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Isaac Newton Project
By Peace | September 3, 2011
Microcentrum retinerve (Angle-wing Katydids), 20 August 2011
“Isaac Newton saw things in a unique way. He saw patterns. He saw the rhythm of everyday life, sunrise to sunset, spring to summer to autumn to winter. He saw patterns as the sun, moon, and stars steadily marched overhead. He could not touch anything ‘up there’, but still he wondered whether heavenly bodies moved according to the same rules that worked ‘down here’. Isaac built tiny windmills, water clocks, sundials, and kites, and saw patterns in how wind, water and the sun made them work. Through his own eyes and the touch of his fingers, the boy sensed that the universe, both Earth and sky, were one and the same. Isaac started to suspect that a universal ‘something’ makes things go.
When Isaac Newton was a boy, people were just starting to give up the idea that the sun, moon and stars revolved around the earth. At school during the week and in church on Sundays, Isaac might have heard that God had set the earth — and the humans on it — in the middle of the universe. Only a bold few, far away from Woolsthorpe, questioned the core belief that the earth lay in the centre of it all.”
“Isaac Newton was a ‘natural philosopher’ — what we generally call a scientist, or physicist. As Newton studied the system of the world, his physics became the crown jewel of the Scientific Revolution. During this era of change, from about 1500 to 1700, people learned to make observations, do experiments, and develop a formal method to test why things are the way they are. Isaac Newton detected a set of laws — simple but elegant, that linked ‘up there’ with ‘down here’. Of that discovery was born one of the most influential books of all time, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, or the Mathematical Principles of the Natural Philosophy.
Isaac Newton was curious — and a curiosity to others. There was a lot to admire about him — and much to despise. Many downright disliked him. In truth, England’s most brilliant natural philosopher was a very odd man. Newton’s enormous ability to concentrate kept him working for months with nearly no food and next to no sleep. In a few short years, he made astounding discoveries in physics, astronomy, optics, and mathematics — and never told a soul.
The inner life of Sir Isaac Newton is still puzzling. Only Isaac Newton truly knew what orbited in his own head. Isolated, snobbish and jealous, Newton could hold a grudge for a lifetime and he did. Until later in life, he had few friends. At times, he resented his mother, hated his stepfather, and even thought about ways to destroy their house. With such a bitter attitude, Newton could have failed at everything. Instead, Isaac Newton went further in his thinking than anyone else in his generation. He asked,”How can I explain that the heavens and the earth move according to the same simple plan?” Isaac Newton asked the big questions. And he found the answers.”
Though isolated, snobbish and jealous, he almost single-handedly changed the course of scientific advancement and ushered in the Enlightenment. Newton invented the refracting telescope, explained the motion of planets and comets, discovered the multicoloured nature of light, and created calculus, a new field of mathematics. The world might have been a very different place had Newton’s theories and observations not been coaxed out of him by his colleagues.
“In 1936 there arose a clue to Newton’s secretive character. A huge collection of Newton’s manuscripts was auctioned off in England and came into the hands of John Maynard Keynes, one of England’s most famous economists. Keynes took the stacks of papers to read; what they contained surprised him. Some papers revealed that Newton had secretly practiced alchemy. Other papers confirmed that Newton did not believe in the Trinity and was afraid that others might find out. This discovery added a major piece to the puzzle that was Isaac Newton. Researchers now had a much better picture of what he was doing during all his hidden years at Cambridge. This new information convinced Keynes that Newton was not a modern scientist. Instead, Keynes believed that Newton had ‘one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science.” Keynes did not believe that Newton’s work in alchemy had any scientific value at all.
But some scientists today disagree. Chemists are taking a careful look at Newton’s manuscripts in alchemy with fresh eyes. These scientists suspect that Newton was just as interested in the chemical processes he studied in his laboratory as he was in their ‘magical’ nature. They believe that Newton was in fact learning all he could about chemical technology and the behaviour of metals…” ~ Kerrie Logan Hollihan
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November 17th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
[...] Newton’s greatest work was made public in 1687, though he had formulated it some years before. His book, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was so advanced that it was said there were not a dozen men in Europe who could understand it. His three laws laid down the crucial principle of gravitation; that every particle in the universe attracts every other with a force in proportion to its mass. This provided the answer to his question under the apple tree. “What goes up must come down” was a universal principle, applying as well to planets as to apples. The idea that nature could be reduced to such laws was the beginning of modern scientific method. [...]