Newton's apple: Isaac Newton and the English scientific renaissance

In the aftermath of the English Civil War, the Restoration overturned England's medieval outlook and a new way of looking at the world allowed the genius of Isaac Newton (b. 1642) and his contemporaries to flourish. Newton had a long and eventful life apart from his scentific discoveries. He was born at the beginnings of the Civil War, his studies were disrupted by the twin disasters of the Great Plague and the Fire of London; a brilliant and enigmatic genius, Newton dabbled in alchemy, wrote over a million words on the Bible, quarrelled with his contemporaries and spent his last years as Master of the Royal Mint as well as President of the Royal Society. This book sets Newton's life and work against this dramatic intellectual rebirth; among his friends and contemporaries were Samuel Pepys, the colourful diarist, John Evelyn, the eccentric antiquarian, the astronomers Edmund Halley and John Flamsteed, and Christopher Wren, the greatest architect of his age. They were all instrumental in the founding of the Royal Society and their aim was nothing less than to examine the whole field of scientific knowledge.