Recently on Cosmos they portrayed Isaac Newton as a struggling genius who was falsely accused by Robert Hooke of stealing his work(@21:30). The show portrayed Hooke as an ugly, self-serving man.
On Quite Interesting, a British panel show focused on trivia and facts, they claim that Isaac Newton was the "nasty" one with an ego that drove him to scrub Hooke from history.
Who is right? What was the real relationship between these men and their reputation among contemporaries? Both shows are seemingly credible, making the contrast in viewpoints stand out.
^*dangit, ^title ^should ^say ^"is ^the ^nasty"
I am not an expert on this conflict specifically (although I've read a lot about the Newton/Leibniz calculus affair), so this comment may very well get deleted, but I just wanted to point out that TV shows (yes, even Cosmos) edutain by constructing narratives and in the process they make necessary sacrifices of nuance.
That being said, from what I've read of Newton (again this is wrt Leibniz) both of the points of view you pointed out seem to ring true. There is no doubt that Newton was a genius, and deserves a lot of credit for advancing science and math, but it's also clear that he was arrogant and self-centered.
A lot of shows present great people in a way that glosses over their humanity and only focuses on their achievements and struggles, and presents them as being inextricably tied to their ideas. Newton was a genius, and his ideas were very influential in shaping modern mathematics, but he was also a pretty unpleasant and ruthless person.
I can't comment on Hooke but I suspect it's a similar situation. In the Newton/Leibnitz issue neither man was blameless, and they were both foundational figures in the field. But when the issue is presented on TV there isn't enough time to construct a complicated narrative like that, so they usually settle for something along the lines of 'Newton was first but Leibnitz did it better' or some variation thereof. The Newton/Hooke issue is likely similar.