Newton's depiction of the color wheel in Opticks
Newton's law of cooling holds that the rate at which an object will change temperature is directly proportional to the temperature difference between it \((T_{obj})\) and its environment \((T_{env}):\)
\[\frac{dT_{obj}}{dt} = k (T_{env} - T_{obj}).\]
If the environment remains at constant temperature, this implies that \(T_{obj}\) will asymptotically approach \(T_{env}:\)
\[T_{obj} = T_{env} + \big(T_{obj}(0) - T_{env}\big) e^{-kt},\]
which can be shown using differential equations .
A thermometer reading \(80^\circ F\) is taken outside. Five minutes later the thermometer reads \(60^\circ F\). After another 5 minutes it reads \(50^\circ F\).
What is the temperature outside \((\)in \(^\circ F)?\)
Assume that this process follows Newton's law of cooling.
In addition to his lasting scientific discoveries, Newton also investigated alchemy, the study of turning one element into another. While the techniques that Newton investigated led nowhere, alchemy was in a sense rediscovered in the form of nuclear physics. It is now strictly possible to turn lead into gold using a particle accelerator. However, at an estimated quadrillion dollars per ounce, it would be a poor financial choice [5] .
Newton was devoutly religious and would frequently study the Bible, attempting to make predictions based on its contents. He once wrote that the world would end no sooner than the year 2060 based on the Book of John [6] .
[1] Westfall, Richard. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. p. 143. 1983.
[2] Newton's Generalization of the Binomial Theorem . Retrieved from http://www.wwu.edu/teachingmathhistory/docs/psfile/newton1-student.pdf on February 22, 2016.
[3] Connor, Steve. The Core of Truth Behind Sir Newton's Apple. The Independent. January 17, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-core-of-truth-behind-sir-isaac-newtons-apple-1870915.html on February 22, 2016.
[4] Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Published December 17. 2007. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-physics/ on February 22, 2016.
[5] Matson, John. Fact Or Fiction?: Lead Can Be Turned Into Gold. Scientific American. January 31, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/ on February 22, 2016.
[6] Newton, Sir Isaac. Sir Isaac Newton's Daniel and the Apocalypse. 1733. Retrieved from http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/sir-isaac-newtons-daniel-and-the-apocalypse-1733/ on February 22, 2016.
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A short history of Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematician and physicist that helped invent and explain some of the most fundamental laws of science.
Bibliography.
Sir Isaac Newton contributed significantly to the field of science over his lifetime. He invented calculus and provided a clear understanding of optics. But his most significant work had to do with forces, and specifically with the development of a universal law of gravitation and his laws of motion .
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day to a poor farming family in Woolsthorpe, England, in 1642. At the time of Newton's birth England used the Julian calendar, however, when England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, his birthday became 4th January 1643.
Isaac Newton arrived in the world only a few months after his father, Isaac Newton Sr, had died. "The boy expected to live managing the farm in the place of the father he had never known," wrote James Gleick in "Isaac Newton" ( Vintage, 2004 ).
However, when it became clear a farming life was not for him, Newton attended Trinity College in Cambridge, England. "He did not know what he wanted to be or do, but it was not tend sheep or follow the plough and the dung cart," wrote Gleick. While there, he took an interest in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy .
After his graduation, he began to teach at the college and was appointed as the second Lucasian Chair there. Today, the chair is considered the most renowned academic chair in the world, held by the likes of Charles Babbage and Stephen Hawking .
In 1689, Newton was elected as a member of parliament for the university. In 1703, he was elected as president of the Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists that still exists today. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. He never married.
Newton's most famous work came with the publication of his " Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica " ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), generally called Principia. In it, he determined the three laws of motion for the universe .
Newton's first law describes how objects move at the same velocity unless an outside force acts upon them. (A force is something that causes or changes motion.) Thus, an object sitting on a table remains on the table until a force — the push of a hand, or gravity — acts upon it. Similarly, an object travels at the same speed unless it interacts with another force, such as friction.
His second law of motion provided a calculation for how forces interact. The law states that a force is equal to the change in the momentum (mass multiplied by velocity) per change in time. Therefore, when more force is applied to an object, its acceleration also increases, but when the mass of the object increases and the force remains constant, its acceleration decreases.
Newton's third law states that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If one body applies a force on a second, then the second body exerts a force of the same strength on the first, in the opposite direction.
From all of this, Newton calculated the universal law of gravitation. He found that as two bodies move farther away from one another, the gravitational attraction between them decreases by the inverse of the square of the distance. Thus, if the objects are twice as far apart, the gravitational force is only a fourth as strong; if they are three times as far apart, it is only a ninth of its previous power.
These laws helped scientists understand more about the motions of planets in the solar system , and of the moon around Earth.
Related: What makes Newton's laws work? Here's the simple trick.
A popular myth tells of an apple falling from a tree in Newton's garden, which brought Newton to an understanding of forces, particularly gravity. Whether the incident actually happened is unknown, but historians doubt the event — if it occurred — was the driving force in Newton's thought process.
The myth tells of Isaac Newton having returned to his family farm in Woolsthorpe, escaping Cambridge for a short time as it was dealing with a plague outbreak. As he sat in the farm's orchard, an apple fell from one of the trees (in some tellings it hit Newton on the head). Watching this happen, Newton began to consider the forces that meant the apple always fell directly towards the ground, beginning his examination of gravity.
One of the reasons that this story gained a foothold in popular understanding is that it is an anecdote Newton himself seems to have shared. "Toward the end of his life, Newton told the apple anecdote around four times, although it only became well known in the nineteenth century," wrote Patricia Fara, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, in a chapter of " Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science " (Harvard University Press, 2020).
However, it would be at least 20 years before Newton published his theories on gravity. It seems more likely that Newton used the story as a means of connecting the concept of gravity's impact on objects on Earth with its impact on objects in space for his contemporary audience.
The apple tree in question — known as the "Flower of Kent" — still blooms in the orchard of Woolsthorpe Manor, and is now a popular tourist attraction.
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While a student, Newton was forced to take a two-year hiatus when plague closed Trinity College. At home, he continued to work with optics, using a prism to separate white light, and became the first person to argue that white light was a mixture of many types of rays, rather than a single entity. He continued working with light and color over the next few years and published his findings in " Opticks " in 1704.
Disturbed by the problems with telescopes at the time, he invented the reflecting telescope, grinding the mirror and building the tube himself. Relying on a mirror rather than lenses, the telescope presented a sharper image than refracting telescopes at the time. Modern techniques have reduced the problems caused by lenses, but large telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope use mirrors.
As a student, Newton studied the most advanced mathematical texts of his time. While on hiatus, he continued to study mathematics, laying the ground for differential and integral calculus. He united many techniques that had previously been considered separately, such as finding areas, tangents, and the lengths of curves. He wrote De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum in 1671 but was unable to find a publisher.
Newton also established a cohesive scientific method, to be used across disciplines. Previous explorations of science varied depending on the field. Newton established a set format for experimentation still used today.
However, not all of Newton's ideas were quite as revolutionary. In P rincipia, Newton describes how rarefied vapor from comet tails is pulled into Earth's gravitational grasp and enables the movements of the planet's fluids along with the "most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us."
"Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica verita."
(Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.)
—Written in the margin of a notebook while a student at Cambridge. In Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 89.
"Genius is patience."
—The Homiletic Review, Vol. 83-84 (1922), Vol. 84, 290.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
—Letter to Robert Hooke (5 Feb 1675-6).In H. W. Turnbull (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 1, 1661-1675 (1959), Vol. 1, 416.
"I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy."
—Letter to Henry Oldenburg (18 Nov 1676). In H. W. Turnbull (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 1676-1687 (1960), Vol. 2, 182.
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
—First reported in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations and Characters, of Books and Men (1820), Vol. 1 of 1966 edn, sect. 1259, p. 462
"To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction."
— The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."
—'Fragments from a Treatise on Revelation". In Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974), 120.
Newton died in 1727 during his sleep at the age of 84. Although the cause of death is unknown, a 1979 study published by Newton's own Royal Society suggests mercury poisoning may have contributed to the decline of his physical and mental health. During the exhumation of his body, large amounts of mercury were found in the scientist's system, likely due to his work with alchemy. Newton conducted several experiments to convert base metals, such as mercury and copper into precious metals, such as gold and silver.
"In 1693 Newton suffered from insomnia and poor digestion; and he also wrote irrational letters to friends. Although most scholars have attributed Newton's breakdown to psychological factors, it is possible that mercury poisoning may have been the principal cause," wrote L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht " Mercury Poisoning: A probable cause of Isaac Newton's physical and mental ills: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 34. No. 1. " .
After his death, his body was moved to a more prominent place in Westminster Abbey. His white and grey marble monument stands in the nave of the Abbey's choir screen and boasts sculptures of Newton lounging surrounded by children using the many instruments, such as telescopes, associated with Newton's work. The inscription on the monument — originally written in Latin — reads:
" Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726. " The date of his death on his monument is given in the Julian calendar.
If you want to learn more about the impact of this celebrated scientist, then you should read about how Isaac Newton Changed the World . If you're wondering whether Newton's second law of motion works in space then an Astronaut has tested the theory out.
"Isaac Newton" by James Gleick (Vintage, 2004 )
" Mercury Poisoning: A probable cause of Isaac Newton's physical and mental ills: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 34. No. 1. " by L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht (July 1979)
" The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy " by Isaac Newton (Flame Tree Collections, 2020)
" Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science " edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (Harvard University Press, 2020)
" Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career " by Patricia Fara (Oxford University Press, 2021)
"Isaac Newton" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007)
"Isaac Newton" University of St Andrews (2000)
"Sir Isaac Newton" Westminster Abbey (2023)
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Isaac Netwon is synonymous with apples and gravity. He rose to become the most influential scientist of the 17th century, his ideas becoming the foundation of modern physics, after very humble beginnings. But first, the big question: Did an apple really fall on Newton's head and spur him to figure out gravity? Historians say there is likely no more than a grain of truth to the story.
Sir Isaac Newton was born, premature and tiny, in 1642 in Woolsthorpe, England. His father, wealthy but uneducated, died before Newton was born, and he ended up being raised by his grandmother after his mother remarried. It’s said he didn’t excel at school, but he ended up studying law at Trinity College Cambridge, part of Cambridge University. He worked as a servant to pay his bills. And he kept a journal about his ideas.
What got Newton interested in math? He bought a book on the subject and couldn't comprehend it. After getting his bachelor's degree in 1665; he studied math, physics, optics and astronomy on his own (Cambridge was closed for a couple of years due to the plague known as the Black Death). By 1666 he had completed his early work on his three laws of motion . Later he got his master's degree.
Later work focused on the diffraction of light (he used a prism to discover that white light is made of a spectrum of colors ) and the concepts he'd become known for: universal gravitation, centrifugal force, centripetal force, and the effects and characteristics of bodies in motion. His laws are still used by physics students today:
Newton said many things worth remembering, including these philosophical gems:
Newton once said that if he had achieved anything in his research, it was "by standing on the shoulders of giants ." The quote was prophetic. A couple of centuries later, Albert Einstein puzzled over how to reconcile Newton's law of gravity with special relativity, which after several years led to Einstein's theory of general relativity .
While he's best known for his work on gravity, Newton was a tinkerer, too, but more with ideas than physical inventions. He did invent reflecting lenses for telescopes, which produced clearer images in a smaller telescope compared with the refracting models of the time. In his later years, he developed anti-counterfeiting measures for coins, including the ridges you see on quarters today.
Among his biggest " inventions " was calculus. Yes, that's right. Mere math and algebra weren't enough to explain the ideas in his head, so he helped invent calculus (German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz is typically credited with developing it independently at about the same time).
It's said that Newton invented a cat door so his cats would stop scratching to get in, but the truth of that one is a bit sketchy.
He also conceived of an "orbital cannon" that would poke out of a huge mountain, up in space, and with just the right amount of gunpowder could put a cannonball into orbit. This was not something Newton actually imagined building, but rather a way to think about his theories.
Urged by astronomer Edmond Halley (who was studying his now-famous comet), Newton continued to study his notion of gravity and apply it to the motions of the Earth, sun and moon. It all led to his seminal work, published in 1687, called the "Principia" — considered by many as the greatest science book ever written.
Newton's research stopped in 1679 when he had a nervous breakdown. Later, recovered, he spoke out against King James II, who wanted only Roman Catholics to be in powerful government and academic positions. When James was later driven out of England, Newton was elected to Parliament. He had a second breakdown in 1693, then retired from research. Isaac Newton died in 1727.
Among his more eccentric pastimes, Newton also dabbled (or more than dabbled) in alchemy, also called chymistry, with some historians estimating that he wrote more than a million words of alchemical notes, according to curator of rare books at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, James Voelkel.
And in March 2016, researchers announced they had found bought a 17th-century alchemy manuscript written by Newton . The manuscript, which had been hidden in a private collection for decades and turned up at an auction at Bonhams, provided the recipe for "philosophic" mercury, which was considered a step in the process for concocting a mysterious substance known the philosopher's stone; this material was thought to have supernatural powers — the ability to turn any metal into gold and to grant immortality. The manuscript will be available online for enthusiasts to explore.
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Before Newton, standard telescopes provided magnification, but with drawbacks. Known as refracting telescopes, they used glass lenses that changed the direction of different colors at different angles. This caused “chromatic aberrations,” or fuzzy, out-of-focus areas around objects being viewed through the telescope.
After much tinkering and testing, including grinding his own lenses, Newton found a solution. He replaced the refracting lenses with mirrored ones, including a large, concave mirror to show the primary image and a smaller, flat, reflecting one, to display that image to the eye. Newton’s new “reflecting telescope” was more powerful than previous versions, and because he used the small mirror to bounce the image to the eye, he could build a much smaller, more practical telescope. In fact, his first model, which he built in 1668 and donated to England’s Royal Society, was just six inches long (some 10 times smaller than other telescopes of the era), but could magnify objects by 40x.
Newton’s simple telescope design is still used today, by both backyard astronomers and NASA scientists.
The next time you look up at a rainbow in the sky, you can thank Newton for helping us first understand and identify its seven colors. He began working on his studies of light and color even before creating the reflecting telescope, although he presented much of his evidence several years later, in his 1704 book, Opticks .
Before Newton, scientists primarily adhered to ancient theories on color, including those of Aristotle , who believed that all colors came from lightness (white) and darkness (black). Some even believed that the colors of the rainbow were formed by rainwater that colored the sky’s rays. Newton disagreed. He performed a seemingly endless series of experiments to prove his theories.
Working in his darkened room, he directed white light through a crystal prism on a wall, which separated into the seven colors we now know as the color spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). Scientists already knew many of these colors existed, but they believed that the prism itself transformed white light into these colors. But when Newton refracted these same colors back onto another prism, they formed into a white light, proving that white light (and sunlight) was actually a combination of all the colors of the rainbow.
In 1687, Newton published one of the most important scientific books in history, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica , commonly known as the Principa . It was in this work that he first laid out his three laws of motion.
The law of inertia states that at rest or in motion will remain at rest or in motion unless it’s acted upon by an external force. So, with this law, Newton helps us explain why a car will stop when it hits a wall, but the human bodies within the car will keep moving at the same, constant speed they had been until the bodies hit an external force, like a dashboard or airbag. It also explains why an object thrown in space is likely to continue at the same speed on the same path for infinity unless it comes into another object that exerts force to slow it down or change direction.
You can see an example of his second law of acceleration when you ride a bicycle. In his equation that force equals mass times acceleration, or F=ma , your pedaling of a bicycle creates the force necessary to accelerate. Newton’s law also explains why larger or heavier objects require more force to move or alter them, and why hitting a small object with a baseball bat would produce more damage than hitting a large object with that same bat.
His third law of action and reaction creates a simple symmetry to the understanding of the world around us: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you sit in a chair, you are exerting force down upon the chair, but the chair is exerting equal force to keep you upright. And when a rocket is launched into space, it’s thanks to the backward force of the rocket upon gas and the forward thrust of the gas on the rocket.
The Principa also contained some of Newton’s first published works on the motion of the planets and gravity. According to a popular legend, a young Newton was sitting beneath a tree on his family’s farm when the falling of an apple inspired one of his most famous theories. It’s impossible to know if this is true (and Newton himself only began telling the story as an older man), but is a helpful story to explain the science behind gravity. It also remained the basis of classical mechanics until Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Newton worked out that if the force of gravity pulled the apple from the tree, then it was also possible for gravity to exert its pull on objects much, much further away. Newton’s theory helped prove that all objects, as small as an apple and as large as a planet, are subject to gravity. Gravity helped keep the planets rotating around the sun and creates the ebbs and flows of rivers and tides. Newton’s law also states that larger bodies with heavier masses exert more gravitational pull, which is why those who walked on the much smaller moon experienced a sense of weightlessness, as it had a smaller gravitational pull.
To help explain his theories of gravity and motion, Newton helped create a new, specialized form of mathematics. Originally known as “fluxions,” and now calculus, it charted the constantly changing and variable state of nature (like force and acceleration), in a way that existing algebra and geometry could not. Calculus may have been the bane of many a high school and college student, but it has proved invaluable to centuries of mathematicians, engineers and scientists.
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Sir Isaac Newton (Jan. 4, 1643–March 31, 1727) was a superstar of physics, math, and astronomy even in his own time. He occupied the chair of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England, the same role later filled, centuries later, by Stephen Hawking . Newton conceived of several laws of motion , influential mathematical principals which, to this day, scientists use to explain how the universe works.
Newton was born in 1642 in a manor house in Lincolnshire, England. His father had died two months before his birth. When Newton was 3 his mother remarried and he remained with his grandmother. He was not interested in the family farm, so he was sent to Cambridge University to study.
Newton was born just a short time after the death of Galileo , one of the greatest scientists of all time. Galileo had proved that the planets revolve around the sun, not the earth as people thought at the time. Newton was very interested in the discoveries of Galileo and others. Newton thought the universe worked like a machine and that a few simple laws governed it. Like Galileo, he realized that mathematics was the way to explain and prove those laws.
Newton formulated laws of motion and gravitation. These laws are math formulas that explain how objects move when a force acts on them. Newton published his most famous book, "Principia," in 1687 while he was a mathematics professor at Trinity College in Cambridge. In "Principia," Newton explained three basic laws that govern the way objects move. He also described his theory of gravity, the force that causes things to fall down. Newton then used his laws to show that the planets revolve around the suns in orbits that are oval, not round.
The three laws are often called Newton’s Laws. The first law states that an object that is not being pushed or pulled by some force will stay still or will keep moving in a straight line at a steady speed. For example, if someone is riding a bike and jumps off before the bike is stopped, what happens? The bike continues on until it falls over. The tendency of an object to remain still or keep moving in a straight line at a steady speed is called inertia.
The second law explains how a force acts on an object. An object accelerates in the direction the force is moving it. If someone gets on a bike and pushes the pedals forward, the bike will begin to move. If someone gives the bike a push from behind, the bike will speed up. If the rider pushes back on the pedals, the bike will slow down. If the rider turns the handlebars, the bike will change direction.
The third law states that if an object is pushed or pulled, it will push or pull equally in the opposite direction. If someone lifts a heavy box, they use force to push it up. The box is heavy because it is producing an equal force downward on the lifter’s arms. The weight is transferred through the lifter’s legs to the floor. The floor also presses upward with an equal force. If the floor pushed back with less force, the person lifting the box would fall through the floor. If it pushed back with more force, the lifter would fly up in the air.
When most people think of Newton, they think of him sitting under an apple tree observing an apple fall to the ground. When he saw the apple fall, Newton began to think about a specific kind of motion called gravity. Newton understood that gravity was a force of attraction between two objects. He also understood that an object with more matter or mass exerted the greater force or pulled smaller objects toward it. That meant that the large mass of the Earth pulled objects toward it. That is why the apple fell down instead of up and why people don’t float in the air.
He also thought that maybe gravity was not just limited to the Earth and the objects on the earth. What if gravity extended to the Moon and beyond? Newton calculated the force needed to keep the Moon moving around the earth. Then he compared it with the force that made the apple fall downward. After allowing for the fact that the Moon is much farther from the Earth and has a much greater mass, he discovered that the forces were the same and that the Moon is also held in orbit around Earth by the pull of earth’s gravity.
Newton moved to London in 1696 to accept the position of warden of the Royal Mint. For many years afterward, he argued with Robert Hooke over who had actually discovered the connection between elliptical orbits and the inverse square law, a dispute that ended only with Hooke's death in 1703.
In 1705, Queen Anne bestowed a knighthood upon Newton, and thereafter he was known as Sir Isaac Newton. He continued his work, particularly in mathematics. This led to another dispute in 1709, this time with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. They both quarreled over which of them had invented calculus.
One reason for Newton's disputes with other scientists was his overwhelming fear of criticism, which led him to write, but then postpone publication of, his brilliant articles until after another scientist created similar work. Besides his earlier writings, "De Analysi" (which didn't see publication until 1711) and "Principia" (published in 1687), Newton's publications included "Optics" (published in 1704), "The Universal Arithmetic" (published in 1707), the "Lectiones Opticae" (published in 1729), the "Method of Fluxions" (published in 1736), and the "Geometrica Analytica" (printed in 1779).
On March 20, 1727, Newton died near London. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to receive this honor.
Newton’s calculations changed the way people understood the universe. Prior to Newton, no one had been able to explain why the planets stayed in their orbits. What held them in place? People had thought that the planets were held in place by an invisible shield. Newton proved that they were held in place by the sun’s gravity and that the force of gravity was affected by distance and mass. While he was not the first person to understand that the orbit of a planet was elongated like an oval, he was the first to explain how it worked.
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Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest physicist who has ever lived. He and Albert Einstein are almost equally matched contenders for this title.
Each of these great scientists produced dramatic and startling transformations in the physical laws we believe our universe obeys, changing the way we understand and relate to the world around us.
Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643 in the tiny village of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England.
His father, whose name was also Isaac Newton, was a farmer who died before Isaac Junior was born. Although comfortable financially, his father could not read or write.
His mother, Hannah Ayscough, married a churchman when Newton was three years old.
Newton disliked his mother’s new husband and did not join their household, living instead with his mother’s mother, Margery Ayscough.
His resentment of his mother and stepfather’s new life did not subside with time; as a teenager he threatened to burn their house down!
Beginning at age 12, Newton attended The King’s School, Grantham, where he was taught the classics, but no science or mathematics. When he was 17, his mother stopped his schooling so that he could become a farmer. Fortunately for the future of science Newton found he had neither aptitude nor liking for farming; his mother allowed him to return to school, where he finished as top student.
In June 1661, age 18, Newton began studying for a law degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, earning money as a personal servant to wealthier students.
By the time he was a third-year student he was spending much of his time studying mathematics and natural philosophy (today we call it physics). He was also fascinated by alchemy, which is now categorized as a pseudoscience.
His natural philosophy lecturers based their courses on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas from Ancient Greek times. This was despite the fact that 25 years earlier, in 1638, Galileo Galilei had established a new scientific basis for the physics of motion with his masterpiece Two New Sciences .
Newton began to disregard the material taught at his college, preferring to study the recent (and more scientifically correct) works of Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, and Kepler. He wrote:
Reading the works of these great scientists, Newton grew more ambitious about making his own discoveries. While still working part-time as a servant, he wrote a note to himself. In it he posed questions not yet been answered by science. These included questions about gravity, the nature of light, the nature of color and vision, and atoms.
After three years at Cambridge, he won a four-year scholarship. This allowed him to give up working as a servant and devote his time fully to academic studies.
In 1665, at age 22, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton made his first major discovery: this was in mathematics, where he discovered the generalized binomial theorem. He was awarded his B.A. degree in the same year.
By now his mind was ablaze with new ideas. He began making significant progress in three distinct fields – he would make some of his most profound discoveries in these fields:
He did much of his work on these topics back home at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth after the Great Plague forced Cambridge colleges to close.
At age 24, in 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge, where events moved quickly.
First he was elected as a fellow of Trinity College.
A year later, in 1668, he was awarded an M.A. degree.
A year after that, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Isaac Barrow, resigned and Newton was appointed as his replacement; he was just 26 years old. Barrow, who had recommended Newton to succeed him, said of him:
Achievements in brief.
Isaac Newton, who was largely self-taught in mathematics and physics:
Newton revealed his laws of motion and gravitation in his book the Principia . Just as few people at first could understand Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, few people understood the Principia . When Newton walked past them one day, one student remarked to another:
“There goes a man who has written a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.”
Newton’s ideas were spread by the small number of people who understood the Principia , and who were able to develop and convey its message in more accessible ways: people including Colin Maclaurin, Leonhard Euler , Joseph Louis Lagrange, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Willem Jacob’s Gravesande, William Whiston, John Theophilus Desaguliers, and David Gregory.
Newton was the first person to fully develop calculus. Calculus is the mathematics of change. Modern physics and physical chemistry would be impossible without it. Other academic disciplines such as biology and economics also rely heavily on calculus for analysis.
In his development of calculus Newton was influenced by Pierre de Fermat , who had shown specific examples in which calculus-like methods could be used. Newton was able to build on Fermat’s work and generalize calculus. Newton wrote that he had been guided by:
From Newton’s fertile mind came the ideas that we now call differential calculus, integral calculus, and differential equations.
Soon after Newton generalized calculus, Gottfried Leibniz achieved the same result. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.
He told people that seeing the apple’s fall made him wonder why it fell in a straight line towards the center of our planet rather than moving upwards or sideways.
Ultimately, he realized and proved that the force behind the apple’s fall also causes the moon to orbit the earth; and comets, the earth and other planets to orbit the sun. The force is felt throughout the universe, so Newton called it Universal Gravitation . In a nutshell, it says that mass attracts mass.
Newton discovered the equation that allows us to calculate the force of gravity between two objects.
Most people don’t like equations much: E = mc 2 is as much as they can stand, but, for the record, here’s Newton’s equation:
Newton’s equation says that you can calculate the gravitational force attracting one object to another by multiplying the masses of the two objects by the gravitational constant and dividing by the square of the distance between the objects’ centers.
Dividing by distance squared means Newton’s Law is an inverse-square law .
Newton proved mathematically that any object moving in space affected by an inverse-square law will follow a path in the shape of one of the conic sections, the shapes which fascinated Archimedes and other Ancient Greek mathematicians.
For example, planets follow elliptical paths; while comets follow elliptical, or parabolic or hyperbolic paths.
And that’s it! Newton showed everyone how, if they wished to, they could calculate the force of gravity between things such as people, planets, stars, and apples.
Third Law: The rocket flies because of the upward thrust it gets as a reaction to the high speed gas particles pushing downward from its engines.
First law: Objects remain stationary or move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force. This law was actually first stated by Galileo , whose influence Newton mentions several times in the Principia .
Second law: The force F on an object is equal to its mass m multiplied by its acceleration: F = ma.
Third law: When one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts a force equal in size and opposite in direction on the first object.
With Newton’s calculus, universal gravitation, and laws of motion, you have enough knowledge at your fingertips to plot a course for a spaceship to any planet in our solar system or even another solar system!
And Isaac Newton figured it all out about 300 years before we actually did send a spaceship to the planets.
A Word of Caution Newton’s laws become increasingly inaccurate when speeds reach substantial fractions of the speed of light, or when the force of gravity is very large. Einstein’s equations are then required to produce reliable results.
Newton was not just clever with his mind. He was also skilled in experimental methods and working with equipment.
He built the world’s first reflecting telescope. This telescope focuses light from a curved mirror. Reflecting telescopes have several advantages over earlier telescopes including:
Newton also used glass prisms to establish that white light is not a simple phenomenon. He proved that it is made up of all of the colors of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.
Newton’s crucial 1672 experiment with two prisms. The result absolutely demolished competing theories, such as the proposal that glass added the colors to sunlight.
Although he is one of the greatest scientists in history, Newton’s laboratory papers show he probably devoted more of his time to alchemy than to anything we would recognize as science.
The Alchemist by Joseph Wright depicts Hennig Brand’s discovery of phosphorus. Brand was actually trying to discover the Philosophers’ Stone. Newton seems to have put more of his hours into alchemy than mathematics and physics.
Not surprisingly, Newton never found the Philosophers’ Stone. Given his towering contributions to real science, all we can do is wonder what else he might have achieved if he had not been such a passionate alchemist.
Despite his brilliance, Newton was a very insecure man: most historians trace this back to his childhood family difficulties.
Newton published very little work until his later years, because in his early years as a scientist, Robert Hooke disagreed strongly with a scientific paper Newton published. Newton took criticism of his work in a very personal way and developed a lifelong loathing for Hooke.
His lack of published work also caused a huge issue when Gottfried Leibniz starting publishing his own version of calculus. Newton was already a master of this branch of mathematics, but had published very little of it. Again Newton’s insecurity got the better of him, and he angrily accused Leibniz of stealing his work. The pros and cons of each man’s case have long been debated by historians. Most mathematicians regard Newton and Leibniz as equally responsible for the development of calculus.
Newton was a very religious man with somewhat unorthodox Protestant Christian views. He spent a great deal of time and wrote a large body of private works concerned with theology and his interpretation of the Bible.
His scientific work had revealed a universe that obeyed logical mathematical laws. He had also discovered that starlight and sunlight are the same, and he speculated that stars could have their own systems of planets orbiting them. He believed such a system could only have been made by God.
In 1696, Newton was appointed as a Warden of the Royal Mint. In 1700, he became Master of the Mint, leaving Cambridge for London, and more or less ending his scientific discovery work. He took his new role very seriously, going out into London’s taverns in disguise gathering evidence against counterfeiters.
In 1703, he was elected President of the Royal Society.
In 1705, he was knighted, becoming Sir Isaac Newton.
Isaac Newton died on March 31, 1727, age 84. He had never married and had no children.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, London.
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Isaac newton.
Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.
... setting my heart on money, learning, and pleasure more than Thee ...
... changed his mind when he read that parallelograms upon the same base and between the same parallels are equal.
Thus Wallis doth it, but it may be done thus ...
[ Newton ] brought me the other day some papers, wherein he set down methods of calculating the dimensions of magnitudes like that of Mr Mercator concerning the hyperbola, but very general; as also of resolving equations; which I suppose will please you; and I shall send you them by the next.
... having no more acquaintance with him I did not think it becoming to urge him to communicate anything.
... that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall ...
After his 1679 correspondence with Hooke , Newton, by his own account, found a proof that Kepler's areal law was a consequence of centripetal forces, and he also showed that if the orbital curve is an ellipse under the action of central forces then the radial dependence of the force is inverse square with the distance from the centre.
... asked Newton what orbit a body followed under an inverse square force, and Newton replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. However in 'De Motu..' he only gave a proof of the converse theorem that if the orbit is an ellipse the force is inverse square. The proof that inverse square forces imply conic section orbits is sketched in Cor. 1 to Prop. 13 in Book 1 of the second and third editions of the 'Principia', but not in the first edition.
... all matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Be courageous and steady to the Laws and you cannot fail.
Newton was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.
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Honours awarded to Isaac Newton
Dec 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England |
March 20, 1727 (at age 84), in Kensington, Middlesex, England, Great Britain |
English |
Newton’s method for estimating roots of a function |
Isaac Newton is one of the most celebrated and recognized mathematicians and physicists in world history. Known for his discovery of gravity, Newton remains to this day a very influential figure from the Age of Enlightenment.
Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire on Christmas Day of 1642. His father died before Newton was born and his mother remarried. Newton’s early years were spent with his maternal grandmother. The time he did spend with his mother was very tumultuous since he did not like his stepfather at all.
Until he was 17 years old, Newton was a student at The King’s School in Grantham. He did not leave the school on pleasant terms. Reunited with his mother, Newton tried his hand at being a farmer. This was a very unhappy with his new profession and he would re-enroll in school. Newton became a standout in school and scored very high in his studies.
Newton became a student at Trinity College in Cambridge where he studied the official curriculum based on Aristotle. He also expanded his learning to include the study of the great philosopher – René Descartes . He invested a great deal of time pursuing his love for astronomy and he spent time learning about the lives and work of many famous astronomers.
One of Newton’s best known early achievements while in school was his discovery of the generalized binomial theorem. This theorem set the stage for an expanded mathematical system which would be advanced calculus. Ironically, he was not considered all that great of a student when he was enrolled in college. When he graduated, he invested a great deal of time in self-study. During this period of self-study, he focused on physics, calculus, and the laws of gravity.
Newton went on to publish a very influential work titled The Principia and it centered on infinitesimal calculus in geometric form. His work on cubicle curves in relation to the Euclidean plane was quite revolutionary for its time. As with his other studies, the work set the stage for amazing inroads in math and science when others built upon the groundwork he created.
Newton made many discoveries in areas related to optics, the theory of finite differences, and innovative applications in geometry. Based on his very unique work, he received a great deal of acclaim. This led to him being named Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. Traditionally, a person who was awarded such a position had to become a priest. Newton was given an exemption from that rule.
In his later years, Newton invested a significant amount of time writing about the subject of religion and he even studied alchemy. Financial hardships, however, plagued him later in life.
Newton passed away on March 20, 1727. He died unmarried and had no children.
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Sir Isaac Newton
Apart from discovering the cause of the fall of an apple from a tree, that is, the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the most brilliant and greatest physicists of all time. He shaped dramatic and surprising discoveries in the laws of physics that we believe our universe obeys, and hence it changed the way we appreciate and relate to the world around us.
About sir isaac newton, sir isaac newton’s education, awards and achievements, some achievements of isaac newton in brief.
Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in a small village of England called Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. He was an English physicist and mathematician, and one of the important thinkers in the Scientific Revolution.
He discovered the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further laid the foundation of modern physical optics. His famous three laws of Motion in mechanics and the formulation of the laws of gravitation completely changed the track of physics across the globe. He was the originator of calculus in mathematics. A scientist like him is considered an excellent gift by nature to the world of physics.
Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem. He was bestowed with his B.A. degree in the same year.
Isaac Newton held numerous positions throughout his life. In 1671, he was invited to join the Royal Society of London after developing a new and enhanced version of the reflecting telescope.
He was later elected President of the Royal Society (1703). Sir Isaac Newton ran for a seat in Parliament in 1689. He won the election and became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He was also appointed as a Warden of the Mint in 1969. Due to his exemplary work and dedication to the mint, he was chosen Master of the Mint in 1700. After being knighted in 1705, he was known as “Sir Isaac Newton.”
His mind was ablaze with original ideas. He made significant progress in three distinct fields – with some of the most profound discoveries in:
Sir Isaac Newton was the first individual to develop calculus. Modern physics and physical chemistry are almost impossible without calculus, as it is the mathematics of change.
The idea of differentiating calculus into differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equations came from Newton’s fertile mind. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.
The famous apple that he saw falling from a tree led him to discover the force of gravitation and its laws. Ultimately, he realised that the pressure causing the apple’s fall is responsible for the moon to orbit the earth, as well as comets and other planets to revolve around the sun. The force can be felt throughout the universe. Hence, Newton called it the Universal Law of Gravitation .
Newton discovered the equation that allows us to compute the force of gravity between two objects.
Sir Isaac Newton also accomplished himself in experimental methods and working with equipment. He built the world’s first reflecting telescope . This telescope focuses all the light from a curved mirror. Here are some advantages of reflecting telescopes from optics and light –
Isaac Newton also proved that white light is not a simple phenomenon with the help of a glass prism. He confirmed that it is made up of all of the colours of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.
How did newton discover gravity.
Seeing an apple fall from the tree made him think about the forces of nature.
Calculus is the study of differentiation and integration. Calculus explains the changes in values, on a small and large scale, related to any function.
It’s a telescope invented by Newton that uses mirrors to collect and focus the light towards the eyepiece.
Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are:
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Dec 25, 1642 in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England |
Mar 20, 1727 (at age 84) in Kensington, Middlesex, England, Great Britain |
English (later British) |
Newtonian mechanics, Principia Newton’s method, Universal gravitation, Optics Binomial series, Infinitesimal calculus |
Isaac Newton is considered one of the greatest scientists and physicists who ever lived. Newton invented a new kind of mathematics called calculus, discovered how light and color work and showed how gravity functions in the universe. Remarkably, he made these discoveries over a period of 18 months, between 1665 and 1667.
Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, England on December 25th, 1642. He went to Grantham grammar school, but he was more interested in making mechanical models than he was in studying and was considered a poor student. His boyish hobbies led to a small windmill that could grind corn and wheat, a water clock and a sundial. Newton left school when he was 14 because his widowed mother needed him to help with their farm. He was no better at this than he was at being a schoolboy and he was eventually sent back to school.
Newton entered Trinity College at Cambridge University in 1661. Here again he was a mediocre student. He left school in 1665 without distinction, but returned in 1667 as a fellow. In 1669 he became professor of mathematics and gave lectures on geometry, astronomy, optics and mathematics. He later quit and went to work for the government and was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1672.
Newton claimed that he began to think about a theory of gravity while he was drinking tea one afternoon and saw an apple fall from a tree. This made him realize that the same force that made the apple fall is what keeps the moon in its orbit. He extrapolated from this to realize that gravity makes every pair of bodies in the universe attracted each other. He also learned that the strength of gravity depends on the amount of matter in the bodies being attracted and the distance between the bodies.
Newton also showed why the apple might fall straight to earth while the moon moved in a circle around the earth. He showed that the moon was falling constantly toward the earth and if it moved in a straight line, it would fly out of its orbit.
In 1684, Edmund Halley, the English astronomer, urged Newton to publish his findings on gravity. In 1687 Newton’s discoveries were published in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica . Even today this book is considered one of the great scientific books of all time.
In 1704, Newton published Optiks . In this book, he explained why bodies appear to be colored. This laid the foundation for spectrum analysis, which allows scientists to determine the temperature, chemical composition and speed of bodies like distant stars. Newton also discovered that sunlight is a mix of light of all colors while passing sunlight through a prism.
Interestingly, Newton did not spend too much time studying math, physics or astronomy. He was fascinated by alchemy and theology, and was so sensitive to criticism that he had to be urged by his friends to even publish his work. Yet, Albert Einstein claimed that he could not have done what he did without Newton’s discoveries.
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Controversy, influence of the hermetic tradition.
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Newton was elected to a fellowship in Trinity College in 1667, after the university reopened. Two years later, Isaac Barrow , Lucasian professor of mathematics , who had transmitted Newton’s De Analysi to John Collins in London , resigned the chair to devote himself to divinity and recommended Newton to succeed him. The professorship exempted Newton from the necessity of tutoring but imposed the duty of delivering an annual course of lectures. He chose the work he had done in optics as the initial topic; during the following three years (1670–72), his lectures developed the essay “Of Colours” into a form which was later revised to become Book One of his Opticks .
Beginning with Kepler’s Paralipomena in 1604, the study of optics had been a central activity of the Scientific Revolution . Descartes’s statement of the sine law of refraction , relating the angles of incidence and emergence at interfaces of the media through which light passes, had added a new mathematical regularity to the science of light, supporting the conviction that the universe is constructed according to mathematical regularities. Descartes had also made light central to the mechanical philosophy of nature; the reality of light, he argued, consists of motion transmitted through a material medium. Newton fully accepted the mechanical nature of light, although he chose the atomistic alternative and held that light consists of material corpuscles in motion. The corpuscular conception of light was always a speculative theory on the periphery of his optics, however. The core of Newton’s contribution had to do with colours . An ancient theory extending back at least to Aristotle held that a certain class of colour phenomena, such as the rainbow , arises from the modification of light, which appears white in its pristine form. Descartes had generalized this theory for all colours and translated it into mechanical imagery. Through a series of experiments performed in 1665 and 1666, in which the spectrum of a narrow beam was projected onto the wall of a darkened chamber, Newton denied the concept of modification and replaced it with that of analysis. Basically, he denied that light is simple and homogeneous—stating instead that it is complex and heterogeneous and that the phenomena of colours arise from the analysis of the heterogeneous mixture into its simple components. The ultimate source of Newton’s conviction that light is corpuscular was his recognition that individual rays of light have immutable properties; in his view, such properties imply immutable particles of matter. He held that individual rays (that is, particles of given size) excite sensations of individual colours when they strike the retina of the eye . He also concluded that rays refract at distinct angles—hence, the prismatic spectrum, a beam of heterogeneous rays, i.e., alike incident on one face of a prism , separated or analyzed by the refraction into its component parts—and that phenomena such as the rainbow are produced by refractive analysis. Because he believed that chromatic aberration could never be eliminated from lenses, Newton turned to reflecting telescopes ; he constructed the first ever built. The heterogeneity of light has been the foundation of physical optics since his time.
There is no evidence that the theory of colours, fully described by Newton in his inaugural lectures at Cambridge, made any impression, just as there is no evidence that aspects of his mathematics and the content of the Principia , also pronounced from the podium, made any impression. Rather, the theory of colours, like his later work, was transmitted to the world through the Royal Society of London, which had been organized in 1660. When Newton was appointed Lucasian professor, his name was probably unknown in the Royal Society; in 1671, however, they heard of his reflecting telescope and asked to see it. Pleased by their enthusiastic reception of the telescope and by his election to the society, Newton volunteered a paper on light and colours early in 1672. On the whole, the paper was also well received, although a few questions and some dissent were heard.
Among the most important dissenters to Newton’s paper was Robert Hooke , one of the leaders of the Royal Society who considered himself the master in optics and hence he wrote a condescending critique of the unknown parvenu. One can understand how the critique would have annoyed a normal man. The flaming rage it provoked, with the desire publicly to humiliate Hooke, however, bespoke the abnormal. Newton was unable rationally to confront criticism . Less than a year after submitting the paper, he was so unsettled by the give and take of honest discussion that he began to cut his ties, and he withdrew into virtual isolation.
In 1675, during a visit to London, Newton thought he heard Hooke accept his theory of colours. He was emboldened to bring forth a second paper, an examination of the colour phenomena in thin films , which was identical to most of Book Two as it later appeared in the Opticks . The purpose of the paper was to explain the colours of solid bodies by showing how light can be analyzed into its components by reflection as well as refraction . His explanation of the colours of bodies has not survived, but the paper was significant in demonstrating for the first time the existence of periodic optical phenomena. He discovered the concentric coloured rings in the thin film of air between a lens and a flat sheet of glass; the distance between these concentric rings ( Newton’s rings ) depends on the increasing thickness of the film of air. In 1704 Newton combined a revision of his optical lectures with the paper of 1675 and a small amount of additional material in his Opticks .
A second piece which Newton had sent with the paper of 1675 provoked new controversy. Entitled “An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light,” it was in fact a general system of nature. Hooke apparently claimed that Newton had stolen its content from him, and Newton boiled over again. The issue was quickly controlled, however, by an exchange of formal, excessively polite letters that fail to conceal the complete lack of warmth between the men.
Newton was also engaged in another exchange on his theory of colours with a circle of English Jesuits in Liège, perhaps the most revealing exchange of all. Although their objections were shallow, their contention that his experiments were mistaken lashed him into a fury. The correspondence dragged on until 1678, when a final shriek of rage from Newton, apparently accompanied by a complete nervous breakdown, was followed by silence. The death of his mother the following year completed his isolation. For six years he withdrew from intellectual commerce except when others initiated a correspondence, which he always broke off as quickly as possible.
During his time of isolation, Newton was greatly influenced by the Hermetic tradition with which he had been familiar since his undergraduate days. Newton, always somewhat interested in alchemy , now immersed himself in it, copying by hand treatise after treatise and collating them to interpret their arcane imagery. Under the influence of the Hermetic tradition, his conception of nature underwent a decisive change. Until that time, Newton had been a mechanical philosopher in the standard 17th-century style, explaining natural phenomena by the motions of particles of matter. Thus, he held that the physical reality of light is a stream of tiny corpuscles diverted from its course by the presence of denser or rarer media. He felt that the apparent attraction of tiny bits of paper to a piece of glass that has been rubbed with cloth results from an ethereal effluvium that streams out of the glass and carries the bits of paper back with it. This mechanical philosophy denied the possibility of action at a distance; as with static electricity , it explained apparent attractions away by means of invisible ethereal mechanisms. Newton’s “Hypothesis of Light” of 1675, with its universal ether , was a standard mechanical system of nature. Some phenomena, such as the capacity of chemicals to react only with certain others, puzzled him, however, and he spoke of a “secret principle” by which substances are “sociable” or “unsociable” with others. About 1679, Newton abandoned the ether and its invisible mechanisms and began to ascribe the puzzling phenomena—chemical affinities , the generation of heat in chemical reactions , surface tension in fluids, capillary action , the cohesion of bodies, and the like—to attractions and repulsions between particles of matter. More than 35 years later, in the second English edition of the Opticks , Newton accepted an ether again, although it was an ether that embodied the concept of action at a distance by positing a repulsion between its particles. The attractions and repulsions of Newton’s speculations were direct transpositions of the occult sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic philosophy—as mechanical philosophers never ceased to protest. Newton, however, regarded them as a modification of the mechanical philosophy that rendered it subject to exact mathematical treatment. As he conceived of them, attractions were quantitatively defined, and they offered a bridge to unite the two basic themes of 17th-century science—the mechanical tradition, which had dealt primarily with verbal mechanical imagery, and the Pythagorean tradition, which insisted on the mathematical nature of reality. Newton’s reconciliation through the concept of force was his ultimate contribution to science.
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Isaac Newton (born December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], 1727, London) was an English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and ...
Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician famous for his laws of physics. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. Search. 2024 Olympians;
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 - 20 March 1726/27 [a]) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. [7] He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ...
Isaac Newton: Early Life and Education. Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. The son of a farmer who died three months before he was born, Newton spent ...
Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is best known for having invented the calculus in the mid to late 1660s (most of a decade before Leibniz did so independently, and ultimately more influentially) and for having formulated the theory of universal gravity — the latter in his Principia, the single most important work in the transformation ...
Biography Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Issac Newton (1643- 1726) was an English mathematician, physicist and scientist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time, developing new laws of mechanics, gravity and laws of motion. His work Principia Mathematica ( 1687) laid the framework for the Scientific Revolution of the ...
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist widely regarded as the single most important figure in the Scientific Revolution for his three laws of motion and universal law of gravity. Newton's laws became a fundamental foundation of physics, while his discovery that white light is made up of a rainbow of colours revolutionised the field of optics.
Sir Isaac Newton, (born Jan. 4, 1643, Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died March 31, 1727, London), English physicist and mathematician. The son of a yeoman, he was raised by his grandmother. He was educated at Cambridge University (1661-65), where he discovered the work of René Descartes. His experiments passing sunlight through a prism ...
I INTRODUCTION. Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669.
Also Known As. Sir Isaac Newton. Born. January 4, 1643 • England. Died. March 31, 1727 (aged 84) • London • England. Notable Works. "Opticks" • "Principia" • "The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series". Subjects Of Study.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was one of the world's most famous and influential thinkers. He founded the fields of classical mechanics, optics and calculus, among other contributions to algebra and thermodynamics. His concept of a universal law--one that applies everywhere and to all things--set the bar of ambition for physicists since. Newton held the position of Lucasian Professor of ...
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day to a poor farming family in Woolsthorpe, England, in 1642. At the time of Newton's birth England used the Julian calendar, however, when England adopted the ...
He never knew his father Isaac, who had died months before he was born. Newton's own chances of survival seemed slim at the beginning. He was a premature and sickly infant that some thought ...
Isaac Newton laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students, in 1666. (Image credit: Library of Congress) Isaac Netwon is synonymous with apples and gravity.
One of the most influential scientists in history, Sir Isaac Newton's contributions to the fields of physics, mathematics, astronomy and chemistry helped usher in the Scientific Revolution. And ...
Biography of Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist. Sir Isaac Newton (Jan. 4, 1643-March 31, 1727) was a superstar of physics, math, and astronomy even in his own time. He occupied the chair of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England, the same role later filled, centuries later, by Stephen Hawking.
Fellow and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. At age 24, in 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge, where events moved quickly. First he was elected as a fellow of Trinity College. A year later, in 1668, he was awarded an M.A. degree. A year after that, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Isaac Barrow, resigned and Newton was ...
Biography Isaac Newton's life can be divided into three quite distinct periods.The first is his boyhood days from 1643 up to his appointment to a chair in 1669.The second period from 1669 to 1687 was the highly productive period in which he was Lucasian professor at Cambridge. The third period (nearly as long as the other two combined) saw Newton as a highly paid government official in London ...
Born: Dec 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England. Died: March 20, 1727 (at age 84), in Kensington, Middlesex, England, Great Britain. Nationality: English. Famous For: Newton's method for estimating roots of a function. Isaac Newton is one of the most celebrated and recognized mathematicians and physicists in world ...
Sir Isaac Newton's Education, Awards and Achievements. Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem.
Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is considered one of the greatest scientists and physicists who ever lived. Newton invented a new kind of mathematics called calculus, discovered how light and color work and showed how gravity functions in the universe. Remarkably, he made these discoveries over a period of 18 months, between 1665 and 1667.
Isaac Newton (4. jaanuar 1643 (25. detsember 1642 vkj) Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire - 31. märts (20. märts vkj) 1727 Kensington) oli inglise füüsik, matemaatik, astronoom, teoloog ja alkeemik, keda peetakse nüüdisfüüsika alusepanijaks.
Isaac Newton - Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy: Newton originally applied the idea of attractions and repulsions solely to the range of terrestrial phenomena mentioned in the preceding paragraph. But late in 1679, not long after he had embraced the concept, another application was suggested in a letter from Hooke, who was seeking to renew correspondence.
The Isaac Newton Telescope or INT is a 2.54 m (100 in) optical telescope run by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands since 1984.. Originally the INT was situated at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, England, which was the site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory after it moved away from Greenwich due to light pollution.
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, Anglaterra, 25 de desembre de 1642 - Kensington, Middlesex, Regne d'Anglaterra, 20 de març de 1727) [nota 1] [1] fou un físic, matemàtic, astrònom, teòleg i autor anglès (descrit en el seu temps com un «filòsof natural») i és reconegut com un dels més grans matemàtics i científics més influents de tots els temps i ...
Sir Isaac Newton [ˌaɪzək 'njuːtən] (* 25. Dezember 1642 jul. / 4. Januar 1643 greg. in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in Lincolnshire; † 20. März 1726 jul. / 31. März 1727 greg. (sic!) [1] in Kensington) war ein englischer Physiker, Astronom und Mathematiker an der Universität Cambridge und Leiter der Royal Mint.Wie erst später öffentlich bekannt wurde, beschäftigte er sich ...
Isaac Newton - Scientist, Physics, Mathematics: Newton was elected to a fellowship in Trinity College in 1667, after the university reopened. Two years later, Isaac Barrow, Lucasian professor of mathematics, who had transmitted Newton's De Analysi to John Collins in London, resigned the chair to devote himself to divinity and recommended Newton to succeed him.
Isaac Newton, โดย จอร์จ สมิธ; Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, โดย จอร์จ สมิธ; Newton's Philosophy, โดย แอนดรูว์ จาเนียค; Newton's views on space, time, and motion, โดย Robert Rynasiewicz; Newton's Castle Educational material