After the mythic apple fell, and with the fame that followed his “discovery” of gravity and the architecture of everyday reality, Isaac Newton changed. Life After Gravity pursues Newton as he traded reclusive scholarship at Cambridge for politics and high times in London. Having laid bare the laws of nature, Newton “became convinced that he could bring similar harmony to the apparently disorderly development of human civilization.” The Newton who emerges in the account by Cambridge University historian of science Patricia Fara was a hypocritical careerist who enjoyed the exercise of power and benefitted from slave trafficking—yet also a person who maintained some principles. Fara puts Newton’s accomplishments in the context that science is “inextricably intertwined with society” and reflects and influences social values.
