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"Was Newton a Newtonian?": Review of Isaac Newton by James Gleick. Reviewed by Patricia Fara. Science, 15 August 2003, page 920.
As part of a justification for the seemingly easy question, Fara writes that "Newton himself would have been horrified by modern Newtonian physics, especially the innovations it owes to Pierre Laplace, the self-styled 'French Newton' who introduced the deterministic interpretation we now associate with Newtonianism." Newton's interests in subjects such as alchemy are now thought of as part of his world view rather than as anomalies. Fara's overall impression of the book is that Gleick "has transformed mainstream academic research into an exciting story about the revised Newton, a thinker more akin to Aristotle than to Einstein," but she wishes there were more pages devoted to Newton's last 30 years.
--- Mike Breen
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