In 1665 the plague reached London, the colleges shut, and a young undergraduate was sent home to a farm in the countryside with nothing much to do. Over the next couple of years, alone, he did the early work on three separate things that would each have made somebody a career.
That is where this book gets good, and it is why it sits on the Stealth Science shelf instead of the biography pile. Janet B. Pascal wrote it, the store bands it 3 to 6, and the series template is doing its usual work around the edges: whole life, first page to last breath, short chapters, drawings, sidebars. You have seen the shape. The question is only ever what got packed inside it, and what got packed inside this one is more actual physics than a hundred page paperback has any business carrying.
The science it actually teaches
Four things, and the first one is the best experiment a child will meet all year.
The prism, done properly. Everybody already knew that a glass prism turns sunlight into a band of colours. The usual explanation was that the glass was doing it, staining the light on the way through the way a window stains it. Newton's move was not making the rainbow. Anybody could make the rainbow. His move was the second prism. He took the band of colours, blocked off all of it except one single colour, and sent that one colour alone through a second prism. If glass adds colours, that colour should split into more colours. It does not. It comes out the far side the same colour it went in. Then he took the whole spread and put it back together into white light again.
That is the difference between seeing a thing and proving a thing, and your child can follow every step of it. The conclusion is worth saying out loud: white light is a mixture, and colour belongs to the light, not to the glass. Which means the red of a fire truck is not a paint fact, it is a light fact, about which parts of the light come back off it into your eye.
One rule for the apple and the Moon. Before Newton, the sky and the ground were understood to run on different rules. Things fell down here. Things went round up there. He said no, it is the same force in both places, and whatever pulls an apple off a branch is what holds the Moon in its path. That single sentence is the biggest thing in this book, and children tend to skate over it because it sounds obvious now. It was not obvious. It was outrageous.
The laws of motion, which your child can test on a wall. A thing keeps doing exactly what it is already doing until something acts on it, which is why the world looks like things stop on their own only because friction is quietly acting on everything. And every push comes with an equal push back the other way. Lean on the wall. The wall leans on you.
He built the mathematics he needed. This is the part that gets skipped in almost every children's book about him, and this one keeps it. There was no arithmetic in existence that could handle something whose speed is changing at every instant, so he invented one. Not applied one. Invented one. The book names it, calculus, without trying to teach it, which is the correct call. What your child should take away is that sometimes the tool does not exist yet and the job is to build the tool.
There is a fifth thing worth noticing if the book carries it. He ground a mirror by hand and built a telescope that used a mirror instead of a lens, which gets around the coloured fringing that lenses put around everything. His own work on light is what explained why lenses do that. The theory and the instrument are the same story, and that is a rare loop to see in a book at this level.
Depth, honestly: nothing is derived, and the laws of motion get a page rather than a chapter. But the claims are stated correctly and the prism sequence is explained properly, which is more than most.
The child it lands with
The taker-apart. The one whose screwdriver you keep confiscating, who has had the back off the remote and the wheels off something. Newton ground his own lenses and built his own instruments, and that child will notice.
The other one, and it matters more: the child who is difficult with people. Newton was cold, secretive, quick to take offence and slow to let go of anything. The book does not pretend he was warm. For a kid who has worked out that they do not fit easily with other kids, meeting somebody who changed the world and was still hard work at dinner is not nothing.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the prism, and do not just talk about it. Do it.
A glass prism costs a few dollars. A clear glass of water on a windowsill in a low sun will do at a pinch. Make the band of colours first, and let your child enjoy that for a minute, because that part is genuinely lovely and it is also the part everybody stops at.
Then ask the real question. Where did those colours come from? If your child says the glass made them, which is what nearly everyone says and what nearly everyone believed before Newton, you have the whole experiment sitting in front of you. So how would you find out? What would you have to do to catch the glass in the act?
That is a windowsill, an afternoon, and a four hundred year old piece of reasoning your child worked out most of by themselves.
What to know going in
Three things, and the first one is about the apple.
The apple story is in the book, it will be the bit your child remembers, and it is a story about a question arriving, not an answer. No apple ever contained the answer. The answer took years of mathematics that had to be built from nothing first. Left alone, the apple teaches a child that science is a lightning strike that hits clever people, which is exactly backwards and is the standing weakness of this whole genre. Say so out loud when you reach it, and the book gets better.
Second, the man. Newton was not pleasant, and the book is honest about it. He carried a long and vicious fight with another mathematician over who had invented calculus first, and he did not fight it fairly. His later years were spent running the national mint and hunting down counterfeiters, and the punishments for that crime at the time were severe. None of this is dwelt on and none of it is hidden.
Third, his childhood was hard. His father was dead before he was born and his mother left him with his grandmother while he was small. The book states it plainly rather than sitting in it, but a child who has lost somebody may feel it more than the page seems to intend.
Where to get it
It is $6.99 at Who Was Isaac Newton?. Buy a cheap glass prism at the same time. That is the whole recommendation and I am not going to dress it up: this is a perfectly decent paperback on its own, and it is a completely different book if the thing it describes is sitting on your windowsill throwing colours across the wall while your child reads about the man who worked out where they came from.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Who Was Neil Armstrong? The Pilot Before the Footprint
Who Was Neil Armstrong? by Roberta Edwards
Grade 3 to 6
Emi and the Rhino Scientist: How One Calf Happened
Emi and the Rhino Scientist by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
