Isaac newton

Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward. "He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits," said Martin Rees, a former president of Britain's Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself. "His theory of gravity wouldn't have got us global positioning satellites," said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K.-based Open University. "But it was enough to develop space travel." Isaac Newton, Underachiever? Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. A practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel. Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student. In 1665 the school temporarily closed because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm occurred, and he described his years on hiatus as "the prime of my age for invention." Despite his apparent affinity for private study, Newton retur...

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 • "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." • "To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me." Newton once said that if he had achieved anything in his research, it was "by Isaac Newton inventions 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 " It's said that Newton invented a c...

Sir Isaac Newton and his telescope.; Photo: Getty Images 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. Newton helped develop spectral analysis A drawing of Sir Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism.; Photo: Apic/Getty Images 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 befo...

Isaac Newton is best know for his theory about the law of gravity, but his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) with its three laws of motion greatly influenced the Enlightenment in Europe. Born in 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England, Years of research culminated with the 1687 publication of “Principia,” a landmark work that established the universal laws of motion and gravity. Newton’s second major book, “Opticks,” detailed his experiments to determine the properties of light. Also a student of Biblical history and alchemy, the famed scientist served as president of the Royal Society of London and master of England’s Royal Mint until his death in 1727. 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 most of his early years with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. His education was interrupted by a failed attempt to turn him into a farmer, and he attended the King’s School in Grantham before enrolling at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661. Newton studied a classical curriculum at Cambridge, but he became fascinated by the works of modern philosophers such as René Descartes, even devoting a set of notes to his outside readings he titled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (“Certain Philosophical Questions”). When the Isaac Newton’s Telescope and Studies on Light Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was ...

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) lived in a philosophically tumultuous time. He witnessed the end of the Aristotelian dominance of philosophy in Europe, the rise and fall of Cartesianism, the emergence of “experimental philosophy,” and the development of numerous experimental and mathematical methods for the study of nature. Indeed, he helped to develop many of those methods. Newton’s contributions to mathematics—including the co-discovery with G.W. Leibniz of what we now call the calculus—and to what is now called physics, including both its experimental and theoretical aspects, will forever dominate discussions of his lasting influence. His impact on the development of early modern philosophy was also profound; indeed, it is difficult to grasp the history of philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without considering Newton’s role. His engagement with Cartesian ideas and methods early in his life was just as significant to the transformation of philosophy in the seventeenth century as his debates with Leibniz were to the setting of the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth. Obviously, Newton is not part of the traditional philosophy canon of the period. That fact reflects an anachronistic approach to the history of modern philosophy that we have inherited from French and German scholars of the nineteenth century. During the height of the Enlightenment, Newton was always characterized as a canonical philosopher: for instance, he plays a leading role in ...