Isaac Newton’s remarkable year — and the plagiarism accusations that followed

The Winding Trail to Newton’s Principia Mathematica Jed Z. Buchwald & Mordechai Feingold Princeton Univ. Press (2026)

The ‘ten-year rule’ of creativity and genius, identified by psychologist John Hayes in 1989, states that individuals in both the arts and sciences need a decade of learning and practising a craft or discipline before they can make a breakthrough. Many scientists fit that pattern.

For example, Charles Darwin conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838, ten years after immersing himself in science at university. Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity was published in 1905, ten years after he began to question the speed of light. And in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web server and browser that became the World Wide Web, a decade after making his first web-like computer programme.

But Isaac Newton stands out as an exception. The seventeenth-century natural philosopher, who revealed the workings of light and gravity, is the subject of a penetrating and intriguing book by science historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold. The authors have spent decades studying Newton’s manuscripts and published works. Here, they analyse in detail the complicated evolution of his most celebrated publication, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It was in this work’s three volumes, published in Latin in 1687, that Newton proposed his laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation.

In 1665–66, during the Great Plague, Newton made three breakthroughs while working mostly alone at his birthplace and home, Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham, UK. The house is north of Cambridge, where he was then a student at the university.

In mathematics, he laid the foundations for differential and integral calculus to solve complex problems in motion and geometry. In physics, after observing an apple fall from a tree, he deduced that the same invisible force that pulls objects to Earth governs the orbit of the Moon: an idea that he later used to formulate his gravitational law. And in optics, he performed experiments with a glass prism in a darkened room, and showed that white light consists of the colours of the rainbow.

But this remarkable year occurred well before he had accumulated ten years of study in maths or physics. The authors found no reliable evidence that Newton, who was born in 1642, studied maths or science at school. When he was sent to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, UK, as an undergraduate in 1661, his guardians intended for him to become a minister in the Church of England, and he enrolled in humanities subjects.

After examining Newton’s curriculum at Cambridge and his surviving papers, Buchwald and Feingold suggest that it was in only his final undergraduate term that he started to engage seriously with science — that is, in 1664–65, one year before the plague forced him to seek solitude.

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Other exceptions to the ten-year rule in maths and physics include Werner Heisenberg. In 1925, aged 23, he created matrix mechanics, one of the foundations of quantum theory, after studying physics for five years. Paul Dirac formulated the relativistic equation of the electron — from which he predicted the existence of the positron and antimatter — at the age of 25, when he had only about six years of university training in applied mathematics.

But Heisenberg had two leading physicists, Max Born and Niels Bohr, as mentors during this period, and Dirac had previously completed a three-year degree in electrical engineering. Newton, by contrast, worked mainly by himself — with the important exception of Isaac Barrow, the inaugural Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, whom Newton succeeded in 1669.

So, how did Newton do it? In 1726, not long before his death, while sitting under apple trees in his London garden, he relayed the story to a friend, William Stukeley, who published it in Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life in 1752. Six decades before this meeting, Newton was sitting alone under apple trees at his farmhouse “in a contemplative mood”, notes Stukeley.

Observing an apple drop perpendicularly to the ground, he realized that matter must have some drawing power, and in the case of Earth, it must come from the very centre, not somewhere to the side. And, if all matter has this property, then it must be proportional to its quantity. Thus, Earth draws the apple, but the apple also draws Earth.

Extrapolating further, Newton deduced that this power, which he called gravity, must extend throughout the Universe. “And thus by degrees”, wrote Stukeley, he “began to apply this property of gravitation to the motion of the Earth and of the heavenly bodys”.