I was more interested in the papers and the characters that worked on them. The alchemical stuff is technical, the scientific stuff is technical, the religious stuff is technical. One of the first editors of the papers said an older man should take up the task, because he’d have less to lose than a younger man. And one of the messages of the book is that getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health. It’s more about how others have made sense of all this work. WIRED: Did you read through all this work yourself?ĭry: The book isn’t really about the contents of the paper. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math.
There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.ĭry: A huge amount. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. But Newton also studied alchemy and religion. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.Įven in his lifetime, Newton was hailed as an eminent scientist and mathematician of unparalleled genius. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance.
His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers.
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