Isaac Newton was one of the most famous scientists of all time and tremendously added to the discoveries of mankind.
He once said “To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me”. This article only completes some of his discoveries (and you’ll be reading this for hours)! Isaac Newton was born on January 4th, 1643 (some people think it was December 25th, but that was in the olden calendars). He was tragically born on the same day his father, Isaac Newton sr. died. This was hard on his mother, Hannah, who named Isaac after his father. She remarried and left a 3-year old Isaac with his grandma. Poor little Isaac felt alone and abandoned.
She shouldn’t have done that because this will lead to him not being able to socialize, even in his adult years. In 1654 he was sent to a boarding school in Grantham. There he lived with an alchemist and his two sons and daughter. Newton hated the boys but was friends with the girl (he even made furniture for her dolls, how sweet!). The headmaster, Henry Stokes thought (like many critics of early scientists) that Newton was a useless boy with no talent. But he soon found out that he was very, very wrong indeed. Newton was already smarter than most of his peers and has many ingenious gadgets to present to him. 1660 was the year that his mom finally pulled him out of school so he could try farming.
But that went disastrously haywire (he was still a school boy at heart). His uncle finally thought that Newton would be better off if he were set to a university. He went to Cambridge University. But his mother said that she wouldn’t pay for the fees, so Newton had to work for other students to pay them.
This was the start of the brilliant Isaac Newton.When Newton was in Cambridge, he used to set up experiments in his room with his roommate, who helped him. His theory (or hypothesis), was that light was made out of particles. Quantum Physics showed he was partially correct (PARTIALLY). At that time, the Great Plague of London began. Rats that came from ships that sailed to the Black Sea infected themselves and other people, about a quarter of London’s population died. Cambridge University was forced to close its doors, and Newton had to go back home. He continued his projects at home, by poking a blunt needle beneath his eye and describing the colors he saw, and also by staring at the sun, which made him temporarily blind (he had to stay in a dark room for 3 days).
Then, using a prism from the county fair, he set up an experiment where he put up the prism against the sunlight, which split it up into a rainbow. Isaac was the first scientist to argue that light was not one, but 7 (or 6) different colors. Then he got another prism and a piece of red card with a small hole in it. He put the first prism in its original position and the red card with a hole in front of it, and put the second prism in front of the card upside down. This made red light appear at the end, proving that light could be refracted into individual colors. He did the same for the rest, substituting the red card for an orange card, a yellow card, and so forth.
Newton, after 16 months of hard work, finally published a book called The Principia, (or the full name: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica). It stated all his work on light, gravity (more on that later), and his 3 laws of motion, which are:Every object stays at rest unless it is acted on by an outside force. If it is in motion, it travels in a straight line unless an it is acted on by an outside forceThe outside force is related to the direction and the increase in speed of the objectTo every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
Before his adventure into the 3 laws of motion, Newton started a small theory of gravity, but stopped it abruptly to do other experiments. It wasn’t until the great apple myth that he restarted it. It all started when Newton was sitting under an apple tree, thinking. When all of a sudden, an apple fell from the tree and landed on his head. That was when he thought out of the blue: why did the moon stay tethered to the earth and yet not crash into earth? He did some thinking, did a few experiments, and thought some more.
He finally came to a conclusion that gravity was faint in space, and that there was enough gravity to tether the moon, but not as much to completely make it crash into earth. This helped him and his astronomer friend Hailey to figure out comet time intervals. Not much to be said about the Royal Society. It was an official group of scientists founded in 1660. In 1671, the astronomer Seth Ward, who was part of the group, proposed for Newton to join the Society. Newton agreed and joined the group, but fell into quarrel with Robert Hooke, another scientist in that group. Hooke was argumentative and Newton was easily offended.
The quarrel stopped when Hooke died. Soon later Isaac became the president.In later life, Newton was a very wealthy man. In 1693 he suffered a mental breakdown, writing letters to friends accusing them of plotting against him. Samuel Pepys got worried and told a friend of his in Cambridge to check on Newton. He told him that he wrote the letter after not sleeping in 5 days in a row. He had no memory of what he wrote. Now scientists think that he was poisoned by mercury ( then known as the harmless quiksilver).
In the financial crash in 1720, (aka the South Sea Bubble), he almost lost 4.5 million dollars (3,665,790 euros today!). He also had many health problems like gout (a type of arthritis), kidney stones (hard deposits in the kidney), and lung inflammations (pneumonia). In 1727, he burnt all of his personal papers about his life and discoveries (he was a private man).
He died in the early hours of March 20, 1727. He was buried in the Westminster Abbey, where only important people are buried.Isaac Newton made many discoveries. His most important discoveries are the discovery of gravity and the 3 laws of motions.
You may be wondering {hmmm, why am I reading this (almost boring) article?}. Well (especially if your still in school), Isaac Newton’s discoveries are very important in physics and other sciences which make it important to study if you are planning to be (or already are) a scientist.
