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Sir Isaac Newton- The Biography

Isaac Newton- Family and Education
Sir Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727]) was the greatest English mathematician of his generation. He laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus. His work on optics and gravitation make him one of the greatest scientists the world has known. Isaac Newton were born on 4th Jan. 1643 in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth Lincolnshire, England in a poor farming family. He is the one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. At the time of Newton’s birth, England had not adopted the Gregorian calendar and therefore his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, 25 December 1642. Newton was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. His mother Hannah Ayscough married with Isaac Newton, the elder, in April 1642. His father Isaac Newton, the elder died in October 1642, and nearly three months later their only child Isaac Newton was born.

Isaac’s mother Hannah Ayscough remarried Barnabas Smith the minister of the church at North Witham, a nearby village, when Isaac was two years old. The young child was then left in the care of his grandmother Margery Ayscough at Woolsthorpe. Basically treated as an orphan, Isaac did not have a happy childhood. Upon the death of his stepfather in 1653, Newton lived in an extended family consisting of his mother, his grandmother, one half-brother, and two half-sisters. His mother Hannah died in 1679.
Isaac Newton father is a farmer his mother decided in 1659 that Isaac should also be a farmer, and thus took him away from his school studies. He spent a year away from school on the farm, at quite a critical time in his education. It was with great sadness to Lincolnshire farming that Isaac was not suited to this vocation, but modern physics is more than grateful for this lack of agricultural skill. Isaac went back to school in autumn 1660. From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King’s School, Grantham (where his signature can still be seen upon a library window sill). In 1661 Newton accordingly entered as a student at Cambridge, where for the first time he found himself among surroundings which were likely to develop his powers. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing in most years, until 1696. In 1665, he discovered the generalized binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become infinitesimal calculus. There is a manuscript of his, dated May 28, 1665, written in the same year as that in which he took is B.A. degree, which is the earliest documentary proof of his invention of fluxions. The University temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague. Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, Newton’s private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the subsequent two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation. In 1667 he returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Trinity. Newton suffered a mental breakdown in 1675 and was still recovering through 1679.

Newton’s Law of Motions
Newton gives the famous three laws of motion:

• Newton’s First Law of Motion is also known as the Law of Inertia. The Newton’s first law of motion 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.

• Newton’s Second Law of Motion states that an applied force, , on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum, , with time. Mathematically, this is expressed as

Since the second law applies to an object with constant mass (dm/dt = 0), the first term vanishes, and by substitution using the definition of acceleration, the equation can be written in the iconic form

The first and second laws represent a break with the physics of Aristotle, in which it was believed that a force was necessary in order to maintain motion. They state that a force is only needed

in order to change an object’s state of motion. The SI unit of force is the newton, named in Newton’s honour.
The vector nature of the second law addresses the geometrical relationship between the direction of the force and the manner in which the object’s momentum changes. Before Newton, it had typically been assumed that a planet orbiting the sun would need a forward force to keep it moving. Newton showed instead that all that was needed was an inward attraction from the sun. Even many decades after the publication of the Principia, this counterintuitive idea was not universally accepted, and many scientists preferred Descartes’ theory of vortices.

• Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that any force exerted onto an object has a counterpart force that is exerted in the opposite direction back onto the first object. A common example is of

two ice skaters pushing against each other and sliding apart in opposite directions. Another example is the recoil of a firearm, in which the force propelling the bullet is exerted equally back onto the gun and is felt by the shooter. Since the objects in question do not necessarily have the same mass, the resulting acceleration of the two objects can be different (as in the case of firearm recoil).
Unlike Aristotle’s, Newton’s physics is meant to be universal. For example, the second law applies both to a planet and to a falling stone.

Classical mechanics

Newton’s Second Law

History Fundamental concepts Time • Mass • Force Energy • Momentum Formulations Newtonian mechanics Lagrangian mechanics Hamiltonian mechanics Branches Statics Dynamics Kinematics Applied mechanics Celestial mechanics Continuum mechanics Statistical mechanics Scientists Isaac Newton • Jeremiah Horrocks • Leonhard Euler • Jean le Rond d’Alembert • Alexis Clairaut Joseph Louis Lagrange • Pierre-Simon Laplace • William Rowan Hamilton • Siméon-Denis Poisson

Newton’s Apple Story
According to the well-known story, In the year 1666 he (Isaac Newton) 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.

Newton conceived that the same force governed the motion of the Moon and the apple. He calculated the force needed to hold the Moon in its orbit, as compared with the force pulling an object to the ground. He also calculated the centripetal force needed to hold a stone in a sling, and the relation between the length of a pendulum and the time of its swing. These early explorations were not soon exploited by Newton, though he studied astronomy and the problems of planetary motion.
Correspondence with Hooke (1679-1680) redirected Newton to the problem of the path of a body subjected to a centrally directed force that varies as the inverse square of the distance; he determined it to be an ellipse, so informing Edmond Halley in August 1684. Halley’s interest led Newton to demonstrate the relationship afresh, to compose a brief tract on mechanics, and finally to write the Principia.

Newton’s Religious Views
Historian Stephen D. Snobelen says of Newton, “Isaac Newton was a heretic. But … he never made a public declaration of his private faith — which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. In a view disputed by Snobelen, T.C. Pfizenmaier argues that Newton held the Eastern Orthodox view of the Trinity rather than the Western one held by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and most Protestants.
Although Newton’s novel idea of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth’s gravity influenced the Moon, counter- balancing its centrifugal force. From his law of centrifugal force and Kepler’s third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse-square law.
In 1679 Newton corresponded with Hooke who had written to Newton claiming:-
… that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall …
Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton’s unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God’s providential role in nature. Thus, the ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. He saw evidence of design in the system of the world: “Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice”. But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities. For this Leibniz lampooned him: “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.” Newton’s position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence.

Some Other Achievments
In 1672 Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society after donating a reflecting telescope. Also in 1672 Newton published his first scientific paper on light and colour in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The paper was generally well received but Hooke and Huygens objected to Newton’s attempt to prove, by experiment alone, that light consists of the motion of small particles rather than waves. The reception that his publication received did nothing to improve Newton’s

attitude to making his results known to the world. He was always pulled in two directions, there was something in his nature which wanted fame and recognition yet another side of him feared criticism and the easiest way to avoid being criticised was to publish nothing.
Newton’s relations with Hooke deteriorated further when, in 1675, Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen some of his optical results. Although the two men made their peace with an exchange of polite letters, Newton turned in on himself and away from the Royal Society which he associated with Hooke as one of its leaders. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke in 1703. Newton’s Opticks appeared in 1704. It dealt with the theory of light and colour and with

• investigations of the colours of thin sheets
• ‘Newton’s rings’ and
• diffraction of light.

Newton published an edition of Geographia generalis by the German geographer Varenius in 1672. His own letters on optics appeared in print from 1672 to 1676. Then he published nothing until the Principia (published in Latin in 1687; revised in 1713 and 1726; and translated into English in 1729). This was followed by Opticks in 1704; a revised edition in Latin appeared in 1706. Posthumously published writings include The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), The System of the World (1728), the first draft of Book III of the Principia, and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John (1733). In a manuscript he wrote in 1704 in which he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible, he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this he said, “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”
Some more writings by Sir Isaac Newton are:
• Method of Fluxions (1671)
• Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation (unpublished, c. 1671–75)
• De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (1684)
• Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
• Opticks (1704)
• Reports as Master of the Mint (1701–25)
• Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
• The System of the World, Optical Lectures, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, (Amended) and De mundi systemate (published posthumously in 1728)
• Observations on Daniel and The Apocalypse of St. John (1733)
• An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754)

Newton remains influential to scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of members of Britain’s Royal Society (formerly headed by Newton) asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Royal Society scientists deemed Newton to have made the greater overall contribution. In 1999, leading physicists from all over the world voted Einstein “greatest physicist ever;” Newton was the runner-up.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Death
On March 31, 1727 at [OS: 20 March 1727] at the age of 84 in Kensington, Middlesex, England this great scientist takes his last breath.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Quotes

• If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

• Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

• I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

• To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.

• We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

• I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

• If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

• No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess

• A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

• I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.

• We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

• We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

• I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only 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.

• It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.

• About the Time of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the Prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition

• Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

• Oh Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done! (Said to a pet dog who knocked over a candle and set fire to his papers

• Yet one thing secures us what ever betide,/ The scriptures assures us the Lord will provide.

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