isaac newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP was an English physicist and mathematician .
11. Early life
Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643), at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. He was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. Born prematurely, he was a small child, his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19. Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them. Newtons mother had three children from her second marriage. Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, Newton never married.

From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The Kings School, Grantham which taught him Latin but no mathematics. He was removed from school, and by October 1659, he was to be found at Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth, where his mother, widowed for a second time, attempted to make a farmer of him. Newton hated farming. Henry Stokes, master at the Kings School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school so that he might complete his education. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top ranked student, distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the recommendation of his uncle Rev William Ayscough. He started as a subsizar paying his way by performing valets duties until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, which guaranteed him four more years until he would get his M.A. At that time, the colleges teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton supplemented with modern philosophers such as Descartes, and astronomers such as Galileo and Thomas Street, through whom he learned of Keplers work. He set down in his notebook a series of Quaestiones about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus. Soon after Newton had obtained his B.A. degree in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague. Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, Newtons private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation. In April 1667, he returned to Cambridge and in October was elected as a fellow of Trinity. Fellows were required to become ordained priests, although this was not enforced in the restoration years and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient. However, by 1675 the issue could not be avoided and by then his unconventional views stood in the way. Nevertheless, Newton managed to avoid it by means of a special permission from Charles II (see Middle years section below).His studies had impressed the Lucasian professor, Isaac Barrow, who was more anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity two years later), and in 1669, Newton succeeded him, only one year after he received his M.A.

12. Apple incident
Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree.Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity in any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the cartoon version that the apple actually hit Newtons head. Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newtons Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726.In similar terms, Voltaire wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.

It is known from his notebooks that Newton was grappling in the late 1660s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse square proportion, to the Moon, however it took him two decades to develop the full fledged theory. The question was not whether gravity existed, but whether it extended so far from Earth that it could also be the force holding the Moon to its orbit. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moons orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it universal gravitation.Various trees are claimed to be the apple tree which Newton describes. The Kings School, Grantham, claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmasters garden some years later. The staff of the [now] National Trust owned Woolsthorpe Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their gardens is the one described by Newton. A descendant of the original tree can be seen growing outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there. The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale can supply grafts from their tree, which appears identical to Flower of Kent, a coarse fleshed cooking variety.

13. Laws of motion
In the Principia, Newton gives the famous three laws of motion, stated here in modern form.Newtons First Law (also known as the Law of Inertia) states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force. The meaning of this law is the existence of reference frames (called inertial frames) where objects not acted upon by forces move in uniform motion (in particular, they may be at rest).Newtons Second Law states that an applied force, mathbf{F}, on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum, mathbf{p}, with time. Mathematically, this is expressed asSince the law applies only to systems of constant mass, m can be brought out of the derivative operator. By substitution using the definition of acceleration, the equation can be written in the iconic formThe first and second laws represent a break with the physics of Aristotle, in which it was believed that a force was necessary in order to maintain motion. They state that a force is only needed in order to change an objects state of motion. The SI unit of force is the newton, named in Newtons honour.

Newtons Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that any force exerted onto an object has a counterpart force that is exerted in the opposite direction back onto the first object. A common example is of two ice skaters pushing against each other and sliding apart in opposite directions. Another example is the recoil of a firearm, in which the force propelling the bullet is exerted equally back onto the gun and is felt by the shooter. Since the objects in question do not necessarily have the same mass, the resulting acceleration of the two objects can be different (as in the case of firearm recoil).Unlike Aristotles, Newtons physics is meant to be universal. For example, the second law applies both to a planet and to a falling stone.The vector nature of the second law addresses the geometrical relationship between the direction of the force and the manner in which the objects momentum changes. Before Newton, it had typically been assumed that a planet orbiting the Sun would need a forward force to keep it moving. Newton showed instead that all that was needed was an inward attraction from the Sun. Even many decades after the publication of the Principia, this counterintuitive idea was not universally accepted, and many scientists preferred Descartes theory of vortices.

14. Royal Mint
As Warden, and afterwards Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 percent of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felons being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult. However, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as a habitu? of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties there is a draft of a letter regarding this matter stuck into Newtons personal first edition of his Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. Newton successfully prosecuted 28 coiners.
15. Enlightenment philosophers
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of Nature and Natural Law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.

It was Newtons conception of the Universe based upon Natural and rationally understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of Natural Law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights, the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied Natural conceptions of psychology and self interest to economic systems, and sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into Natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newtons work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.

16. Effect on religious thought
Newton and Robert Boyles approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. The clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newtons discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a Natural Religion.The attacks made against pre Enlightenment magical thinking, and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyles mechanical conception of the Universe. Newton gave Boyles ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them.Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles. These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed people to pursue their own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect themselves with their own rational powers.

Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. His spokesman, Samuel Clarke, rejected Leibniz theodicy which cleared God from the responsibility for lorigine du mal by making God removed from participation in his creation, since as Clarke pointed out, such a deity would be a king in name only, and but one step away from atheism. But the unforeseen theological consequence of the success of Newtons system over the next century was to reinforce the deist position advocated by Leibniz. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason, and humans, as Odo Marquard argued, became responsible for the correction and elimination of evil.

17. light and color
Not long after he donated his telescope to the Royal Society, Newton delivered a paper to that august body about his novel theory of light and colors. Using prisms and his usual very exacting experimental technique, Newton had discovered that sunlight is comprised of all the colors of the rainbow, which could not only be separated but recombined into white light.he most surprising and wonderful composition was that of Whiteness, he wrote. I have often with Admiration beheld that all the Colours of the Prisme being made to converge, and thereby to be again mixed .reproduced light, intirely [sic] and perfectly white. Though he made his experiments on light as early as 1666, when he was only 24 years old, he didnt publish his classic Opticks, which summarized his findings on light and color, until 1704.
18. Discovered calculus
When Newton began to muse on the problem of the motion of the planets and what kept them in their orbits around the sun, he realized that the mathematics of the day werent sufficient to the task. Properties such as direction and speed, by their very nature, were in a continuous state of flux, constantly changing with time and exhibiting varying rates of change. So he invented a new branch of mathematics, which he called the fluxions (later known as calculus). Calculus allowed him to draw tangents to curves, determine the lengths of curves, and solve other problems that classical geometry could not help him solve. Interestingly, Newtons masterwork, the Principia, doesnt include the calculus in the form that hed invented years before, simply because he hadnt yet published anything about it. But he did combine related methods with a very high level of classical geometry, making no attempt to simplify it for his readers. The reason was, he said, to avoid being baited by little Smatterers in Mathematicks.
19. Advanced early modern chemistry
Newton spent untold hours of his life practicing alchemy. Like other alchemists, he sought to turn base metals into gold, find a universal cure for disease, and secure the elixir of life, which promised perpetual youth and eternal life. In his garden shed outside his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the midst of phials and furnaces, mortars and pestles, Newton pored over ancient texts and performed endless experiments. Yet while he never found what he and other alchemists sought, and while he only published one short paper that grew out of his alchemical experiments (a two page speculation on acids), his work was not for naught. As the historian Jed Buchwald has said, As historians have shown in the last several decades, there was a much more profound element to the practice of alchemy which really makes it deserving of being called early modern chemistry. Through his meticulous efforts, Newton greatly furthered the practice and techniques of chemical science.
20. The Royal Society
In 1672, Newton became a member of the Royal Society a group of scientists committed to the experimental method. He presented one of his new telescopes to the Royal Society along with his findings on light. The Royal Society set up a committee led by physicist Robert Hooke to evaluate Newtons findings. Hooke was a scientist employed by the Royal Society to evaluate new inventions. However, Hooke had his own ideas on light and was slow to accept the truth of Newtons findings. This surprised and disappointed Newton, who even considered not circulating his discoveries in the future.While it is sometimes said that Newton was too sensitive to critical evaluation of his work, he was merely concerned that the time spent justifying past findings was preventing him from making new discoveries.