Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians that ever lived. He was born in England on December 25, 1643. He was born the same year that Galileo died. He lived for 85 years.
Isaac Newton was raised by his grandmother. He attended Free Grammar School and then went on to Trinity College Cambridge. Newton worked his way through college. While at college he became interested in math, physics, and astronomy. Newton received both a bachelors and masters degree.
While Newton was in college he was writing his ideas in a journal. Newton had new ideas about motion, which he called his three laws of motion. He also had ideas about gravity, the diffraction of light, and forces. Newton's ideas were so good that Queen Anne knighted him in 1705. His accomplishments laid the foundations for modern science and revolutionized the world. Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727.
5: The Three Laws of Motion
There are three laws of motion:
An object will remain at rest or moving in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.
When force is applied to an object, it will accelerate (Force = mass x acceleration).
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
First published when Newton was 43, the three laws remain the cornerstone of modern physics. Some die-hard physicists have even had the laws tattooed on their skin.
For centuries, scholars have wrestled with the fundamental concepts of motion. The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought smoke moved upwards because smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding to go into the sky to hang out with the rest of its air buddies. French philosopher René Descartes devised laws of motion that were very similar to parts of Newton's first and third laws, but he still held that "God is the primary cause of motion and always conserves the same quantity of motion in the universe"
The genius of Newton's laws is that they're so poetically simple. Using only these three basic laws, scientists now had a road map for all planetary motion, from the movement of electrons to the movement of the planets. Whether you're designing F-1 cars or figuring out why apples plummet to the earth after breaking free from a tree branch, Newton's three laws have you covered.
4: Calculus
By Newton's time, scientists were becoming frustrated with the limitations of existing math systems like algebra and geometry. Mathematicians could calculate the speed of a ship, but they couldn't figure out the rate at which the ship was speeding up. They could measure the angle at which a cannonball was being fired, but they had no way of calculating which angle would send the cannonball the farthest. They could calculate the relative birth and death rate of a population, but they couldn't combine the two to figure out how rapidly a population was growing. The question was: How could they understand a way to calculate problems that involved changing variables?
This was the problem facing Newton when an outbreak of bubonic plague hit England in the spring of 1665. As plague-stricken citizens dropped dead in the streets, Cambridge University was shut down, forcing Newton to move to Woolsthorpe, an estate in the north of England. He spent 18 months there formulating the origins of what he then called "the science of fluxions."
As scientists have built upon Newton's original ideas over the years, the results have been far-reaching. In the 1960s, for example, Apollo engineers used calculus to figure out how to send a spacecraft between the moving targets of the Earth and the moon. Calculus has become a critical tool in almost any situation, from economics to physics to probability science.
3: The Reflecting Telescope
Scientists knew that rainbows were formed by light refracting within raindrops, but they didn't know why rainbows were so colorful. When Newton first began his studies at Cambridge, the common theory was that the sun's rays were somehow being dyed different colors by the water.
Using a lamp and a prism, Newton experimented by running white light through a prism to separate it into a rainbow of colors. The prism trick was nothing new, but just as with the raindrops, scientists assumed it was the prism that was coloring the light. But by reflecting the scattered beams into another prism, Newton reformed them back into white light, proving that the colors were a characteristic of the light itself.
At the time, telescopes used a set of glass lenses to magnify an image. Through his experiments with colors, Newton knew that the lenses would refract different colors at different angles, creating a fuzzy image for the viewer. To get around this, Newton proposed using mirrors instead of lenses. The image would be captured in a large mirror and then bounced off a smaller mirror into the viewer's eye. The result would be both a clearer image and a smaller telescope.
Granted, a Scottish mathematician had earlier proposed the idea of a reflecting telescope, but Newton was the first to actually build one. Grinding the mirrors himself, Newton put together a prototype and presented it to the Royal Society in 1670. To this day, nearly all astronomical observatories use a variant of Newton's original design.
2: The Modern Coin
By the late 1600s, England's financial system was in the midst of a crisis. The country's currency was made up entirely of silver coins; often, the silver the coin was made out of was worth more than the value stamped on it. The system was a magnet for criminals who melted down the coins or "clipped" silver from the edges to sell to France. The practice was so widespread that by Newton's time the average bag of English coins was a hodgepodge of damaged and unrecognizable hunks of silver. Forgers were also rampant. Since English coins varied so widely in size and quality, it was easy to pass off even the most sloppy knockoffs as legal tender. Riots began to break out as faith in English currency eroded.
In 1696, the British government appointed Newton warden of the Royal Mint. The position was supposed to be largely ceremonial, but a restless Newton jumped into the job with full force. He declared that all the coins in England needed to be recalled, melted down, and remade into a higher-quality, harder-to-counterfeit design. It was a bold move, considering that the entire country had to make do without a currency for the year. Working as many as 18 hours a day, Newton reorganized the Royal Mints into high-quality, high-efficiency factories pumping out currency that was highly resistant to forgers.
You know those ridges on the edge of a U.S. quarter? Those are milled edges, a feature introduced by Newton on English coins to prevent clipping.
1: Cat Doors
Newton never married and had few friends, but he did keep a dog and cat for companionship. The story goes that at Cambridge University, Newton's experiments were constantly being interrupted by his cat scratching at the door to his office. Newton summoned the Cambridge carpenter and had him saw two holes in his office door. A large hole was for the mother cat, and a smaller hole was for her kittens. Of course, since the kittens simply followed their mother through the larger hole, the smaller hole went unused.
"Whether this account be true or false, indisputably true is that there are in the door to this day two plugged holes of proper dimensions for the respective egresses of cat and kitten," wrote a Newton contemporary some years after the scientist's death. The jury is still out on this story. Newton could have invented one of the world's most popular cat accessories -- or somebody at Cambridge simply was very skilled at making up stories for mysterious door holes.
Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians that ever lived. He was born in England on December 25, 1643. He was born the same year that Galileo died. He lived for 85 years.
Isaac Newton was raised by his grandmother. He attended Free Grammar School and then went on to Trinity College Cambridge. Newton worked his way through college. While at college he became interested in math, physics, and astronomy. Newton received both a bachelors and masters degree.
While Newton was in college he was writing his ideas in a journal. Newton had new ideas about motion, which he called his three laws of motion. He also had ideas about gravity, the diffraction of light, and forces. Newton's ideas were so good that Queen Anne knighted him in 1705. His accomplishments laid the foundations for modern science and revolutionized the world. Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727.
5: The Three Laws of Motion
There are three laws of motion:
First published when Newton was 43, the three laws remain the cornerstone of modern physics. Some die-hard physicists have even had the laws tattooed on their skin.
For centuries, scholars have wrestled with the fundamental concepts of motion. The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought smoke moved upwards because smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding to go into the sky to hang out with the rest of its air buddies. French philosopher René Descartes devised laws of motion that were very similar to parts of Newton's first and third laws, but he still held that "God is the primary cause of motion and always conserves the same quantity of motion in the universe"
The genius of Newton's laws is that they're so poetically simple. Using only these three basic laws, scientists now had a road map for all planetary motion, from the movement of electrons to the movement of the planets. Whether you're designing F-1 cars or figuring out why apples plummet to the earth after breaking free from a tree branch, Newton's three laws have you covered.
4: Calculus
By Newton's time, scientists were becoming frustrated with the limitations of existing math systems like algebra and geometry. Mathematicians could calculate the speed of a ship, but they couldn't figure out the rate at which the ship was speeding up. They could measure the angle at which a cannonball was being fired, but they had no way of calculating which angle would send the cannonball the farthest. They could calculate the relative birth and death rate of a population, but they couldn't combine the two to figure out how rapidly a population was growing. The question was: How could they understand a way to calculate problems that involved changing variables?
This was the problem facing Newton when an outbreak of bubonic plague hit England in the spring of 1665. As plague-stricken citizens dropped dead in the streets, Cambridge University was shut down, forcing Newton to move to Woolsthorpe, an estate in the north of England. He spent 18 months there formulating the origins of what he then called "the science of fluxions."
As scientists have built upon Newton's original ideas over the years, the results have been far-reaching. In the 1960s, for example, Apollo engineers used calculus to figure out how to send a spacecraft between the moving targets of the Earth and the moon. Calculus has become a critical tool in almost any situation, from economics to physics to probability science.
3: The Reflecting Telescope
Scientists knew that rainbows were formed by light refracting within raindrops, but they didn't know why rainbows were so colorful. When Newton first began his studies at Cambridge, the common theory was that the sun's rays were somehow being dyed different colors by the water.
Using a lamp and a prism, Newton experimented by running white light through a prism to separate it into a rainbow of colors. The prism trick was nothing new, but just as with the raindrops, scientists assumed it was the prism that was coloring the light. But by reflecting the scattered beams into another prism, Newton reformed them back into white light, proving that the colors were a characteristic of the light itself.
At the time, telescopes used a set of glass lenses to magnify an image. Through his experiments with colors, Newton knew that the lenses would refract different colors at different angles, creating a fuzzy image for the viewer. To get around this, Newton proposed using mirrors instead of lenses. The image would be captured in a large mirror and then bounced off a smaller mirror into the viewer's eye. The result would be both a clearer image and a smaller telescope.
Granted, a Scottish mathematician had earlier proposed the idea of a reflecting telescope, but Newton was the first to actually build one. Grinding the mirrors himself, Newton put together a prototype and presented it to the Royal Society in 1670. To this day, nearly all astronomical observatories use a variant of Newton's original design.
2: The Modern Coin
By the late 1600s, England's financial system was in the midst of a crisis. The country's currency was made up entirely of silver coins; often, the silver the coin was made out of was worth more than the value stamped on it. The system was a magnet for criminals who melted down the coins or "clipped" silver from the edges to sell to France. The practice was so widespread that by Newton's time the average bag of English coins was a hodgepodge of damaged and unrecognizable hunks of silver. Forgers were also rampant. Since English coins varied so widely in size and quality, it was easy to pass off even the most sloppy knockoffs as legal tender. Riots began to break out as faith in English currency eroded.
In 1696, the British government appointed Newton warden of the Royal Mint. The position was supposed to be largely ceremonial, but a restless Newton jumped into the job with full force. He declared that all the coins in England needed to be recalled, melted down, and remade into a higher-quality, harder-to-counterfeit design. It was a bold move, considering that the entire country had to make do without a currency for the year. Working as many as 18 hours a day, Newton reorganized the Royal Mints into high-quality, high-efficiency factories pumping out currency that was highly resistant to forgers.
You know those ridges on the edge of a U.S. quarter? Those are milled edges, a feature introduced by Newton on English coins to prevent clipping.
1: Cat Doors
Newton never married and had few friends, but he did keep a dog and cat for companionship. The story goes that at Cambridge University, Newton's experiments were constantly being interrupted by his cat scratching at the door to his office. Newton summoned the Cambridge carpenter and had him saw two holes in his office door. A large hole was for the mother cat, and a smaller hole was for her kittens. Of course, since the kittens simply followed their mother through the larger hole, the smaller hole went unused.
"Whether this account be true or false, indisputably true is that there are in the door to this day two plugged holes of proper dimensions for the respective egresses of cat and kitten," wrote a Newton contemporary some years after the scientist's death. The jury is still out on this story. Newton could have invented one of the world's most popular cat accessories -- or somebody at Cambridge simply was very skilled at making up stories for mysterious door holes.