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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.
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.
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.
A Mind on Fire
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:
calculus, the mathematics of change, which is vital to our understanding of the world
around us
gravity
optics and the behavior of light
He did much of his work on these topics back home at Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth after
the Great Plague forced Cambridge colleges to close.
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:
“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.
Calculus
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 = mc2 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.
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.
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’s crucial 1672 experiment with two prisms. The result absolutely demolished competing
theories, such as the proposal that glass added the colors to sunlight.
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.
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets
could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent
and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other like
systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all
subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed
stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun.
ISAAC NEWTON
Moving On
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.