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The Catholic Church saw these new ideas as a threat and opposed them vehemently. But a layer of society was enthusiastic of the new thinking, and in turn hated the Catholic Church to the extent that Newton, for example, believed that the Pope was the Antichrist.

When Newton went to Cambridge, it was at a pivotal point in the history of ideas and in a period that must have seemed fairly cataclysmic. The plague of 1666 had wiped out 100, 000 people in Britain. And this was followed by the Great Fire of London the next year. Which must have been followed by millions of people going there, that much of a summer *.

Newton probably wasn't helped by these distractions, and he only just scraped through a degree. But then he was free to develop his own theories, and he began by inventing a whole new school of mathematics called the calculus for working out the exact speed of an object.

Newton has spotted a flaw with the previous method. It was fine for working out that you travelled, say, 30 miles over the quarter of an hour, but no good for working out exactly how fast an object was travelling at any given moment. Now with Newton's method of calculus, mathematicians could calculate exactly how fast an object was going at any precise time.

The only trouble is: this requires loads of calculations. For example, one book about Newton says in introduction "Nothing in this book requires very difficult mathematics. " But then within 30 pages it says "A concentrated line of code emerges: bracket A plus B close bracket N equals A N plus N A N minus one B plus N bracket N minus one close bracket over two A N minus two B squared plus dot dot dot plus N B N minus one plus B N. " Not only that, but one of the twos has an exclamation mark after it. An exclamation mark after a solid number, what's that supposed to be? Is that a mathematical symbol or you're lacking a holiday postcard? Bracket over two . . . what about that?

Whereas Newton had his method for measuring exact speeds and acceleration, he became even more obsessive, spending his whole time in his office working on experiments. He was trying to find the answers to the problems posed by previous generations. For example, once it was established that the planets were moving, what was it that was moving them? The first attempt to answer this came from the philosopher Descartes, who refused to get off bed before 11 and often spent the day meditating inside a stove.

Descartes said that everything, even space, was made up from ether which when moved pushes the next thing along. It's believed that Newton was able to put his own theory after one of the most famous events in human history.