Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
For millions, Sir Isaac Newton is perhaps the most singular reason why humanity moved from the medieval world of myth, superstition and sometimes mind boggling ways of thinking by 21st century standards and into the way of enlightenment, to question what if rather than accepting the so called dogma rationale. In the B.B.C. 2’s Isaac Newton: The last Magician, the man is revealed to be more than the wrongly sum of his work in the Newton’s three Laws of Motion.
Narrated by the actor Helen McCrory, the programme, unfortunately hidden away on the corporation’s second channel, delved into the world of the man, the reasons behind his undoubted genius and the driving forces of his life, that of his mistress and the art of science. What is little known about the man who took on and rejected the basic conventional thought of nearly 2,000 years of teaching handed down from Aristotle in his lifetime, is Newton’s work and study into alchemy and the occult. Studies that in his day would have been deemed so dangerous, so heretical that his inner most thoughts and analysis were locked away for the better part of two centuries and if not for John Maynard Keynes, all that may have happened to Newton’s memory is his reverence would have gone unchallenged.
As it is, these papers and private letters to some of the most intellectual men of his day only serve notice that this is a man so consumed by a passion for the truth, to wipe away 1,700 years of teaching that his experiments into light, such as putting a 17th century version of a toothpick into his eye to see how the perception of light can change, is not just questioning God’s power of life and death, he was driven by the demons of the age in proving that man should question and not take for granted what was written between the covers of the Bible.
With contributions by leading figures such as Dr. Stuart Clark and Professor Lisa Jardine, this revealing programme shed luminosity onto a man whose life was so much more than the often repeated through the centuries and perhaps allegorical tale of the man who when hit by a fallen apple had an epiphany that changed the world.
Isaac Newton: The last Magician was an interesting insightful documentary that got to the core of the man.
Ian D. Hall