Yet if we go by sheer word count, physics was only one of Newton's intellectual priorities. He devoted more time to what we would now regard as non-scientific topics such as theology and alchemy, writing treatise after treatise on early church history and biblical prophecy.
Scholars have long known that Newton dabbled in the occult, but the sheer magnitude of his devotion to such matters has only recently come to light, bolstered by a British-led project trying to put all of his writings -- about 10 million words in all -- on the World Wide Web.
"We think of Newton, obviously, primarily as a scientist," says Stephen Snobelen, a historian of science at King's College in Halifax. "So this awareness that there is this four-million-word corpus of theological texts, and another one million words on alchemy, is quite a revelation for many people."
Prof. Snobelen is the leading Canadian contributor to the Newton Project, which is based at Imperial College, London, and also involves researchers at Cambridge and at universities in France and the United States.
The project was also a major topic of discussion at a conference held at King's College this week. The conference, titled Circulating Knowledge, was jointly organized by the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the leading British and U.S. history-of-science associations.
The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk) began in 1998 with a £330,000 (about $800,000) grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Board, and may take 20 years or more to complete. It is by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated such project dealing with Newton, and one of the largest Web-based projects involving any single historical figure.
The project will involve Web versions not only of transcriptions of Newton's writings, but also colour images of the original documents, as well as the annotations and margin notes from the books he kept in his personal library -- most of it never before made public.
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