Isaac Newton, backstabbing workaholic

“Time to him was the arch-enemy of man, something never to be squandered but devoured.”

Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously, we talked to the filmmaker Erin Lee Carr about her quarantine routine.

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Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

The other week, I ran across an article suggesting that the great English physicist and mathematician may have discarded a portrait of his scientific rival, Robert Hooke, in an effort to discredit and suppress Hooke’s work, which contradicted Newton’s own law of universal gravitation.

This rather delicious story of scientific backstabbing inspired me to do a little digging into Newton’s work habits. Not surprisingly, he was a workaholic. The biographer Gale E. Christianson has written: