In the plague year of 1665, when England's Cambridge University was shut down due to the dread epidemic, a shy student used his leisure time to "experiment". On the farm at home in his ill-equipped room, young Isaac Newton made three discoveries which were to excite the world of science—and start him on an amazing career.

The fascinating story of the apple and gravity also came about during Newton's enforced absence from Cambridge. Only he could have related the apple's fall to the orbit of the moon—though he forgot to tell anyone of his discovery and it remained in notebooks for 20 years. Newton also experimented with beams of sunlight and laid the intricate foundation of spectrum analysis, so important to modern physics, chemistry and astronomy.

At the age of 24 he proved that the inverse square law accounted for the motion of the moon around the earth. So absorbed in his work that he took hardly time enough to sleep, Newton was a respected authority well before he reached thirty.

Honors came to Isaac Newton, even knighthood, but his unusual temperament made him oblivious to all but his work. Distracted, unmindful of physical comfort, he nevertheless completed his monumental Principia, sometimes called the most extraordinary creation of the human mind.

Edmund Halley, an impulsive and buoyant young astronomer, admired the older Newton and urged him to disregard the slights of detractors. Halley was to discover in Newton's work the key to laws defining comets. And the fascinating story of Halley's comet, which we will see again in 1986, is here told in full.

Here is the supreme "detective story"—a brilliant mind tracking down the mysteries of time and space and the movement of the heavens.

From the dust jacket of Michael Faraday: From Errand Boy to Master Physicist