IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT SIR ISAAC NEWTON was the last person to know everything. He was an accomplished physicist (his three laws of motion were the basis of classical mechanics, which defi ned astrophysics for three centuries), mathematician (he was one of the inventors of calculus and developed Newton’s Method for fi nding roots of equations), astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist (okay, maybe the last one was a mistake). He invented the refl ecting telescope, a theory of color, and a law of cooling, and he studied the speed of sound. Just as important, he was born before relativity, quantum mechanics, gene sequencing, thermodynamics, parallel computation,.
