Britian lost her advantage in part due to her caste system. Germany, for a time, opened the doors to the scientific academy for all to enter. Britain relied on her upper classes to fill her institutions of higher education (for the most part), and those people still valued a Classical education over a technical one. The Germans surged ahead in physics and chemistry in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but were later hampered by the hierarchical pyramid of their university system, that allows one professor to control the research direction for an entire insitute (a practice that the Soviets copied). As the German campuses ossified into warring camps, innovation slowed, as Hayek would have predicted.

Newton’s fame (if not his practical influence) was laced with serendipidity. And Jacob and Stewart do a fine job of making that clear to ordinary mortals in a book that’s very fun to read.

And over on the Continent…Mathematicians such as the German Leibniz, who had independently invented calculus…

I think it a common misconception that whole new philosophies, such as calculus, are suddenly invented from scratch at some moment in history. That’s a rare event indeed when it does occur (if ever). Major philosophies or sciences are built up over long periods of time with each major contributor building upon, refining and adding to the work of their intellectual forebears. Calculus is no exception. The Greek mathemetician Archimedes was on the very cusp of doing integral calculus circa 200 BC and performed the first known summation of an infinite series. (There’s one indicator of how far civilization fell between the end of Greco-Roman society and the Renaissance. From art, philosophy and calculus to the Inquisition. Sheesh! What a death spiral.) The concept of limits, although refined by Newton, was an idea much discussed among philosophers of his day; much as, say, String Theory has been batted around among theoretical physicists for the last thirty years. At a certain point, a coherent theory begins to gel. The person(s) who bring that theory to coherence are often cited as it’s inventors. It was Newton himself who said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Next, I agree the author is absolutely onto something regarding the link between the publication of the Principia in England and the birth and flowering on the industrial revolution. What I hadn’t realized was the degree of publicity his work received and was fascinated to read that.

On a lighter note, I was recently surprised to see there actually is some truth to the old canard about Newton and the apple. While, according to Newton, it didn’t bonk him on the head, watching an apple fall while sitting on the grounds of his estate did inspire him to wonder if there was some connection between the force which pulled on the apple and the force that kept the moon in orbit around the earth; the moon question being one he had wondered about and been confounded by for a long time.

And there’s no doubt the man was a stunning genius of rare degree.

Anyway, this sounds like a book I want to read.