Sir Isaac Newton bags a counterfeiter
August 3, 2009 | 5:00 am
Now here’s a bit of physics-related lore I didn’t know: After leaving Cambridge, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the English Mint, where he got involved in some very nasty business.
From a review of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist, on TheScientist.com:
The greatest mind of the 17th (or arguably any) century found himself in a position to use his superior mental powers to study and rectify the problems of England’s Mint. Once he’d improved the manufacture of the King’s coin by adding eight new rolling mills and five new coin presses to the Mint, his attention turned to the country’s counterfeiters. This is when Newton morphed into a master sleuth, building a network of spies and informers in London’s underworld, never hesitating to wade into unsavory, dangerous territory. His mania for detail helped him in matching wits with one of the most inventive criminals of the age, one William Chaloner.
Reviewer Margaret Guthrie writes that author Thomas Levenson’s pace and timing
…rival those of the best crime story authors. He has written a real page-turner, perfect for a long afternoon’s engagement with the hammock or whiling away a long airport layover.
Apparently Newton left detailed records of the case he built against Chaloner; the author also had the benefit of a 17th-century biography of the master criminal. So now we can indulge in a bit of true-crime reading while nobly boning up on the history of physics — sort of.
Glennda Chui
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2 Comments »
August 4th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Glennda: I agree with Margaret Guthrie: this is a page turner. I picked it up at Keplers, read two pages & was hooked. (and I think I’ve talked my book group into making it our next title to read.)
August 5th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Sweet! I’ve been looking for good reads. Right now I’m reading David Bodanis’s “E=mc squared,” which is excellent; his description of how light travels was a real revelation to me:
“Light waves keep themselves going only by virtue of one part moving forward and so powering up the next part. (The electricity part of the light wave shimmers forward, and that ‘squeezes’ out a magnetic part; then that magnetic part, as it powers up, creates a further ‘surge’ of electricity so the rushing cycle keeps repeating.”
But what make the book really sing are the stories of the people involved in the biography of the famous equation, and its later applications. I’m looking forward to reading about this unexpected side of Newton.