Changes

|Title=In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and his Times

|Resource Type=book

|Year=1984

|Abstract=From dust jacket notes: "...In the first major popular biography of Sir Isaac Newton in 50 years, historian Gale E. Christianson paints a compelling portrait of this seminal thinker -- a towering genius who, in the words of Albert Einstein, 'stands before us, strong, certain, and alone.' Drawing on the full body of Newton papers (nearly four million words), this majestic work details Newton's life in its entirety: from an introspective boyhood in rural Lincolnshire, to Cambridge, where he came to question the very order of things, to the heretical religious ideas that would ultimately absorb him more than science itself, to celebrity as leonine Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society. Throughout, Newton emerges as a passionate recluse, given to sleepless nights working alone with little more nourishment than bread and wine. As the legend unfolds, so , too, do Newton's epoch-making discoveries in mathematics, physics, optics, and astronomy. At 23 he had already established the elements of differential calculus. Soon after he created the reflecting telescope and described the properties of light. At 45 Newton secured his reputation by publishing the Principia Mathematica, a treatise on universal gravitation that would alter forever man's vision of the cosmos...."