“The great synthesizer who alters the outlook of a generation, who suddenly produces a kaleidoscopic change in our vision of the world, is apt to be the most envied, feared, and hated man among his contemporaries. Almost by instinct they feel in him the seed of a new order; they sense, even as they anathematize him, the passing away of the sane, substantial world they have long inhabited. Such a man is a kind of lens or gathering point through which past thought gathers, is reorganized, and radiates outward again into new forms.”

—Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971. Sir Isaac Newton (see below) was such a man.