Of all of the early scientists of the scientific revolution I am most impressed by Sir Isaac Newton.
Of all of the early scientists of the scientific revolution I am most impressed by Sir Isaac Newton. Newton is important because he contributed more to the development of science than any other person in history. Isaac Newton is remembered as the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. His discoveries about physics, light, and mathematics changed the world. I am even more impressed by what he overcame to reach his goals. He came to surpass even his own expectations. I am more impressed with the man than with the discoveries. So many people in history are viewed as larger than life, which can be dehumanizing. Newton was very much a human with very human emotions. Isaac Newton came from a family of farmers. His father dies three months before he was born. Isaac's father was a wealthy landowner but was uneducated and could not even sign his own name. Isaac did not lead a privileged life; he was basically treated like an orphan. Isaac had a very unhappy childhood. Isaac is only ten when his grandfather, James, dies and James left him nothing in his will. There is also no doubt that Isaac felt very bitter towards his mother and stepfather. When
he was reflecting on his sins at age 19 he wrote: "Threatening my father and mother to burn them and the house over them." Upon the death of his stepfather, Isaac lived with his extended family including his mother, grandmother, half-brother and two half-sisters. Shortly after this time Isaac began attending the Free Grammar School in Garntham. His school reports described him as "idle" and "inattentive". His mother, a lady of wealth and property, thought that Isaac was the right person to manage her estate and removed him from school. Soon Isaac showed no interest in managing the estate so ...
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he was reflecting on his sins at age 19 he wrote: "Threatening my father and mother to burn them and the house over them." Upon the death of his stepfather, Isaac lived with his extended family including his mother, grandmother, half-brother and two half-sisters. Shortly after this time Isaac began attending the Free Grammar School in Garntham. His school reports described him as "idle" and "inattentive". His mother, a lady of wealth and property, thought that Isaac was the right person to manage her estate and removed him from school. Soon Isaac showed no interest in managing the estate so an Uncle convinced his mother to let him continue his education. Isaac was allowed to return to the Free Grammar School to complete his education. From there he went to Trinity College Cambridge in 1661. He was older than most of the other students. Despite the fact that his mother was very well off he was entered as a sizar, a student who receives and allowance toward college expenses for acting as a servant to another student. Isaac's goal at Cambridge was a law degree. Education at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle. He also studied the philosophy of Gassendi, Hobbes, Descartes, and Boyle. He was attracted to the mechanics of Coperican astronomy of Galileo. He also studied Keeper’s Optics. Isaac wrote his thoughts in a journal which he called Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae (Certain Philosophical Questions). It is an account of how Newton's brilliant ideas were already forming. The text was headed with a Latin statement which read "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth" presenting himself as a free thinker from an early age. In 1663, Isaac's awareness in mathematics began when he bought a book at a fair in Cambridge and found that he could not understand the mathematics in it. Attempting to read a trigonometry book, he found that he lacked the knowledge of geometry and so decided to read Euclid's Elements. Isaac Newton was elected a scholar on April 28, 1664 and received his bachelor's degree the following year. His scientific genius had still not emerged, but it did so when the bubonic plague closed the university in the summer of 1665 and he had to return home. He began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. While Isaac remained at home he laid the foundations for differential and integral calculus. His method of fluxions was based on his insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it. With differentiation as the basic operation, he created straightforward analytical methods that unified many separate techniques to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. Isaac had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colors that was formed. He argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a different spectral color. Isaac was led by this reasoning to the erroneous conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration. He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope. Isaac Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. However he did not have a correct understanding of the mechanics of circular motion. 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, he deduced the inverse-square law. Over a year later (1687) he published the Principia. The Principia is recognized as the greatest scientific book ever written. Newton analyzed the motion of bodies in resisting and non-resisting media under the action of centripetal-forces. The results were applied to orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendulums, and free-fall near Earth. He further demonstrated that the planets were attracted toward the Sun by a force varying as the inverse square of the distance and generalized that all heavenly bodies mutually attract one another. As people came to understand the importance of his many discoveries Isaac received many honors. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted him, Sir Isaac Newton. It was the first knighthood for scientific discoveries rather than deeds on the battlefield or in government. When Isaac Newton died in 1727, the poor country boy from Woolsthorpe was buried in a plot reserved for a king.
