The life and work of Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton has been considered one of the most outstanding scientists of all time.

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The life and work of Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton has been considered one of the most outstanding scientists of all time.  He has often been portrayed as a man who saw the world in absolutes and adopted an image of a scientist who after centuries of ignorance and superstition gave rise to a time of empirical science in a modern world.  However various sources have personified Newton in a different light.  There is evidence to suggest that Newton was a seeker of a synthesis of all knowledge and believed that there was a unified theory of the principles of the universe.  It also suggests the he believed that this synthesis was once known to mankind.   Newton spent his life looking for this combination of complex ideas not only through mathematics and physics but through the pursuit of alchemy, chronology, and theology, always seeking to include God in all his investigations.  This essay will look at the journey of Newton’s life, from his early years to his death, his discoveries through his life in mathematics and physics, his relationships and feuds with other scientists.  It will also at how Newton’s findings formed the basis of mathematics for the next three hundred years.

In the seventeenth century, science was in its infancy.  Many people, including educated people still believed in witchcraft and sorcery.  Almost nothing was known about the fundamental principles behind the way many things worked.  According to White (1990) most people believed that the universe was controlled by an all powerful deity and many observed events and phenomena were caused by spirits and inexplicable mystical forces.  There were no proper theories of   mechanics or ideas about how and why things moved the way they did.  Scientist new little about light and how it behaves, and subjects like chemistry and medicine were based more on magic than science.  Rankin (1993) reports that most of the world still held the view of Aristotle, who, over two thousand years previous, believed that the earth was unmoving and the centre of the universe.  Yet by the end of Isaac Newton’s life he would have the answer to all these questions and completely alter the way that people would perceive the world.

Early life and education

Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in the manor house in Woolsthorpe, three months after his father’s death.  According to Rankin (1993) he was born so little that he was not expected to survive the night.  When Newton was only three years old his mother, Hannah Newton, remarried.  Her new Husband was a wealthy clergy man, Barnabas Smith, who was rector at the village of South Witham.  The rector decreed that Hannah was to leave her son to live with his grandmother, while she moved with him to Witham a few miles away.  White (1991 pg11), states that, Newton had recalled to close friends many years later, that he felt only jealously and hatred for his new parent.  Meadows (1987), describes these events as the key factors in shaping Newton’s character.   He states that Newton never got on with his grandmother.  Friends and collogues very rarely heard him speak of her when he remembered his childhood.  Some people have said that the trauma he experienced over his mothers marriage scarred him for life and accounted for his melancholy as a teenager and emotional upsets in later life.  

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It was expected that Newton would maintain the family farm. It was considered that he did not need an education and he was consequently removed from school at Grantham.  Nevertheless, according to Toohey (2004) it soon became patently clear that Isaac was not cut out for this type of occupation and due to his uncles persistence he was sent back to Grantham in preparation for his attendance at trinity college, Cambridge.  It was here that Newton lodged with the local Apothecary.    According to Meadows (1987) it was at this time that Newton was inspired by two books that ...

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