Life

Born to a poor family in Woolsthorpe, England in 1642, Isaac Newton attended Trinity College in Cambridge, after it became apparent that he would never be a successful farmer.

He took interest in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. After his graduation, he began to teach at the college, and was appointed as the second Lucasian Chair. Today, the chair is considered the most renowned academic chair in the world.

In 1689, Newton was elected as a member of parliament for the university. In 1703, he was elected as president of the Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists that still exists today. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

Newton died in 1727, at the age of 84. After his death, his body was moved to a more prominent place in Westminster Abbey. During the exhumation, large amounts of mercury were found in the scientist’s system, likely due to his work with alchemy.

Newton’s Laws

A popular story surrounding Isaac Newton is about the apple that fell while he sat under a tree. It’s unknown whether this actually happened or not, but historians doubt it had as big an impact on his observations as the tale implies. But anyhow… regardless of how it came about, Newton was the first to determine the three famous laws of motion.

:arrow_right: The first one is about how objects move at the same velocity unless an outside force acts upon it.

An object at rest stays at rest until an outside force acts upon it, be it another object, being, or gravity. It wouldn’t just randomly start moving on it’s own for no reason.

On the other side of this coin is an object travels at the same speed unless it interacts with another force, such as friction, or unless it collides with another object

:arrow_right: His second law of motion provided a calculation for how forces interact. The force acting on an object is equal to the object’s mass times the acceleration.

:arrow_right: And Newton’s third and final law states that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If one body applies a force on a second, then the second body exerts a force of the same strength on the first, in the opposite direction.

Using these three laws, Newton calculated the universal law of gravity. He found that as two bodies move farther away from one another, the gravitational attraction between them decreases by the inverse of the square of the distance.

For example, if two objects are twice as far apart, the gravitational force is only a fourth as strong; if they are three times as far apart, it is only a ninth.

These laws helped scientists understand more about the motions of planets in the solar system, and of the moon around Earth, among other things.

Other Notable Achievements

:arrow_right: Newton worked a lot with optics, using a prism to separate white light, and became the first person to state that white light was a mixture of many types of rays, rather than a single one.

:arrow_right: He also invented the reflecting telescope, grinding the mirror and building the tube himself. Relying on a mirror rather than lenses alone, the telescope presented a sharper image than refracting telescopes at the time.

:arrow_right: Newton was known to study the most advanced mathematical texts of his time, and eventually laid the groundwork for differential and integral calculus. He united many techniques that had previously been considered separate, such as finding areas, tangents, and the lengths of curves.