Eduardo Paolozzi's Newton, in the courtyard of the British Library in LondonWIKIMEDIA, SOLIPSISTRenowned microscopist Robert Hooke haughtily asks Isaac Newton if he’d ever had a play written about him when the two first meet in Lucas Hnath's new play Isaac's Eye. Set sometime during the plague year 1665–66, this meeting never actually happened, which is the case with a number of scenes in the play. Isaac’s Eye opens with a twentysomething Newton, confident of his genius, explaining his obsession with gaining entry into the Royal Society (founded in November 1660) of which Hooke was the Curator of Experiments. The young physicist is intent on explaining a cornucopia of his ideas to the most learned men in England. He wants to pierce them with his intelligence. After several rebuffs, Newton has forced the meeting by sending Hooke all of his work, leaving the curator worried about being scooped by Newton's findings on the nature of light.
What follows is a thoroughly engaging, thought-provoking, and often very funny exchange of ideas between two titans of science. Hnath plays Newton's decidedly odd, tortured personality off of the prickly Hooke, who was just 7 years Newton’s elder, but definitely more a man in and of the world. The two argue about things that still obsess practitioners of science to this day: experimental design, researcher bias, the importance of replicability, the value of thought experiments, credit for discovery—and they dis each other in earthy 21st-century language.
Throughout the play a narrator separates fact from fiction. True: Hooke was satirized in plays. False: This had already happened when he meets Newton in the play. True: the men were bitter scientific rivals. True: they both were interested ...
