Why is Sir Isaac Newton the greatest Briton of all time?

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Why is Sir Isaac Newton the greatest Briton of all time?

Why pick a scientist over someone who has contributed to any other field of endeavour?

Look at the evidence: here is a person who discovered the universal law of why “what goes up must come down”, the explanation of the colours of a rainbow; and a method of calculation with applications in far reaching areas that affect our lives today.

Newton is best known for formulating a universal law of gravitation, however it is unlikely that his ideas stemmed solely from the well-known story of an apple falling on his head whilst sat under a tree. His mathematical researches into planetary motion drew him to the conclusion that that the force of attraction that held planets in their orbits, and the Moon in its orbit around Earth, varied inversely with the square of their distance from the sun. In other words, the nearer you are to a planet the greater its force of gravitational pull. This was his fundamental law of gravitation.

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He discovered that the force of gravity affected all objects in the universe. His laws of motion can be summarised as follows:

 

  1. Everything preserves its motion in a straight line unless its deflected from that course by a force
  2. The rate at which a body travels is in proportion to the force applied on it.
  3. To every action there is an opposite and equal reaction

These laws held true for many years and it was only until Einstein, in the twentieth century, proposed his theory of relativity that we were to have a ...

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