THE REJECTED BUT UNWAVERING GENIUS
ISAAC NEWTON
Isaac Newton was not born a genius; he was born frail, and premature. His father had died three months earlier, he was so small he could fit into a quart pot. They said he wouldn't survive, but he did. He was not the kind of child that was tipped to achieve anything worthwhile in life due to his attitude in class and towards academics. His mother pulled him from school to tend the family farm, a chore he performed with spectacular neglect. While sheep wandered and hedges went untrimmed, young Isaac sat under a tree, carving mathematical models and dreaming of a world beyond the wool and manure of Woolsthorpe.
His failure as a farmer was so absolute that his uncle sent him back to school, and eventually to Cambridge University. There, he was not a star, he was a poor student who earned his keep by serving the wealthier ones. Yet in the solitude of his own mind, a universe was beginning to glow.
The Great Plague of 1665 saw Cambridge shut down. Newton, at 23, retreated to that same farmhouse of his failed farming days. In that quiet, eighteen-month isolation, with the world in panic, he experienced an intellectual supernova that would illuminate the universe.
With no textbooks, no colleagues, only his own relentless curiosity, he invented calculus to describe how things change. He pried apart sunlight with a prism, proving white light was a tapestry of colours, forged the foundation of modern optics, and one afternoon, as the story goes, watching an apple fall in the orchard, he asked a question that seemed childish: Why does the apple fall perpendicular to the ground? Why not sideways or upward?
The answer was not about the apple, it was about the moon. If the same force that pulled the apple could reach the moon, perhaps it was universal. He calculated, he struggled, he conceived a force that bound the cosmos in a single, elegant law: Gravity. Not just a force on Earth, but a silent, invisible hand that sculpted the orbits of planets, the path of a comet, the very tides of the ocean. The universe, once a mysterious clockwork of divine intervention, was revealed to be a realm of magnificent, predictable order.
He published his masterpiece, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In it, he laid down three simple laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. He built the first practical reflecting telescope, served as Warden of the Royal Mint, where he fought counterfeiters with zeal, and even served as a rather distracted Member of Parliament.
Yet he remained a paradox, a man who discovered the laws governing the universe, yet spent years obsessed with alchemy and biblical chronology. He was notoriously prickly, engaging in bitter feuds with rivals like Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz. He knew he stood on the shoulders of giants, but he was a giant who often wanted to kick the others off.
Newton shows us that transformative genius is not about being the brightest student or the most favored. It is about a relentless, obsessive curiosity that refuses to let a question go. It is about finding the situation that forces you into solitude where you can focus without distraction on the problem that consumes you. It is about seeing the extraordinary in the extremely ordinary.
Newton changed the world by teaching us that the universe is not a chaotic mystery, but a book written in the language of mathematics. He gave us the confidence to seek answers, to believe that the human mind, flawed and human as it is, can decipher the deepest secrets of existence.
He was a fragile, solitary boy who asked a simple question and then handed humanity the keys to the heavens. His story inspires us to, look, question, and seek answers. The universe is waiting to be understood, the apple falls for everyone, it is up to us to ask why.
365 men who changed the world.
Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.
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