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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 2946821, member: 57463"]Newton versus the Counterfeiter is worth the time and easy to find. Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter: The  Unknown Detective Career of the WorldÆs Greatest Scientist takes you to London, 1699. Having been rebuilt only a generation before, following the Great Fire of 1666, the town is at once opulent and squalid, close and large. An award-winning video producer for PBS Nova, Levenson delivers a narrative that is rich with sensory adjectives. To be sure, this is creative non-fiction. Meeting a counterfeiter in a pub, "Newton swallowed his impatience." Whether he did or not is beyond assessment. The book is nonetheless factual. Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT, so it is no surprise that 150 footnotes and another 150 bibliographic entries support the story. Whether or not Newton's career as an investigator and prosecutor is "unknown" may also be putative. Certainly, numismatists have known of it, since Sir John Craig's works. (Sir John Craig was Deputy Master and Comptroller of the British Royal Mint.)<ul> <li>Newton at the Mint (Cambridge: University Press, 1946).</li> <li>"Isaac Newton: Crime Investigator," Nature 182, 149-152 (19 July 1958)</li> <li>"Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters." Notes and Records of the Royal Society 18), London: 1963.</li> </ul>[/QUOTE]