The Story of Greatest Scientist Isaac Newton | Issac Newton life story
My power is ordinary. Only my application brings me success _ Isaac Newton
Early life and education...
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas day, 1642, at Woolsthorpe, a village in southwestern Lincolnshire, England. His father died two months before he was born. When he was three years old, his mother remarried and moved away, leaving Isaac in the care of his grandmother. After a basic education in local schools, at the age twelve, he was sent to the king's school in Grantham, England where he lived in the home of a pharmacist (one who prepares and distributes medication)named Clark. Newton was interested in Clark's chemical library and laboratory and built mechanical devices to a mouse Clark's daughter, including a windmill
run by a live mouse floating lanterns, and sundials.
After Newton's stepfather died, his mother returned to Woodthorpe, and she pulled him out of school to help run the family farm. His preferred reading to working. though, and it became apparent that farming was not his destiny. At the age of nineteen, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, England. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1665, Newton stayed on for his master's, but an outbreak of the plague (a highly infectious and deadly disease often carried by rats) caused the university to close. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe for eighteen months, from 1666 to 1667, during which time he performed the basic experiments and did the thinking for his later work on gravitation (the attraction the mass of the Earth has for bodies near its surface) and optics (the study of light and the changes it experiences and produces). The story that a falling apple suggested the idea of gravitation to him seems to be true. Newton also developed his own system of calculus (a form of mathematics used to solve problems in physics).
Returning to Cambridge in 1667, Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then began a period of expanding on the work he had started at Woolsthorpe. His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability. When Barrow resigned to take another job in 1669, he recommended that Newton take his place. Newton became a professor of mathematics at age twenty-seven and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for twenty-seven years.
Experiments in optics
Newton's main interest at the time was optics, and for several years his lectures were devoted to the subject. His experiments in this area had grown out of his interest in improving the effectiveness of telescopes (instruments that enable the user to view distant objects through the bending of light rays through a lens). His discoveries about the nature and properties of light had led him to turn to suggestions for a reflecting telescope rather than current ones based on the refractive (bending) principle. Newton built several reflecting models in which the image was viewed in a concave (rounded like the inside of a bowl) mirror through an eyepiece in the side of the tube. In 1672 he sent one of these to the Royal Society (Great Britain's oldest organization of scientists).
Newton was honored when the members of the Royal Society were impressed by his reflecting telescope and when they elected him to their membership. But when he decided to send the society a paper describing his experiments on light and the conclusions he had drawn from them, the results almost changed history for the worst. The paper was published in the society's Philosophical Transactions. Many scientists refused to accept the findings, and others were strongly opposed to conclusions that seemed to show that popular theories of light were false. At first Newton patiently answered his critics with further explanations, but when these produced more criticism, he became angry. He vowed he would never publish again, even threatening to give up science altogether. Several years later, at the urging of the astronomer Edmund Halley (c. 1656–1743), Newton put together the results of his work on the laws of motion, which became the great Principia.
His major work:
Newton's greatest work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was completed in eighteen months. It was first published in Latin in 1687 when Newton was forty-five. Its appearance established him as the leading scientist of his time, not only in England but in the entire Western world. In the Principia Newton, with the law of universal gravitation, gave mathematical solutions to most of the problems relating to motion with which earlier scientists had struggled.
In the years after Newton's election to the Royal Society, the thinking of his peers and of scholars had been slowly developing along lines similar to those which his had taken, and they were more open to his explanations of the behavior of bodies moving according to the laws of motion than they had been to his theories about the nature of light. Yet the Principia 's mathematical form made it difficult for even the sharpest minds to follow. Those who did understand it saw that it needed to be made easier to read. As a result, in the years from 1687 to Newton's death, the Principia was the subject of many books and articles attempting to better explain Newton's ideas.
London years:
After the publication of the Principia, Newton became depressed and lost interest in scientific matters. He became interested in university politics and was elected a representative of the university in Parliament. Later he asked friends in London to help him obtain a government appointment. The result was that in 1696, at the age of fifty-four, he left Cambridge to become warden and then master of the Mint (place where money is printed or manufactured). Newton took the job just as seriously as he had his scientific pursuits and made changes in the English money system that was effective for over one hundred years.
My power is ordinary. Only my application brings me success _ Isaac Newton
Early life and education...
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas day, 1642, at Woolsthorpe, a village in southwestern Lincolnshire, England. His father died two months before he was born. When he was three years old, his mother remarried and moved away, leaving Isaac in the care of his grandmother. After a basic education in local schools, at the age twelve, he was sent to the king's school in Grantham, England where he lived in the home of a pharmacist (one who prepares and distributes medication)named Clark. Newton was interested in Clark's chemical library and laboratory and built mechanical devices to a mouse Clark's daughter, including a windmill
run by a live mouse floating lanterns, and sundials.
After Newton's stepfather died, his mother returned to Woodthorpe, and she pulled him out of school to help run the family farm. His preferred reading to working. though, and it became apparent that farming was not his destiny. At the age of nineteen, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, England. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1665, Newton stayed on for his master's, but an outbreak of the plague (a highly infectious and deadly disease often carried by rats) caused the university to close. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe for eighteen months, from 1666 to 1667, during which time he performed the basic experiments and did the thinking for his later work on gravitation (the attraction the mass of the Earth has for bodies near its surface) and optics (the study of light and the changes it experiences and produces). The story that a falling apple suggested the idea of gravitation to him seems to be true. Newton also developed his own system of calculus (a form of mathematics used to solve problems in physics).
Returning to Cambridge in 1667, Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then began a period of expanding on the work he had started at Woolsthorpe. His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability. When Barrow resigned to take another job in 1669, he recommended that Newton take his place. Newton became a professor of mathematics at age twenty-seven and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for twenty-seven years.
Experiments in optics
Newton's main interest at the time was optics, and for several years his lectures were devoted to the subject. His experiments in this area had grown out of his interest in improving the effectiveness of telescopes (instruments that enable the user to view distant objects through the bending of light rays through a lens). His discoveries about the nature and properties of light had led him to turn to suggestions for a reflecting telescope rather than current ones based on the refractive (bending) principle. Newton built several reflecting models in which the image was viewed in a concave (rounded like the inside of a bowl) mirror through an eyepiece in the side of the tube. In 1672 he sent one of these to the Royal Society (Great Britain's oldest organization of scientists).
Newton was honored when the members of the Royal Society were impressed by his reflecting telescope and when they elected him to their membership. But when he decided to send the society a paper describing his experiments on light and the conclusions he had drawn from them, the results almost changed history for the worst. The paper was published in the society's Philosophical Transactions. Many scientists refused to accept the findings, and others were strongly opposed to conclusions that seemed to show that popular theories of light were false. At first Newton patiently answered his critics with further explanations, but when these produced more criticism, he became angry. He vowed he would never publish again, even threatening to give up science altogether. Several years later, at the urging of the astronomer Edmund Halley (c. 1656–1743), Newton put together the results of his work on the laws of motion, which became the great Principia.
His major work:
Newton's greatest work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was completed in eighteen months. It was first published in Latin in 1687 when Newton was forty-five. Its appearance established him as the leading scientist of his time, not only in England but in the entire Western world. In the Principia Newton, with the law of universal gravitation, gave mathematical solutions to most of the problems relating to motion with which earlier scientists had struggled.
In the years after Newton's election to the Royal Society, the thinking of his peers and of scholars had been slowly developing along lines similar to those which his had taken, and they were more open to his explanations of the behavior of bodies moving according to the laws of motion than they had been to his theories about the nature of light. Yet the Principia 's mathematical form made it difficult for even the sharpest minds to follow. Those who did understand it saw that it needed to be made easier to read. As a result, in the years from 1687 to Newton's death, the Principia was the subject of many books and articles attempting to better explain Newton's ideas.
London years:
After the publication of the Principia, Newton became depressed and lost interest in scientific matters. He became interested in university politics and was elected a representative of the university in Parliament. Later he asked friends in London to help him obtain a government appointment. The result was that in 1696, at the age of fifty-four, he left Cambridge to become warden and then master of the Mint (place where money is printed or manufactured). Newton took the job just as seriously as he had his scientific pursuits and made changes in the English money system that was effective for over one hundred years.
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