Quotes from Edward Dolnick

The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.

In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton," one historian wrote, "the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Especially riches pulled from the ground. Two-thirds of all American workers labored on farms, with sweat and muscle the only fuels. "There was no quittin' time and no startin' time," a folk proverb declared. "It was all the time.

Even supremely able and ambitious men quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers. "When one ... compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet who had compiled an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.

It's always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we've lost more than the losing side's version of history. We've lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.

They believed in angles and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws.

Newton had been the first to learn how to pin down the mysterious infinitesimals that held the key to explaining motion.

We know that we have got about 2500 ft. to fall yet . . . and if it comes all in the first hundred miles we shan't be dreading rapids afterwards for if it should continue at this rate much more than a hundred miles we should have to go the rest of the way up hill which is not often the case with rivers.

Seventeenth-century thinkers rejected the Greek's distinction between truths that have to be - two and two make four - and truths that happen to be - gold is soft and easy to scratch. Since every facet of the universe reflected a choice made by God, chance had no role in the universe. The world was rational and orderly. "It just so happens" was impossible.

The cliché has it that an unknown subject is a closed book, but Egypt was different. Egypt was an open book, with illustrations on every page, that no one knew how to read.

archaeological riddles

Vivant Denon, an artist and writer whose drawings

The question was not whether the world would end but how soon the end would come.

religion focused far more on damnation than on consolation.