Edward Dolnick doesn’t use the word genius lightly. In fact, he believes people today toss the word around nonchalantly. In his book, “The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and the Birth of the Modern World,” which comes out Tuesday, Dolnick centers in on the original geniuses’ like Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and Gottfried Leibniz, who would become Newton’s greatest challenger.

Speakeasy talked with Dolnick about Newton, who he calls “the strangest man who ever lived,” as well as the modern day implications of those 1600s-era discoveries such as calculus.



How was their world so different from ours?


But couldn’t one argue that with the financial crisis and global warming that we are fighting a different but equally challenging set of problems?

The difference then was that thanks to the success of scientists, we take for granted that if you look hard enough and you are smart enough, there’s answers, there’s some underlying system to something that looks like confusion and disorder out there. It’s as if you were doing a crossword puzzle, but now we have perfect faith that it was set in order in some precise way. The way we have that faith and confidence in that puzzle is because of these guys, they found that there was a hidden order.

Is there a society today, hidden or not, that’s akin to the Royal Society?

The Royal Society was not something that ordinary people would have known about. This is an esoteric intellectual interest. Today, I think that one of the differences is that although the man on the street does not know the inns and outs of science, we have a feeling that what the scientists are saying is deep and insightful and worth respecting. Back in the 1600s, that idea had yet to be established. Many people had theories about the way the world worked, nearly all of them religious theories.

Do you think that 17th-century science influences 21st century technologies like the iPad and the mobile phone?

There’s giant influences. The notion that the world is a machine that you can grasp at in equations or that you can grasp the important parts in equations — this is still fundamental to the whole scientific and technological enterprise. People take for granted, scientists do, that there is this deep underlying order. We can’t think that things can be any other way. That was a new idea, it was an idea that was invented by the people I write about.

Newton is very much a historical figure. Did Newton and the others become more than just a set of ideas; were they an eating and drinking person to you?

Well, Newton wouldn’t have got drunk. He was a terribly puritanical fellow. He was probably the last person in the world that you would want to go to a bar with. But I think I did come to have some sense of who they are. They are a lot more than ideas and a lot different then that. Not only were they brilliant, but they were fierce and nasty tempered. They disliked one another and wanted all the credit that they deserved and often times the credit that others deserved. They were sharp-elbowed people.

Your chapters are very short. Did you purposefully do that?

They are short, they are five to ten pages. When I read books I always like to get to the end of the chapter, even if it’s a book I’m loving. It’s just a mini accomplishment. This is a book about hard ideas and I wanted people to catch onto them and then be pleased with themselves that they have had gotten to those ideas.