"Alexander Pope wrote this epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton: ""Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."" To the above, Sir John Collings Squire added: ""It did not last: the devil, shouting 'Ho. Let ___ be' restored the status quo."" Whom did the devil add?"
Isaac Newton in popular culture God said "Let Newton be" and all was light. English poet J. C. Squire satirised this: It could not last; the Devil shouting "Ho! <br>Let Einstein be!" restored the "status quo". The following passage is from William Wordsworth's "The Prelude", in which he describes a marble statue of Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge: And from my pillow, looking forth by light<br> Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold<br> The antechapel where the statue stood<br> Of Newton with his prism and silent face,<br> The marble index of a mind for ever<br> Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone. Some atheists,
Isaac Newton to establish." English poet Alexander Pope wrote the famous epitaph: Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;<br> God said "Let Newton be" and all was light. Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Two writers think that the above quotation, written at a time when Newton and Hooke were in dispute over optical discoveries, was an oblique attack on Hooke (said to have been short and hunchbacked), rather than—or in addition to—a statement of modesty.