A Short History of Nearly Everything

An English astronomer, Halley had a long and productive series of careers. He “was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor of geometry at the University of Oxford, deputy controller of the Royal Mint, astronomer royal, and inventor of the deep-sea diving bell” (45). He also invented the weather map and actuarial table, and worked with Isaac Newton to discover why planets were inclined to orbit in a very specific and precise ovular shape. 

Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton was equally brilliant and strange. Described as a “solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted” man, Newton was as interested in alchemy as he was in mathematics and science (46). In a series of strange self-experiments, Newton inserted a long sewing needle into his eye and wiggled it around, just to see what would happen, and also sometimes stared at the sun for as long as he could.

Yet, amidst these eccentric tendencies, Newton invented calculus, laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and wrote Principia, a paper explaining his three laws of motion.