A new discovery from Armchair BEA: Freda’s Voice hosts a fun quick meme on Fridays — Friday 56: “share a bit of the book, from Page 56, and see if it suits your tastes.” She’s got over 25 participants today with little snippets from whatever book they chose. I’ve got The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick sitting on my desk because I finally finished it today and I’m trying to figure out where a review will fit on the blogging calendar.

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

On page 56…

Newton’s theological and alchemical writings went largely unexamined for two centuries after his death. In 1936, John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Newton’s notes at auction. He read aghast. Newton was not the first inhabitant of the modern world, Keynes declared, but “the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.”