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The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, the formal name of this grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits, and eccentrics, was by most accounts the first official scientific organization in the world.
Two killers inspired more fear than any others. One was plague, the other fire.
The tide of fear rose ever higher as the ominous year 1666 appeared, because of the satanic associations of the number 666. Fear turned to panic when plague swooped down on England in 1665, a year ahead of schedule, and death carts began spilling their cargo into mass graves.
In the deadliest assault, from 1347 through 1350, plague killed twenty million people. Somewhere between one-third and one-half of all Europeans died in that three-year span. England’s population crashed so far that it did not return to its pre-plague level for four centuries.
The 1660s did not mark the end of time but the beginning of the modern age.
Isaac Newton turned his attention to the heavens and described a cosmos as perfectly proportioned as a Greek temple.
The conceptual breakthrough was called calculus. It was the key that opened the way to the modern age, and it made possible countless advances throughout science.
Augustine railed against the sin of curiosity with a fury and revulsion that, to modern ears, sound almost unhinged.
Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz had egos as colossal as their intellects.
In the year 1600, for the crime of asserting that the Earth was one of an infinite number of planets, a man named Giordano Bruno was burned alive.
Almost exactly a century later, in 1705, the queen of England bestowed a knighthood on Isaac Newton.
Newton would have wept with rage to know that his scientific descendants spent their lifetimes proving conclusively that the clockwork universe ran even more smoothly than he had ever believed.
