A Short History of Nearly Everything

Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton was equally brilliant and strange. Described as a “solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted” man, Newton was as interested in alchemy as he was in mathematics and science (46). In a series of strange self-experiments, Newton inserted a long sewing needle into his eye and wiggled it around, just to see what would happen, and also sometimes stared at the sun for as long as he could.

Yet, amidst these eccentric tendencies, Newton invented calculus, laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and wrote Principia, a paper explaining his three laws of motion. 

A brilliant London scientist, Cavendish was born into a lavish life of privilege. Although he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, he was also arguably the strangest. He suffered from such extreme shyness that he couldn’t interact with people. In fact, if approached by anyone, Cavendish would immediately run away. It is for this reason that he remained a solitary man, locking himself away in his own personal laboratory.

Cavendish was the first person to create water by isolating hydrogen and combining it with oxygen. He also discovered “the law of the conservation of energy, Ohm’s law, Dalton’s law of Partial Pressures, Richter’s Law of Reciprocal Proportions, Charles Law of Gases, and the principles of electrical conductivity” (60). He alsoprovided clues that would lead to the discovery of noble gases. 

Born in 1726 to a wealthy family, Hutton created the science of geology and transformed our understanding of the Earth:

[Hutton} conducted experiments with chemicals, investigated methods of coal mining and canal building, toured salt mines, speculated on the mechanisms of heredity, collected fossils, and propounded theories on rain, the composition of air, and the laws of motion, among much else (64).

However, his main interest was geology. Hutton was a poor writer, however, and his papers went virtually unnoticed until after his death. 

Born into wealth, Oxford graduate Lyell hardly ever worked. Instead, he devoted his life to the pursuit of geology, and wrote The Principles of Geology, which “shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century” (71). He also invented the geological time periods known as epochs.

Described as “vain, self-absorbed, priggish, [and] neglectful of his family,” Mantell was lacking in character yet an avidly-devoted amateur paleontologist (84). He collected dinosaur bones before dinosaurs were a known clade—so many, in fact, that the bones filled Mantell’s house. 

Owen, a doctor and anatomist, often stole the limbs and organs of cadavers in order to dissect them. It was said that his own son thought him heartless, and that he was the only person Charles Darwin ever hated. Physically unattractive and ruthless towards those he didn’t like, Owen was generally an unlikable man. However, despite his secretive and disturbing nature, he was a leading expert on anatomy. He could take a pile of bones and put them back together with exceptional accuracy. He was also the driving force behind London’s Natural History Museum, and he was the first person to propose that museums should be open to the public. 

Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, Einstein didn’t show early signs of being a genius. He didn’t learn to speak until he was three and failed his college entrance exams on the first try. During his teenage years, he gave up his German citizenship to avoid military conscription, and had a baby out of wedlock (which was given up for adoption).Yet, while working at a Swiss patent office, Einstein developed his theory of relativity, which would change our understanding of the world forever.