiment it, organize it, to decide everything could be done by measurement and by mechanical calculation.

NARRATOR: The study of Descartes' algebra changed Newton's life forever. He fell in love with mathematics. What little interest he showed in daily college life was now subsumed in a passionate frenzy of learning.

In one year, from 1663 to 1664, he taught himself everything that was known about modern mathematics. RICHARD S. WESTFALL: He knew the problems that the best mathematicians of the age could solve, and he knew that he was better than any of them.

And I think, at that point, he set himself apart from others. DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: You have to bear in mind that Newton was not a man who found social relations easy, and I think he found mathematics as a m tier through which he could live.

NARRATOR: In 1664, Newton got his BA and won a graduate scholarship to continue his studies. The following year, plague struck Cambridge. The university was closed, and he returned to Woolsthorpe.

Except for a short visit back to Cambridge, Newton was to spend the next 18 months at home working completely alone. In that time, he made revolutionary advances in mathematics and optics, as well as starting work on his greatest achievement, the laws of gravitation. [music playing] PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: Newton wanted us to believe that as he watched that apple fall, he realized that the falling of the apple and the motion of the moon must be symbol of phenomena. There is, however, no real evidence that Newton had that advanced notion until quite a bit later.

NARRATOR: He set the date of 1666 for his discovery to assure that he would get sole credit for his later work. In the pioneering days of 17th century science, the means of staking claims to discoveries was to publish, something Newton was very reticent to do and later regretted. He wasn't too concerned with publishing, making it available to other people, getting glory for his own sake.

It was an intellectual challenge that he wanted to do it. NARRATOR: It was in his mathematical work at Woolsthorpe that Newton's failure to publish was most regrettable. Newton made a number of brilliant discoveries in mathematics, most notably calculus, what Newton called fluxions.

The invention of calculus was a major breakthrough in mathematics, allowing measurement of continuously changing motion and the areas of complex shapes. On his return to Cambridge in 1667, he showed a copy of his work on mathematics to Isaac Barrow. It took Barrow two years of diplomatic prodding to get Newton to write his first paper, "De Analysi.

" Although Newton did allow a select group of mathematicians to see his work, he still refused to publish. Every discovery that Newton made had two aspects. First, Newton made the discovery.

And second, other people had to discover that he had made the discovery. NARRATOR: Apart from his groundbreaking work in mathematics and his growing appreciation for the laws of gravity, Newton also applied himself to the study of lights. Of all the mysteries of nature, lights and color over the most fascinating to scientists of that time.

Newton decided to approach the problem using experimentation and observation, a method of inquiry suggested by Francis Bacon in the 16th century. While at Woolsthorpe, he bought a prism to observe the phenomenon of colors. ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: "Having darkened my chamber and made a small hole in my curtains to let a convenient quantity of the sun's light, I placed my prism at its entrance," Isaac Newton, 1660.

What he did, first of all, was to find out, as far as he could, why the colors are produced. NARRATOR: By using an exhaustive series of tests, he finally whittled down the possibilities to conclude that white light consisted of rays of different colors. Color was a property of light, not of objects.

PROF. I. BERNARD COHEN: This particular discovery concerning light and colors explain why we see colored objects.

Most important of all, he came to recognize that since a lens is like two prisms, one on top of the other, there'll be color fringes, or different refraction of the different colors. So he decided he would build a telescope in which the magnification was not produced by a big lens but by a mirror. NARRATOR: Newton constructed the entire telescope by hand, including grinding the concave mirror.

In 1671, word of the invention of his reflecting telescope reached the Royal Society. An invitation was sent out to Newton to demonstrate it. Newton was flattered.

He built a second telescope and had it hand-delivered to London. It was enthusiastically received. Newton was immediately voted a member.

Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Society, wrote to Newton requesting permission to register the invention. In a rare moment of expansiveness, Newton readily agreed and asked if he could submit a paper on light. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: It was the first publication of Isaac Newton. It's the first great scientific discovery to be published in a scientific journal.

It's the first great breakthrough that doesn't have any discussion in it of the nature of the divinity, the creation of the world, general metaphysics. It's a straight scientific paper. NARRATOR: Expecting discussion to focus on his experiments, Newton was angered to hear only polite derision.

Particularly infuriating with the comments of Robert Hooke, the recognized leader in the field, that Newton had borrowed from his work, "Micrographia. " PROF. I.

BERNARD COHEN: When new discoveries come in science, scientists don't throw away all their cherished beliefs. Only in storybooks does that ever happen. What they rather do is to see whether they can find fault with the new presentation.

NARRATOR: The first important discovery of the modern scientific era using experimental procedures was met with ridicule by the brightest minds of his time. Newton, who hated controversy, was so disheartened by the criticism that he shelved plans for publication of his work in calculus. In 1676, frustrated by the lack of appreciation for his work, he vowed never to publish again.

ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: "I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy. I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, except what I do for my private satisfaction," Isaac Newton. NARRATOR: It would be nine years before he would reemerge to shake the very foundations of Western thought.

[music playing] In 1669, Newton succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. As part of the requirement for the post, Newton was to be ordained a minister in the Anglican church. Newton, being Newton, approached this problem in a very typical manner.

Instead of simply either saying yes or no, he decided he would read up on it. NARRATOR: In his studies of early Christianity, Newton became convinced that the doctrine of the trinity was a fraud perpetrated in the third and fourth century. DR.

ALLAN CHAPMAN: He never, ever could have admitted this in public. It would have cost him his office, bearing in mind, of course, he was a professor at the College of the Holy Trinity in Cambridge. So you could hardly really come up with anti-trinitarian statements there.

NARRATOR: He was set to resign his post when he received a dispensation. It is a measure of the depth of Newton's spiritual beliefs that he was willing to abandon all he held dear rather than compromise them. His belief in God was the very basis of his existence.

FRANK E. MANUEL: He was born months after his father died. Now, in Newton, this takes on an extraordinarily passionate quest for knowing his father's will, the father whom he never understood.

God is the father. God has a will, and it is his duty to search out that will. NARRATOR: Newton's God was a personal God-- a creator who was not only over the world, but a part of it, a rational God who revealed Himself and the workings of nature.

The mechanical philosophy of Rene Descartes had removed God from nature, something Newton found abhorrent. He turns to alchemy in the hope of finding an answer. RICHARD S.

WESTFALL: Newton increasingly became worried about the materialistic, atheistic implications of the mechanical philosophy, was looking for a natural philosophy in which spirit rather than matter would be at the center of the world. It's my understanding of his alchemy that he found that in the philosophy of alchemy. NARRATOR: Alchemy was as old as civilization.

Essentially, it was the study of natural magic, a search for the spirit in matter. This spirit manifested itself in physical change, such as fermentation of milk to cheese, the curative properties of herbs, or in the transmutation of metals. Alchemy was concerned with manipulating what was seen to be four elemental properties in nature, the four elements-- earth, air, fire, and water.

And realizing that these things made all substances that you could, therefore, not only make any other substance, such as gold, but you could also somehow learn the secrets by which God had put the world together. NARRATOR: These secrets were revealed only to those who could decipher its arcane language and imagery. As found in the works of other alchemists, such as Hermes Trismegistus, Athanasius Kircher, Michael Maiers.

Newton believed that he had been ordained to use his God-given genius to reveal this lost wisdom. DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: He wasn't looking for gold.

He wasn't looking for any particular substance. He was looking for the wisdom, which the alchemical practitioner believed that you gained once you had learned how matter was composed. It was almost a metaphysical activity.

NARRATOR: In 1669, Newton purchased two furnaces and converted part of his quarters at Cambridge into a laboratory. Throughout the 1670s and '80s, with the help of a servant Humphrey Newton, he worked long into the night. Humphrey Newton thought him to be a man possessed.

ACTOR AS HUMPHREY NEWTON: "So intense, so serious upon his studies, he ate very sparingly. Nay, oft-times, he forgot to eat at all. He rarely went to bed till 2 or 3 o'clock, the fire scarcely going out night or day.

He's sitting up one night as I did another till he finished his chemical experiments," Humphrey Newton. NARRATOR: As intense as his work was an alchemy, mathematics, and physics, it paled in comparison to his studies in theology. Interpretation of scripture in the 17th century is easily as important for intellectuals as science was.

It seems difficult for us to understand that on this interpretation, the whole meaning of existence depends. Because works of prophecy are the truth that has been revealed to us, and they've been shown to be true. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: He wanted to know what the real meaning was of the Book of Revelations and the apocryphal of the New Testament and the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. What was meant by the reference to the horror of Babylon?

He came to believe that there were ancient sources of wisdom and that the way to get these was not through spiritual or mystical experiences but by analysis of the texts. NARRATOR: Like many men of his generation, Newton thought that mankind in ancient times had wisdom that had been lost over the centuries. He believed that his discoveries in mathematics and physics had been known to the ancient Greeks.

DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: He saw Pythagoras and the ancients and their numbers, the belief that numbers lay at the heart of all things, as the real founders of all rational knowledge. NARRATOR: Newton became convinced that Pythagoras had accumulated this wisdom from a meeting with the Old Testament patriarch Moses in Sudan.

To accommodate this historically, Newton began compiling the chronology of the ancient kingdom. FRANK E. MANUEL: Part of this scripture interpretation was to develop a whole system of chronology, re-dating the history of the world, pushing the history of Greece 500 years out of the way.

NARRATOR: In his extensive study of scripture, he was convinced that in three chapters of the Book of Ezekiel could be found the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon. RICHARD S. WESTFALL: He went back and forth between the drawing and the text, insisting that the text had to refer to a possible construction.

Then, from the material necessities of the construction, correcting the text where it was needed. All of this as an effort to reproduce the true original temple of worship that all of the early people, going back to Noah, had used. NARRATOR: At the heart of all Newton's work was the conviction that a rational God had made a rational universe whose laws could be discerned by analysis and mathematics.

FRANK E. MANUEL: I would say that, for him, the world is God writing Himself on the universe as history. The history means there is a succession of events.

And these succession of events are the result of God's personal relationship with men. NARRATOR: As his alchemical experiments led him deeper into the search for the spirit of nature, his understanding of the mathematical and physical laws of nature grew more profound. Approaching was a time when he would make plain the divine master plan, the system of the world.

[music playing] Newton loved his mother, even though she never understood his genius. Her death in June 1679 saw the passing of Newton's only human relationship. All that was left was his work.

While dutifully attending to her last wishes at Woolsthorpe, Newton was reflecting on a recent correspondence concerning astronomy with his arch rival, Robert Hooke. Hooke said, have you thought of explaining the motion of planets according to my hypothesis, which is that the planets move on along the tangent but there's a force that draws them toward the center? And Newton caught on at once the Hooke had a brilliant idea.

NARRATOR: It was now that the significance of the falling apple became apparent. His interest in astronomical matters was further heightened by the appearance of a comet. In popular folklore, comets were omens, but to astronomers like Newton, they were merely aberrations of celestial motion.

What all astronomers were looking for was a mathematical explanation for Kepler's elliptical motion of planets. In 1684, Robert Hooke, Christopher wren and Edmund Halley met at a coffee house to discuss possible mathematical solutions to the problem. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: Halley recalled that out in Cambridge, there was this absent-minded professor who never published very much, a smart man. Maybe he had the answer.

And so out he went and asked Newton. What he probably asked was, if a planet moves in an ellipse, what kind of force is operating? And Newton said, an inverse way of force.

And Halley said, how do you know that? And Newton said, I've proved it. And Halley said, OK, let me see the proof.

Well, Newton went through a kind of taradiddle and charade of some kind and said, I can't find it. And Halley said, well, send it to me, because it would be very important. NARRATOR: A few months later, Newton sent a short paper called "On the Motion of Revolving Bodies.

" Halley realized that this was the holy grail everyone had been looking for. PROF. I.

BERNARD COHEN: Ever since Kepler had devised the modern system of the world, ever since then, people have wondered, what kind of force can hold that thing together and make it go? And here, Newton had found it. Halley couldn't believe it.

He rushed back to Cambridge and said, this is extraordinary. You've got to write this up in more detail and put it in the records of the Royal Society to guarantee your priority. NARRATOR: Halley was keen that Newton should write a book on his discovery.

As the Royal Society was short of money, he offered to pay for it himself. It was an act of generosity for which future generations of scientists would be forever grateful. DR.

ALLAN CHAPMAN: Halley was a great diplomat. However had the self-confidence, the natural flair, and the sheer social savoir-faire, I suppose you might call it, to just handle Newton well. As a result of this, they formed a relationship that lasted best part of half a century.

NARRATOR: Newton had come to realize that the application of his discovery could possibly have wider implications. He contacted John Flamsteed at the Royal Observatory to supply him with data on celestial motion. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: Newton seems to have realized, in the revision of this track de motu, on motion, that if the sun is pulling on the earth to keep it in its orbit, the Earth must pull on the sun. Then Mars and Earth must attract one another, and Mars and Jupiter and Earth and Jupiter.

And Newton realizes, he says that this problem is so complex that he didn't think the combined mathematical power of the human race was sufficient to deal with it. "The Principia," of which he later wrote, is an elaboration of how you deal with that problem. NARRATOR: In 1687, "The Principia" was published.

Acknowledging his love of ancient Greek thought, the book was structured as a classical treatise and rhetorical argument and logic. The mathematical reasoning was largely in Euclidean geometry, the geometry of the ancient Greeks. SIR MICHAEL ATIYAH: Nothing at all odd in Newton using Euclidean geometry.

He wanted to draw a picture of [inaudible] orbits, and he wanted to see the curve, and he wanted to draw the [inaudible]. And he wanted to prove things about it by drawing triangles and areas. And because he thought that was closer to the actual physics.

NARRATOR: The book opened with definitions of mass, types of forces, and inertia, each presented in a radically new light. Using these definitions, he postulated three laws of motion. On these three laws, Newton constructed his framework for dynamics and celestial mechanics, the bases of modern science.

Using his laws of gravitation and measurable data, he described the structure of the universe. He showed how to find masses of planets, why the Earth is flat at the poles, and why there is a bulge at the equator, how the tides work, the procession of the equinoxes, and the motion of comets. PROF.

I. BERNARD COHEN: Newton's "Principia" is generally reckoned to be the single most important scientific book ever written and published. People attribute this singular importance to "The Principia" because for the first time, it's set forth a working, quantitative, exact, mathematical system based upon experiment and critical observation.

I know of no other work which had so profound an effect upon the very nature of science itself. NARRATOR: In "The Principia," Newton had given no explanation for what gravity was, only how it worked. To the followers of Descartes in Europe, such as Gottfried Leibniz, the introduction of gravitational forces working at a distance seemed like a disguised version of medieval think.

DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: It seemed to many scientists that what Newton was doing was bringing back magic. Newton didn't know what gravitation was.

He admitted it. He didn't know what gravity was. We don't know what gravity is today.

But what we do have is a knowledge of the laws that it follows. And this was a major break in the development of Western science. NARRATOR: Above all, Newton showed that time was an absolute quantum.

Knowing what happened at one moment, it was possible to calculate what happened at another. Events were determinable. This discovery initiated a new era in Western thought, one in which man would use the laws of nature to control his destiny.

The publication of "The Principia" ended forever Newton's obscurity. He was now the most famous scientist in Britain. Just prior to its publication in 1687, Newton had already attracted the attention of the English ruling class.

The King of England, James II, was a Catholic and keen to return England to Catholicism. James sought to bring about this change by confronting a bastion of Protestantism. Cambridge university was ordered to confer a degree on a Benedictine monk, Father Alban Francis.

Newton who was a fiercely loyal Protestant and also a man of great courage and great personal integrity, was the man who more than anybody else whipped around Cambridge University to stop them what you might call compromising and shilly-shallying yield about whether they should do this or do that. And Newton became, effectively, the leader of opposition against the granting of a degree to Alban Francis. NARRATOR: The overthrow of King James by William of Orange put an end to the matter.

Newton's leadership role earned him the election as a member of parliament for Cambridge. He was party to the passing of the Bill of Rights and an honored guest at the coronation of William and Mary. He was introduced and became friends with the movers and shakers in politics and society.

All this brought about a change in Newton's personality. Before that time, we find the shy recluse. After it, the man who increasingly enjoyed public fame.

He enjoyed being a famous man, having disciples from all over Europe. He enjoyed having ministers of state fawning upon him and offering him high opportunities. NARRATOR: The trappings of fame required a public office to go with them.

Making use of his new friends and previous contacts from Cambridge, he canvased for a post, but none suitable was offered. While waiting for an appointment, Newton assumed the role of scientific elder to aspiring young mathematicians. With one of these aspirants, Fatio de Duillier, he formed his one and only emotional relationship.

I don't think Newton was interested in sex, quite simply. He was not a man who was interested in the physical dimension at all. And I think his relationship with Fatio was what you would call an intellectual friendship.

NARRATOR: In Fatio, Newton saw reflections of himself as a young mathematician. He also admired the ease with which Fatio moved about in society. When Fatio decided to move back to the continent, Newton asked him to stay.

His absence caused Newton to reflect on his inability to get a post, his difficulties in dealing with people. In late 1693, Newton had a nervous breakdown. RICHARD S.

WESTFALL: There's no doubt whatever that he had the breakdown. We do have two insane letters. I don't think they can be called anything but insane letters-- one to John Locke and one two Samuel Pepys.

ACTOR AS ISAAC NEWTON: "To John Locke, sir, being of the opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women and by other means, I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly and would not live, I answered, 'twere better if you were dead," Isaac Newton, 1693. When the word got around that something was wrong with him during this crisis of the '90s, Pepys wrote [inaudible] I'm afraid that something is happening to that brain of his, that mind. And one result of Newton's breakdown in 1693 was a permanent break with Fatio.

NARRATOR: Newton recovered quickly, but he was never again to achieve the brilliance of his earlier years. Eventually, a post was found for him. In 1696, who has made a Warden of the Mint at the Tower of London.

The letter that appoints him makes it clear that the appointment was being offered to him as a sinecure. No one really expected him to involve himself in the affairs of the mint. But Newton was incapable of doing anything by half.

DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: Newton was given the job of recoining the entire British currency. It may sound odd to give this to a great astronomer and mathematician, but it was, in many respects, very appropriate.

It was concerned with purity. It was concerned with the techniques for mechanically manufacturing coins. It was concerned with being able to make standardized weights of bits of metal, lots of things which are concerned with mathematics.

We often think today that scientists are rather sort of head in the clouds. Newton himself was an extremely efficient runner of organizations, and he totally overhauled the mint. He made it a thoroughly successful government department.

NARRATOR: Despite his acclaim and success, Newton was still an unhappy man. He was known to have laughed only once in his life, when asked what possible use geometry could be. Although living at the center of a vibrant social life in London, he rarely entertained and never married.

It's books that are his guides. He lives with books. He doesn't live with human beings.

NARRATOR: Newton's performance at the mint during the recoinage earned him a promotion to master of the mint in 1699, a post he held to his death and which gave him considerably more leverage with the political elite. When Queen Anne assumed the throne in 1702, Newton ingratiated himself by minting a special coin. In 1705, Queen Anne traveled down to Cambridge to knight him for his work in science.

Sir Isaac Newton was now the most famous man in Britain. [music playing] Upon the death of Robert Hooke in 1703, Newton was voted president of the Royal Society. His first act was to obliterate all references to Hooke.

Newton then began the process of molding the society in his image. By the force of his personality and, of course, his scientific standing, which gave it weight. And in many ways, he could be said to be the first major scientific political figure.

Nowadays, we take it for granted that a scientist would advise governments and so on. Well, Newton was, in some sense, the first scientist of that caliber. And his presence in the Royal Society was his performing that role.

NARRATOR: The following year, he published, through the Society, his work "Opticks. " The book was a refinement of his earlier paper on light. Unlike his first paper on light, it was received without a word of criticism.

As an appendix, he published his early papers in calculus, as well as a section he called Queries. RICHARD S. WESTFALL: These were general assertions about the order of nature, which he was convinced were true, but which nevertheless he did not pretend he could demonstrate to be true.

To some extent, then, they are programs of investigation for others. NARRATOR: Newton now laid plans for a second edition of "The Principia. " To update the data, he needed new astronomical reading.

Over dinner with John Flamsteed, Newton offered to publish his work on celestial observations. Flamsteed refused. DR.

ALLAN CHAPMAN: When John Flamsteed was appointed as the head of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675, he was given virtually no resources or money to do his great product of observing the heavens. He, therefore, felt very annoyed when Newton assumed that he should start handing observations over to him. Because effectively, they were observations paid for out of Flamsteed's own pocket.

NARRATOR: Not to be denied, Newton convinced Prince George to fund the publishing, which Newton offered to oversee-- an offer Flamsteed dare not refuse. DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: When the results were delivered up to Newton and into Newton's hands, Newton did nothing about it.

Flamsteed became increasingly irate and angry and genuinely felt that he had been betrayed. He felt that he was, quite simply, the victim of Newton's autocracy. And the real blow to Flamsteed came in 1712, when Newton actually got Halley to publish a version of Flamsteed's catalog, his lifetime's observations, without Flamsteed's permission.

Now, this was, in many ways, an absolute attack on Flamsteed's integrity. And he loathed and abominated Halley as the man who had actually made that possible. NARRATOR: The second edition of "The Principia" came out the following year.

All mentions of Flamsteed were edited out. Newton now returns to his work on calculus. In his younger days, Newton had shied away from conflict.

As an old and powerful man, he embraced it. The controversy had been brewing since Leibniz published his work on calculus in 1676. Up till now, Newton had allowed his admirers to defend his priority.

He now took hold of the reins. Through his devoted disciples, he began a systematic attack. He released his early work and his personal correspondence with Leibniz to justify claims that the German had stolen his discovery.

To resolve the dispute, Newton suggested that a committee be formed to investigate. PROF. I.

BERNARD COHEN: We now know, from the manuscripts, that Newton wrote the first draft for them. When the thing came out, he wrote a long review, occupying some 20 or 30 pages, of the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society. But this was published anonymously.

So Newton didn't behave about things the way ordinary people do. NARRATOR: Leibniz's [inaudible] are broken. Hooke had ceased to exist.

Flamsteed died before the publication of his life's work. In the last years of Newton's life, he received a never-ending stream of praise and deification. In Europe, Voltaire and his followers idolized him.

When Newton died in 1727, he was given the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral fit for a king. He was buried amid royalty in Westminster Abbey. The poet Alexander Pope composed his epitaph-- "Nature and nature's law hid in night.

God said, let Newton be, and all was light. " DR. ALLAN CHAPMAN: In the century that came after Newton, the 1800s, we find that the fascination with science, with order, and with reasoned knowledge really set the whole tone of that culture.

The one single figure from whom they drew most deeply was, in fact, Isaac Newton. NARRATOR: His major work, "The Principia," has become to science with the "Mona Lisa" is to art. It is the masterwork, the pinnacle of scientific expression.

GROUND CONTROL: 3, 2, 1. Booster ignition. And liftoff.

NARRATOR: In the 20th century, mankind's greatest achievement-- the space program-- is also Newtonian science's greatest triumph. Professor Chandrasekhar, Nobel Prize winner for astrophysics, summed up Newton's stature in science this way. ACTOR AS PROFESSOR CHANDRASEKHAR: "Every time I look at what Newton did I feel like a schoolboy admonished by his master.

" I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing in the seashore and diverting myself now and then, finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.