I think you are doing the man a disservice summarising him in such a way.
His interest in unorthodox/heretical religion was at least since he was at university. He spent a significant amount of time on alchemy.
Newton was the President of the Royal Society for over two decades, an MP for a similar amount of time which I would think required a lot of interpersonal relationships and socialising.
He seemed to get along well with family who cared with and lived with him and described him as loving.
The traits of holding grudges and raging were probably as common in academia then as they are today (tech is benign in comparison), but are otherwise sociable and genuinely trying to be good, albeit flawed, people.
He made numerous statements of modesty, the most famous being "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This has, IMHO, been unfairly reinterpreted in recent times as being a insult to a rival rather than taken at face value.
If every comment, action, HN comment, tweet etc. of any person's entire life was interpreted in the least charitable light we would all be recorded in history as being as vile as you describe him.
I think at the end of the day he was just a gifted flawed human.
> I think at the end of the day he was just a gifted flawed human.
And what gifts !
Imagine anyone doing Principia at an age of 24 (the book was published much later, but he had the results by then).
He would have been notable even if he had borrowed an established discipline of calculus to elaborate it's Physical consequences. No he had to develop it himself first and double check the results by translating that into geometry, into power series to be sure they are correct.
Einstein and Newton are often spoken of in the same breath, but by sheer body of work it seems a no-contest to me. Einstein had the luxury of being able to borrow tensor calculus, by then well formed. Perhaps the person who comes closest to Newton would be Archimedes, considering the time that Archimedes was doing his thing.
Everyone is flawed. But some people do significant harm to the people around them on a regular basis. That isn't erased just because they did a thing we like. Whitewashing the harms that "respected" people do is part of how the powerful get away with sexual assault or abuse of power. And if being a "flawed human" isn't so bad, then there also isn't anything wrong with pointing out those flaws, is there?
On the other hand, excusing, downplaying, or erasing those harms, should not be acceptable, because who decides who's worthy of having their history erased? Should we erase Stalin's past because he helped us win the war? Should we erase Churchill's starvation of millions of Indians because he helped us win the war? The point is not to obsess over good or bad, or call someone a "good person" or a "bad person". The point is to have a realistic perspective on real people, and not let hero-worship distort history or reality. We need realism and accountability now more than ever.
His childhood was quite emotionally traumatic. I can imagine severe abandonment wounds given his situation.
Not only would he have felt abandoned, when his mother quickly remarried after his father's death, he could actually see the distant steeple where her mother had to relocate after her marriage - source of affection and emotional connect just tantalizingly out of reach.
Newton - "the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple."
— Byron
A calculus fit to compute on,
White light and a head to drop fruit on,
A mind to absorb it,
And soar into orbit —
That's all that it takes to be Newton. — Gina Berkeley
Perhaps the person that did the most to raise our standard of living (by basically inventing modern science). I basically don't care about how miserable it would be to sit next to him on a long airplane ride (or carriage ride).
Executing counterfeiters is certainly distasteful to us today, but I find it less distasteful than ideologically motivated crimes by modern scientists such as Lakatos (one of my intellectual heroes who I find it difficult not to despise as a person).
