The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick Read Free Book Online Page B

of some dark corner.”
    Leibniz was a lawyer and a diplomat by profession, but he seemed, almost literally, to know everything. He knew theology and philosophy and history, he published new theorems in mathematics and new theories in ethics, he taught himself Latin at seven and wrote learned essays on Aristotle at thirteen, he had invented a calculating machine that could multiply and divide (when rival machines could do no more than add and subtract). No subject fell outside his range. He knew more about China than any other European. Frederick the Great declared him “a whole academy in himself.”
    Leibniz’s view of his own abilities was fully in line with Frederick’s. On the rare occasions when praise was lacking, he supplied it himself. “I invariably took the first rank in all discussions and exercises, whether public or private,” he remarked happily, recalling his school days. His favorite wedding gift to young brides was a collection of his own maxims. But somehow his vanity was so over-the-top, as was his flattery of the royal patrons he was forever wooing, that his exuberance seemed almost endearing. Throughout his long life, Leibniz retained the frantic eagerness of the smartest boy in fifth grade, desperately waving his hand for attention.
    Newton and Leibniz never met. They would have made a curious-looking pair. Unlike Newton, who often slept in his clothes, Leibniz was a dandy who had a weakness for showy outfits with lace-trimmed cuffs, gleaming boots, and silk cravats. He favored a wig with long, black curls. Newton had a vain side, too, despite his austere manner—eventually he would pose for some seventeen portraits—and in his prime he cut a handsome figure. He was slim, with a cleft chin, a long, straight nose, and shoulder-length hair that turned silver-gray while he was still in his twenties. (Newton’s early graying inspired his only recorded foray into the vicinity of humor. He had spent so much time working with mercury in his alchemical experiments, he once said, “as if from thence he took so soon that Colour.”)
    In appearance Leibniz was an odder duck. He was small, jumpy, and so nearsighted that his nose almost scraped the page as he wrote. Even so, he knew how to charm and chat, and he could set his earnestness aside. “It’s so rare,” the Duchess of Orl é ans declared happily, “for intellectuals to be smartly dressed, and not to smell, and to understand jokes.”

    Leibniz was greatly impressed by a demonstration of “a Machine for walking on water,” which was apparently akin to this arrangement of inflatable pants and ankle paddles.
    Today we slap the word genius on every football coach who wins a Super Bowl, but both Newton and Leibniz commanded intellectual powers that dazzled even their enemies. If their talents were on a par, their styles were completely different. In his day-to-day life, as well as in his work, Leibniz was always riding off boldly in all directions at once. “To remain fixed in one place like a stake in the ground” was torture, he remarked, and he acknowledged that he “burned with the desire to win great fame in the sciences and to see the world.”
    Endlessly energetic and fascinated by everything under the sun, Leibniz was perpetually setting out to design a new sort of clock or write an account of Chinese philosophy and then dropping that project halfway through in order to build a better windmill or investigate a silver mine or explain the nature of free will or go to look at a man who was supposedly seven feet tall. At the same time that he was inventing calculus, in Paris in 1675, Leibniz interrupted his work and scurried off to the Seine to see an inventor who claimed he could walk on water.
    No man ever had less of the flibbertigibbet about him than Isaac Newton. He had not a drop of Leibniz’s impatience or wanderlust. Newton spent the eighty-four years of his