The good news is that there is a Newton film in the works. And he’s played by an alternately gurning and whistling Harpo Marx.įond as I am of the Marx Brothers, the so-called greatest scientist of all time deserves better than just being in one of greatest turkeys of all time. Even then Newton only appears for around two minutes. It’s most notable for being a film that regularly features in lists of the biggest flops of all time. Where, though, is Sir Isaac among all these reels – and unreals? There are a few fleeting appearances on television, including some usually jokey cameos in manifestations of Star Trek (most memorably a holodeck poker game also featuring Einstein and the real Stephen Hawking), and he does rather better in plays and better still in novels – a favourite is Philip Kerr’s Dark Matter with Newton as detective in a murder mystery.īut from the earliest days of cinema until now the one and only movie I’m aware of to feature Newton and have had any kind of release is 1957’s The Story of Mankind. They range from partially-based-on-their-lives efforts like the 1936 Oscar-winner The Story of Louis Pasteur and 2009’s Creation about Charles Darwin, to almost completely fictional tales like Christopher Nolan’s 2006 The Prestige with David Bowie as Edison’s great rival Nicolas Tesla, and this year’s hugely enjoyable The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (irritatingly retitled The Pirates! Band of Misfits for the USA and Australia, as I’ve mentioned before) which creates a Darwin very different from the one in Creation. Given that he’s invariably right up there with Albert Einstein whenever polls are conducted about scientific importance and influence, why does Newton lag so far behind when it comes to appearances in mainstream fiction? Not only are there multiple films in which Einstein plays a leading role (notably Insignificance and IQ, as well as having some of his facial features “borrowed” to help Yoda look wise in the Star Wars movies), it’s also not too much of a stretch to think of significant big screen appearances by other scientists. What, to me, seems even more surprising is that Newton, who supposedly described his life as “like a boy playing on the sea-shore diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell”, hasn’t made much more of a splash in popular culture. Nevertheless, a mall and a knees-up once every 150 years seems a poor return for someone who revolutionised our ideas about optics and gravitation and calculus and much more besides. They already have a shopping centre named after him, and when a statue of Sir Isaac was unveiled back in 1858 assorted dignitaries and leading scientists of the time turned up to watch as Newton’s telescope and prism were paraded round the streets. So why has it taken so long for the town to celebrate a figure of such magnitude? The short answer is, it hasn’t. The plaque finally appeared, along with the pop-up apothecary’s shop, as part of Gravity Fields, an imaginative eight-day science and arts festival all inspired by Newton’s life and legacy. But it only went up there late last month, even though there have long been ones on the site to mark how both political activist Thomas Paine and writer Charles Dickens had much more briefly, and more recently, stayed in a nearby coaching inn. For five years it was the lodging of the young Isaac Newton, who despite – or perhaps because of – spending a great deal of his energy on what we would now call alchemy or magic, also found the time to become arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived.Īs you might expect there is a commemorative plaque outside the restaurant. This was where the ultimate teenage wizard lived and first familiarised himself with the alchemical materials he would devote much of this life to. Three hundred and fifty years ago this wasn’t just any apothecary’s shop. Where I am is not, and never has been, a real apothecary’s shop. The two assistants are actors taking part in a bit of well-staged make believe. I politely decline their suggestions on the basis that there is precious little evidence of the benefits of zodiac-based treatment. Suddenly I find myself in a 17th Century apothecary’s shop, where the shelves are filled with strange looking jars containing everything from colophony (a form of pine resin, apparently) to live leeches, and the two assistants are alarmingly eager to know my star sign so they can work out which potions to give me. It’s lunchtime but I ignore the Italian restaurant and go through a door beside it. I’m in a shopping centre in the small town of Grantham the middle of England – perhaps most famous nowadays for being where former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was born and grew up.
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