![]() ![]() Afterwards, he told his niece that he could “calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of the people.” Deep into that story, I came across this: a stray mention that Newton had lost £20,000–roughly four million dollars in 21st century money–in a financial scam that happened exactly three centuries ago this year, an event called the South Sea Bubble. In that job, he took on the duty of chasing the coiners and counterfeiters who were the enemies of sound money - which meant that Newton’s jailbird correspondence led me both to a ripping crime yarn and a way into what the scientific revolution was like when it was mucking about in the mean streets of 1690s London. Flash forward a decade and that letter led me to what became Newton and the Counterfeiter, the story of what happened when Isaac Newton took over running the Royal Mint, signing on as a mid-level monetary bureaucrat. What? How on earth could a coiner from the flash mob of English criminal society come into contact with the greatest intellect of his day? I had no idea - and the question was far enough off the path of my project that I couldn’t spare the time to dig deeper. One such gift: a letter from a convict in Newgate Jail to the Warden of the Royal Mint - Isaac Newton–in which the condemned man begged for his life. Inevitably I found stuff that seemed incredibly interesting that I had to put aside. That meant that the research for it covered two huge domains, and trying to wrestle the narrative into submission nearly killed me. Twenty-five years ago (sic!) I published my second book, Measure for Measure - a completely not-ambitious-at-all retelling of the history of western science through instruments, both scientific and musical. Money for Nothing, emerged out of a quarter of a century of such tugging and unraveling - and over the course of that ridiculously long span of time, I discovered I had a problem that, I hope, I solved honorably in this attempt to reconstruct what it’s been like to live through moments of great change in the way humans think, and what they - we - think about. My books tend to happen because I can’t resist pulling on loose threads. And thus, we have Money for Nothing, a look at one of the most ruinous financial collapses in the western world, and how one of the greatest minds of the 17th century was caught up in it. Author Thomas Levenson has discovered that when it comes to writing books, one thing truly does lead to another. ![]()
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