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Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton at 46 in Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait
Born	4 January 1643 Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England
Died	31 March 1727 Kensington, London, England
Nationality	English
Alma mater	Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Known for	Newtonian mechanics Universal gravitation Infinitesimal calculus Classical optics
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist
Institutions	University of Cambridge

Sir Isaac Newton, (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist, regarded by many as the greatest figure in the history of science. His treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By demonstrating consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and predictive power of his laws was central to the scientific revolution, the advancement of heliocentrism, and the broader acceptance of the notion that rational investigation can reveal the inner workings of nature.

In mechanics, Newton also markedly enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he invented the reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. Newton notably argued that light is composed of particles. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound, and proposed a theory of the origin of stars. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed the so-called "Newton's method" for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.

French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange often said that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and once added that he was also "the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish." English poet Alexander Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.

Newton himself was rather more modest of his own achievements, famously writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants"

and then in a memoir later

"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 sea-shore, 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."

Biography

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Later life

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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 Newton’s conception of the universe based upon Natural and rationally understandable laws that became the seed 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 the sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into Natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.

Newton's laws of motion

The famous three laws of motion:

1. Newton's 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.
2. Newton's Second Law states that an applied force, ${\displaystyle F}$, on an object equals the time rate of change of its momentum, ${\displaystyle p}$. Mathematically, this is written as ${\displaystyle {\vec {F}}={\frac {d{\vec {p}}}{dt}}\,=\,{\frac {d}{dt}}(m{\vec {v}})\,=\,{\vec {v}}\,{\frac {dm}{dt}}+m\,{\frac {d{\vec {v}}}{dt}}\,.}$ Assuming the mass to be constant, the first term vanishes. Defining the acceleration to be ${\displaystyle {\vec {a}}\ =\ d{\vec {v}}/dt}$ results in the famous equation ${\displaystyle {\vec {F}}=m\,{\vec {a}}\,,}$ which states that the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force acting on the object and inversely proportional to its mass. In the MKS system of measurement, mass is given in kilograms, acceleration in metres per second squared, and force in newtons (named in his honour).
3. Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton's apple

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found, in that slight startle from his contemplation, ‘tis said, a mode of proving that the earth turn’d round in a most natural whirl, called gravitation; and this is the sole mortal who could grapple, since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.

A popular story claims that Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of universal gravitation by the fall of an apple from a tree. Cartoons have gone further to suggest the apple actually hit Newton's head, and that its impact somehow made him aware of the force of gravity. John Conduitt, Newton's assistant at the royal mint and husband of Newton's niece, described the event when he wrote about Newton's life:

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition.

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 Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it "universal gravitation".

A contemporary writer, William Stukeley, recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726, in which Newton recalled "when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre." 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." These accounts are probably exaggerations of Newton's own tale about sitting by a window in his home (Woolsthorpe Manor) and watching an apple fall from a tree.

Various trees are claimed to be "the" apple tree which Newton describes. The King's School, Grantham, claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later, the staff of the 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.

Writings by Newton

• Method of Fluxions (1671)
• Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation (1671–75) unpublished work on alchemy
• De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (1684)
• Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
• Opticks (1704)
• Reports as Master of the Mint (1701-25)
• Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
• Short Chronicle, The System of the World, Optical Lectures, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended and De mundi systemate were published posthumously in 1728.
• An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754)

See also

• Cultural depictions of Isaac Newton
• History of calculus
• Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy
• "Standing on the shoulders of giants"
• Newton-Cotes formulas
• Gauss-Newton algorithm
• Newton fractal
• Newton polygon
• Newton polynomial
• Newton series
• Newton's cannonball
• Isaac Newton's religious views
• De Motu (Berkeley's essay)

Footnotes and references

Resources

References

• Bell, E.T. (1937). Men of Mathematics. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-46400-0. Excerpt
• Christianson, Gale (1984). In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & his times. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-02-905190-8. This well documented work provides, in particular, valuable information regarding Newton's knowledge of Patristics
• "interview with James Gleick: "Isaac Newton" (Pantheon)". WAMU's The Diane Rehm Show Friday, June 13 2003 (RealAudio stream). {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• "Sir Isaac Newton". School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• "The Newton Project". Imperial College London. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
• Westfall, Richard S. (1980, 1998). Never at Rest. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-27435-4. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• Craig, John (1963). "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters". Notes and Records of the Royal Society (18). London: The Royal Society.
• "The Invisible Science." Magical Egypt. Chance Gardner and John Anthony West. 2005.

Further reading

• Berlinski, David, Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of our World, ISBN 0-684-84392-7 (hardback), also in paperback, Simon & Schuster, (2000).
• Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. Collier MacMillan, (1984). 608 pages.
• Dampier, William C. & M. Dampier. Readings in the Literature of Science. Harper & Row, New York, (1959).
• Gjertsen, Derek. The Newton Handbook, Routledge & Kegan Paul, (1986).
• Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Knopf, (2003). hardcover, 288 pages, ISBN 0-375-42233-1.
• Hawking, Stephen, ed. On the Shoulders of Giants. ISBN 0-7624-1348-4 Places selections from Newton's Principia in the context of selected writings by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Einstein.
• Hart, Michael J. The 100. Carol Publishing Group, (July 1992), paperback, 576 pages, ISBN 0-8065-1350-0.
• Keynes, John Maynard. Essays in Biography. W W Norton & Co, 1963, paperback, ISBN 0-393-00189-X. Keynes had taken a close interest in Newton and owned many of Newton's private papers.
• Newton, Isaac. Papers and Letters in Natural Philosophy, edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Harvard University Press, 1958,1978. ISBN 0-674-46853-8.
• Newton, Isaac (1642-1727). The Principia: a new Translation, Guide by I. Bernard Cohen ISBN 0-520-08817-4 University of California (1999) Warning: common mistranslations exposed!
• Shapley, Harlow, S. Rapport, and H. Wright. A Treasury of Science; "Newtonia" pp. 147-9; "Discoveries" pp. 150-4. Harper & Bros., New York, (1946).
• Simmons, J. The giant book of scientists -- The 100 greatest minds of all time, Sydney: The Book Company, (1996).
• Richard de Villamil. Newton, The man. G.D. Knox, London, 1931. Preface by Albert Einstein. Reprinted by Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York (1972).
• Whiteside, D. T. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton - 8 volumes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1967-81).
• Isaac Newton, Sir; J Edleston; Roger Cotes, Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, including letters of other eminent men, London, John W. Parker, West Strand; Cambridge, John Deighton, 1850. – Google Books

External links

• ScienceWorld biography
• The Mind of Isaac Newton By combining images, audio, animations and interactive segments, the application gives students a sense of Newton's multifaceted mind.
• Works by Isaac Newton at Project Gutenberg
• Newton Research Project
• PDF of Newton's Principia: 1687, 1713, and 1726 editions
• Newton's Principia - read and search
• Portraits of Isaac Newton
• Sir Isaac Newton Scientist and Mathematician
• Template:Dmoz
• Rebuttal of Newton's astrology
• Newton's Religious Views Reconsidered
• March 5-June 12, 2005 Isaac Newton's personal copy of Principia at Huntington Library
• Newton's Royal Mint Reports
• Newton's Dark Secrets NOVA TV programme.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Isaac Newton", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Newton's views on space, time, and motion
• Newton's Castle Educational material
• The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Research on his Alchemical writings
• The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences
• Isaac Newton on £1 note.
• FMA Live! Cool program for teaching Newton's laws to kids
• Newton's religious position

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1. ^ During Newton's lifetime, two calendars were in use in Europe: the Julian or 'Old Style' in Britain and parts of Eastern Europe, and the Gregorian or 'New Style' elsewhere. At Newton's birth, Gregorian dates were ten days ahead of Julian dates: thus Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 by the Julian calendar but on 4 January 1643 by the Gregorian. Unless otherwise noted, the remainder of the dates in this article follow the Julian calendar.
2. "Newton beats Einstein in polls of scientists and the public". The Royal Society. Retrieved 2006-10-25.
3. Wilson, Fred L. "History of Science: Newton". Fred Wilson's Physics Web. Retrieved 2006-08-29. citing: Delambre, M. "Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. le comte J. L. Lagrange," Oeuvres de Lagrange I. Paris, 1867, p. xx.
4. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27)
5. Cassels, Alan. Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World. p2.
6. Don Juan (1821), Canto 10, Verse I. In Jerome J. McGann (ed.), Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (1986), Vol. 5, 437
7. Conduitt, John. "Keynes Ms. 130.4:Conduitt's account of Newton's life at Cambridge". Newtonproject. Retrieved 2006-08-30.
8. Newton's alchemical works transcribed and online at Indiana University retrieved January 11, 2007

• Isaac Newton
• 17th century mathematicians
• 18th century mathematicians
• Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Antitrinitarianism
• English alchemists
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• 1643 births
• 1727 deaths