Newton's depiction of the color wheel in Opticks
Newton's law of cooling holds that the rate at which an object will change temperature is directly proportional to the temperature difference between it \((T_{obj})\) and its environment \((T_{env}):\)
\[\frac{dT_{obj}}{dt} = k (T_{env} - T_{obj}).\]
If the environment remains at constant temperature, this implies that \(T_{obj}\) will asymptotically approach \(T_{env}:\)
\[T_{obj} = T_{env} + \big(T_{obj}(0) - T_{env}\big) e^{-kt},\]
which can be shown using differential equations .
A thermometer reading \(80^\circ F\) is taken outside. Five minutes later the thermometer reads \(60^\circ F\). After another 5 minutes it reads \(50^\circ F\).
What is the temperature outside \((\)in \(^\circ F)?\)
Assume that this process follows Newton's law of cooling.
In addition to his lasting scientific discoveries, Newton also investigated alchemy, the study of turning one element into another. While the techniques that Newton investigated led nowhere, alchemy was in a sense rediscovered in the form of nuclear physics. It is now strictly possible to turn lead into gold using a particle accelerator. However, at an estimated quadrillion dollars per ounce, it would be a poor financial choice [5] .
Newton was devoutly religious and would frequently study the Bible, attempting to make predictions based on its contents. He once wrote that the world would end no sooner than the year 2060 based on the Book of John [6] .
[1] Westfall, Richard. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. p. 143. 1983.
[2] Newton's Generalization of the Binomial Theorem . Retrieved from http://www.wwu.edu/teachingmathhistory/docs/psfile/newton1-student.pdf on February 22, 2016.
[3] Connor, Steve. The Core of Truth Behind Sir Newton's Apple. The Independent. January 17, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-core-of-truth-behind-sir-isaac-newtons-apple-1870915.html on February 22, 2016.
[4] Leibniz's Philosophy of Physics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Published December 17. 2007. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-physics/ on February 22, 2016.
[5] Matson, John. Fact Or Fiction?: Lead Can Be Turned Into Gold. Scientific American. January 31, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/ on February 22, 2016.
[6] Newton, Sir Isaac. Sir Isaac Newton's Daniel and the Apocalypse. 1733. Retrieved from http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/sir-isaac-newtons-daniel-and-the-apocalypse-1733/ on February 22, 2016.
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Sir Isaac Newton
Apart from discovering the cause of the fall of an apple from a tree, that is, the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the most brilliant and greatest physicists of all time. He shaped dramatic and surprising discoveries in the laws of physics that we believe our universe obeys, and hence it changed the way we appreciate and relate to the world around us.
About sir isaac newton, sir isaac newton’s education, awards and achievements, some achievements of isaac newton in brief.
Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in a small village of England called Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. He was an English physicist and mathematician, and one of the important thinkers in the Scientific Revolution.
He discovered the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further laid the foundation of modern physical optics. His famous three laws of Motion in mechanics and the formulation of the laws of gravitation completely changed the track of physics across the globe. He was the originator of calculus in mathematics. A scientist like him is considered an excellent gift by nature to the world of physics.
Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem. He was bestowed with his B.A. degree in the same year.
Isaac Newton held numerous positions throughout his life. In 1671, he was invited to join the Royal Society of London after developing a new and enhanced version of the reflecting telescope.
He was later elected President of the Royal Society (1703). Sir Isaac Newton ran for a seat in Parliament in 1689. He won the election and became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He was also appointed as a Warden of the Mint in 1969. Due to his exemplary work and dedication to the mint, he was chosen Master of the Mint in 1700. After being knighted in 1705, he was known as “Sir Isaac Newton.”
His mind was ablaze with original ideas. He made significant progress in three distinct fields – with some of the most profound discoveries in:
Sir Isaac Newton was the first individual to develop calculus. Modern physics and physical chemistry are almost impossible without calculus, as it is the mathematics of change.
The idea of differentiating calculus into differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equations came from Newton’s fertile mind. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.
The famous apple that he saw falling from a tree led him to discover the force of gravitation and its laws. Ultimately, he realised that the pressure causing the apple’s fall is responsible for the moon to orbit the earth, as well as comets and other planets to revolve around the sun. The force can be felt throughout the universe. Hence, Newton called it the Universal Law of Gravitation .
Newton discovered the equation that allows us to compute the force of gravity between two objects.
Sir Isaac Newton also accomplished himself in experimental methods and working with equipment. He built the world’s first reflecting telescope . This telescope focuses all the light from a curved mirror. Here are some advantages of reflecting telescopes from optics and light –
Isaac Newton also proved that white light is not a simple phenomenon with the help of a glass prism. He confirmed that it is made up of all of the colours of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.
How did newton discover gravity.
Seeing an apple fall from the tree made him think about the forces of nature.
Calculus is the study of differentiation and integration. Calculus explains the changes in values, on a small and large scale, related to any function.
It’s a telescope invented by Newton that uses mirrors to collect and focus the light towards the eyepiece.
Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are:
Watch the full summary of the chapter gravitation class 9.
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Today we celebrate Newton’s birthday as January 4th. Originally, according to the “old” Julien calendar, he was born on Christmas Day in 1642. No matter what the case, Newton lived an amazing life. Here are a few interesting tidbits about this important figure in the scientific revolution:
He never knew his father Isaac, who had died months before he was born. Newton’s own chances of survival seemed slim at the beginning. He was a premature and sickly infant that some thought would not live long. Newton was dealt another difficult blow when he was only three years old. His mother, Hannah, remarried, and his new stepfather, Reverend Barnabas Smith, wanted nothing to do with Isaac. The child was raised by his maternal grandmother for many years. The loss of his mother left Newton with a lingering insecurity that followed him the rest of life.
He felt compelled to jot down a list of his sins in one of his notebooks. Already a student at Trinity College at Cambridge University at the time, he divided these sins into acts that happened before and after Whitsunday 1662, or the seventh Sunday after Easter. Newton took even small lapses quite seriously, such as having unclean thoughts or using the Lord’s name. The list also showed a darker side of Newton, including him making threats to burn his mother and stepfather in their home.
He completed his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College in 1665 and wanted to continue his studies, but an epidemic of the bubonic plague soon altered his plans. The university closed its doors not long after the disease had begun its deadly sweep through London. During the first seven months of the outbreak, roughly 100,000 London residents had died.
Back at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton actually began working on some of his most important theories. It was here that he explored ideas of planetary motion and made progress on his understanding of light and color. Newton may have also made advances in his theory about gravity by observing an apple fall from a tree in his garden.
He was named the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, taking over the post from his mentor Isaac Barrow. Later geniuses to hold this position included Charles Babbage (also known as “the father of computing”), Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking .
He and Robert Hooke , a scientist perhaps best known for his microscopic experiments, had a long-lasting grudge match. Hooke thought Newton’s theory of light was wrong and denounced the physicist’s work. The pair later clashed over planetary motion with Hooke claiming that Newton had taken some of his work and included it in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica .
Newton also argued with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz over who discovered infinitesimal calculus first. Leibniz claimed that Newton had stolen his ideas. The Royal Society launched an investigation into the matter in 1712. With Newton as the president of the society since 1703, it was no surprise that the organization favored Newton in its findings. It was later determined that the two mathematicians had probably made their discoveries independent of each other.
He was elected to Parliament as a representative for Cambridge in 1689 and returned to Parliament from 1701 to 1702. Newton was also active in the economic life of his country. In 1696, he was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint. Newton became the master of the mint three years later and actually changed the English pound from a sterling to gold standard.
He was a famous and wealthy man at the time of his death in 1727, and he was mourned by the nation. His body lay in state in Westminister Abbey, and the Lord Chancellor was one of his pallbearers. Newton was laid to rest in the famed abbey, which also hosts the remains of such monarchs as Elizabeth I and Charles II . His elaborate tomb stands in the abbey’s nave and features a sculpture of reclining Newton with an arm resting on a stack of his great printed works. Other scientists, such as Charles Darwin , were later buried near Newton. The Latin inscription on the tomb praises him for possessing “a strength of mind almost, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own,” according to the official Westminister Abbey website.
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The best books on isaac newton, recommended by william newman.
John Maynard Keynes famously cast Isaac Newton not as the first scientist of the age of reason, but the last of the magicians. How should we interpret the million words he wrote, in secret, on alchemy? What should we make of Newton's heretical religious views? William Newman talks us through the best books for a better understanding of the complex man who was one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Interview by Benedict King
2 a portrait of isaac newton by frank e. manuel, 3 newton and the origins of civilization by jed z. buchwald & mordechai feingold, 4 priest of nature: the religious worlds of isaac newton by rob iliffe, 5 isaac newton and natural philosophy by niccolò guicciardini.
B efore we talk about the books, it might be helpful if you could briefly put Isaac Newton into the context of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. What was Newton’s contribution?
The first of the books about Isaac Newton you’ve chosen is a biography, Never at Rest by Richard Westfall. Is this the biography of Newton to read?
It’s a magisterial book. It’s the only treatment of Newton that really tries to give a detailed study of the totality of his science alongside his religion and his work on alchemy, which covered more than 30 years. It is a magnificent product. It’s somewhat dated now, because it appeared in 1980 and Newton scholarship has recently experienced a remarkable change. Some of the other books that I recommended represent attempts to come to terms with sections of Newton’s work in a deeper way than Westfall was able to do in 1980.
Part of the reason for that is because we now have digital sites like the Newton Project in the UK, which has been editing Newton’s theological and religious writings—his prophetic writings more generally—and then the Chymistry of Isaac Newton site that I am the general editor of at Indiana University, that’s been editing the alchemical papers, Newton’s work on chemistry. Westfall didn’t have access to all of that in 1980. So there’s a lot of material that Westfall wasn’t able to take account of, yet all the same, his work is a magnificent synthesis.
You mentioned Newton’s alchemical papers. His work on alchemy is your area of expertise and the subject of your latest book: Newton the Alchemist. Can his alchemical work be seen as foundational for modern science or was it a dead end?
There is currently a widespread ‘master narrative’ of Newton’s alchemy, though one with which I disagree. The major scholars of the subject at that time, especially Westfall, argued that the impact of alchemy on Newton’s more mainstream science lay in his emphasis on invisible forces that could act over a considerable space, such as gravitational attraction. The reason why a lodestone attracted iron at a distance was because of a hidden sympathy between the two, like the occult sympathies governing magical phenomena. Couldn’t this sort of explanation have stimulated Newton to think of gravity in terms of an immaterial attraction? And wasn’t alchemy based on the idea that some materials react with others because of a similar principle of affinity? Thus the idea that Newton’s involvement with alchemy was part of a quest to understand gravitational attraction was born. Contemporary sources ranging from popular outlets such as Wikipedia to serious scholarly monographs echo this theme.
The next book is A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel, which is also a biography. It starts with his childhood in Lincolnshire and has chapters on his time at Cambridge and then in public life in London. What does it add to the story that Westfall doesn’t?
Manuel’s book was published in 1968, so it’s considerably earlier than Westfall’s. Manuel was a brilliant historian and perhaps an even more brilliant writer. I personally think that, of all the books written on Newton, his is stylistically the most engaging. It’s just a terrific read.
The book attempts to provide a kind of Freudian psychoanalytic study of Newton’s character. He tries to explain Newton’s psychology in terms of his childhood lack of a father. One thing that’s interesting about Manuel—and for that matter Westfall and almost everybody else who has come later—is that all these folks were influenced to some degree, perhaps without even realizing it, by John Maynard Keynes .
There was a famous Sotheby’s auction of Newton manuscripts by his heirs in 1936 and Keynes managed to acquire about half of them. Most of them he subsequently gave to King’s College Cambridge, where they remain, but he wrote an extraordinary article called “ Newton the Man” which was published posthumously in 1947. In it, he argues famously that Newton was not the first scientist of the age of reason, but rather the last of the magicians. He tries to debunk the 18th-century view of Newton as a supreme rationalist and even possibly a deist. [Deists, in the 18th century, were people who believed in a supreme benevolent being who had set the universe in motion, but rejected the notion of an interventionist Christian God]
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This focus on Newton’s non-scientific side leads us neatly to the next of the books you’ve selected, Newton and the Origins of Civilization by Buchwald and Feingold. This is the latest word on Newton’s biblical-chronological studies.
Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold point out that in the 17th century there was a widespread view among alchemists that the totality of ancient mythology was just encoded alchemy. There are many examples one could give, but I’ll stick with one that comes up in Newton’s “Index Chemicus”, a very long concordance of the alchemical writings that he read. He talks about Osiris, the Egyptian god, as being a sort of salt. He’s relying there on a 17th-century alchemist named Michael Maier, who interpreted Egyptian mythology as encoded alchemy. Maier argued that these stories about the Egyptian gods and goddesses and so forth were actually recipes that were dressed up as though the Egyptians were talking about actual divinities. That was the view of Maier and Newton interprets Maier in his own work on alchemy.
But in other writings on chronology Newton interprets Osiris literally as a god, though in a certain, restricted sense. Newton in his chronological writings worked with Euhemerus’s interpretation of mythology, in which the gods and goddesses of the ancients were originally human beings who were then treated as heroes and catasterised, so to speak, into the heavens as divinities. In other words, his chronological theory based on Egyptian mythology runs directly at odds with the alchemical theory of ancient mythology that he’s taking from Michael Maier. These are very distinct ways of looking at mythology. They are in fact contradictory and mutually exclusive.
I would argue that Newton did not himself believe that the ancients were encoding alchemy in their mythology. Instead, I suspect he thought people like Michael Maier were using mythology as a way of writing alchemical riddles that then had to be decoded if one was going to carry their alchemy into practice.
Part of the book is about the attacks on Newton in England and France and the demise of the science of chronology. Could you tell us a bit about that?
Newton was trying to build his chronology of the ancient world through studying the Bible and using what he knew about mythology. He really thought that you could extract actual dates out of biblical and mythological literature, with the help of astronomy and other scientific tools that he had at his disposal. For example, he tries to date Jason and the Argonauts’ adventures according to what he knew about the precession of the equinoxes. There’s a precession of one degree every 72 years, so he was able to work backwards from what he knew about the position of the equinoctial colures in the 1680s and 1690s and later.
So he’s incorporating astronomical material as a way of pinpointing the dates that he gets from ancient literature. That fell out of style after Newton’s death and by the 19th century it was considered rather ridiculous.
Another key feature of the book is the fact that Feingold and Buchwald have a very different view of Newton’s anti-trinitarianism than the one you get in other writers like Westfall.
So Newton didn’t believe in the Trinity, which was a highly controversial and dangerous position at at that time. In what way do Feingold and Buchwald offer a different view?
Again we need to go back to Keynes. Keynes thought that Newton was a heretic, that he is an anti-trinitarian from the early 1670s, if not earlier. That position has been picked up by other people, for example Westfall. The evidence for it is primarily the fact that Newton refused to take holy orders in 1675. Entering holy orders was a condition of his fellowship at Trinity College. He managed to get a special dispensation and, according to Westfall, Keynes, and various others, the reason why he refused to take holy orders was because he was effectively a crypto-heretic and would not agree to swear that the Trinity—in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same ‘substance’—was a legitimate way of interpreting Christianity.
How does that fit with the next book, Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature, because he talks at some length about Newton’s heterodox anti-trinitarianism?
Iliffe takes a noncommittal position in Priest of Nature . There’s no question, of course, that Newton was a heretic. The problem is when did he commit to that idea? Most of his papers on his theological views date from, at the earliest, the 1680s. So there really isn’t much evidence from the 1670s. Iliffe spends a lot of time in his book arguing that Newton came out of a Puritan background and that he was intensely religious from day one. He argues that Newton was heavily influenced by an apothecary named Clark with whom he lived in Grantham when he was a student there at the King’s School, and that the origins of his later heretical views are an outgrowth of this early and intense religiosity.
Newton then entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. Among his papers is a list of his sins that he wrote out in 1662, some of which seem quite trivial, like stealing cherry cobs from a friend in Grantham. He also repents of having wanted to burn down the house of his mother and his stepfather, a guy named Barnabas Smith. To Iliffe these admissions provide evidence of a highly Puritanical young Newton, whereas Feingold and Buchwald regard them as aberrations and point to the relative absence of religious themes in Newton’s surviving student notebooks.
In terms of sins, threatening to burn down his stepfather’s house sounds like quite a serious one.
What happened was that Newton’s father died directly before he was born in 1642. His mother remarried the rector of a nearby town named Barnabas Smith, but Barnabas Smith was not interested in having the infant Newton in his house. So, although the house was only a couple of miles away, Newton was raised by his grandmother rather than his mother. She lived with Barnabas Smith for seven years and then he died too. Newton was eleven when Barnabas Smith died and his mother came back to live with him.
This is the basis for Manuel’s psychoanalysis. He claims that Newton was essentially angry throughout his entire life because his mother had been snatched away from him by Barnabas Smith.
Can you tell us about his broader heresy: he wasn’t just anti-trinitarian, was he? He thought the church fathers were fraudulent as well. And he was a strong believer that religious pluralism was a good thing. Is that a fair characterization?
Yes, but it’s more complicated. On the one hand, Newton wanted to claim that in order to be a good Christian all you had to do was profess that Jesus was the Son of God, the Father, and that love was the guiding principle, so basic tenets of Christianity. On the other hand, he was vehemently anti-Catholic and this comes out very clearly in his manuscripts. He claims the Nicene Creed, where the Trinity becomes an official part of Christianity, was a “great Apostasy,” and that behind it was a diabolical influence that converted Christianity essentially into a kind of paganism.
So he was vehemently opposed to the Trinity and to the early upholders of the Trinity like the Church father, Athanasius. And he writes that monks are perverts and goes on like this time and time again throughout his manuscripts. So on the one hand he’s very open to a simple view of Christianity, on the other he thinks Catholicism is evil.
And is his objection to the Trinity that it has no biblical warrant?
The final book you’ve chosen is by Niccolo Guicciardini and it’s called Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy . It’s a much more recent publication. What does this book add to the picture?
Guicciardini’s is the first synthetic book that really tries to incorporate what you could call the new Newton scholarship. He has read and analysed Newton and the Origin of Civilization , Buchwald and Feingold’s work. He’s also quite familiar with Iliffe’s work. He knows some of my work on Newton’s alchemy and he really does try to come to a new synthesis. You get a picture of Newton not so much as a kind of psychopath—that you get in Manuel and to some degree Westfall—but rather Newton as a kind of ‘Caltech geek,’ as Mordechai Feingold has put it. He is somebody who’s on the spectrum, but is not outright crazy.
To what extent did Newton’s achievements in natural philosophy lead him or others to dismiss the views he held on biblical literalism and chronology?
I would say that Newton’s influence in natural philosophy ultimately led away from the very things that he was trying to push not just in chronology, but also in religion more generally. For example, the second edition of the Principia , his major work on gravitation and so forth, includes something called the “General Scholium”, which is an attempt to argue for the necessity of God as the being that orders the universe. That’s absent from the first edition of the Principia . Newton was clearly worried that his natural philosophical work was going to lead, if not directly to atheism, then to a kind of disregard for religion. So you see him inserting these attempts to link his natural philosophical ideas to the necessity of religion in various different works of his.
Another example would be in the 1717 edition of the Optics . The Optics contains so-called “queries” that are hypothetical and Newton frames them in the form of questions. The last query makes a strong argument against Descartes’s idea that there is a fixed amount of motion in the universe, that motion is just getting transferred from one microscopic corpuscle to another, and so that motion could go on forever. Newton argues directly against that and for the necessity of what he calls “active principles”, which ultimately clearly go back to God. He thinks there’s an active principle behind gravity, that there’s an active principle behind magnetism and that there’s an active principle behind electricity. Clearly he’s trying to link these natural phenomena back to the necessity for the existence of a divinity.
So he was very worried about this and he was right to be so. Ultimately the Newtonian world picture did make it unnecessary to invoke direct divine causation. This is one of the reasons why Newton doesn’t like Descartes, because he felt that Cartesianism would lead to atheism. But ultimately the same thing could be said of his own natural philosophy.
Did he address that directly?
In the “General Scholium” he argues very clearly not only that there is a God, but that God is the Lord, the ruler of all. He has a very Old Testament view of God, which is obviously related to his unitarianism. He thinks that Jesus was the son of God, but Jesus nonetheless is not part of God in the way that the trinitarians believe.
There’s another issue that is worth mentioning and that is the issue of compartmentalization of Newton’s thought, a topic that Iliffe discusses. Newton was essentially brilliant at everything that he undertook seriously. Obviously, he was particularly successful in the realm of natural philosophy, what we would call physics, but the same can be said of his religious writings. They really are highly original and extremely ingenious, even if you don’t believe them. The same can be said of his alchemical writing. He was making compounds that people may or may not have discovered even today.
This leads to a different question, which is, how did all of these different pursuits integrate or did they? I hinted at this earlier with the issue of chronology and alchemy and the interpretation of mythology, and how it seems that Isaac Newton was keeping the alchemical and the historical interpretations of mythology quite distinct.
The issue of compartmentalization has really come to the fore as a result of more and more rigorous scholarship on these different aspects of Newton’s thought. These works that I’ve recommended to you, in particular Buchwald and Feingold and Iliffe, are carrying out research on particular aspects of Isaac Newton’s thought in more and more detail. And so the question of how to deal with all of these different sides of Newton has become really very problematic. Guicciardini deals with this I think rather successfully, but nonetheless questions remain as to how you approach this extreme compartmentalization. Is there a relationship between Newton’s ideas on physics and his ideas on alchemy, for example, and if so, what is its precise character?
Even if Newton hadn’t found the unifying factor amongst all these things, Newton must have thought there must be some coherence between them.
I’m not sure that’s right. I don’t know. The problem is you have this guy who is clearly an out-of-control genius. Isaac Newton gets interested in something and he pursues it to the nth degree. He almost can’t control himself. It’s like he can’t turn his brain off. So he just happens to be incredibly good at almost anything he does. Let me give you a parallel example from personal experience. I had a colleague years ago, at Indiana University, who was a brilliant philosopher of science. He was also an Epicurean cook and he also was so good at playing the French horn that he was able to play it in an orchestra in a major city. Did he think all those things were connected? I’m not so sure.
If someone believes in a God who’s the author of the universe, then it implies there must be a coherence between all areas of knowledge. I suppose that’s why I thought he must he must have felt there was some sort of coherence between all these things—some underlying laws.
I think that’s true, but at such an abstract and general level that it might not even touch Isaac Newton’s actual work. For instance, Newton’s view of Christianity ultimately boiled down to very general precepts such as ‘Love thy neighbour,’ ‘Profess the reality of Jesus Christ as the Son of the Father,’ and that kind of thing. So all of the incredibly detailed work that he did in interpreting prophecy, for example, or in writing against the Trinity, may not really have interacted with those very general precepts in any significant way. Isaac Newton was a virtuoso at practically everything he undertook, and virtuosity in multiple areas of endeavour need not imply their interconnectedness.
The problem of assuming an underlying unity to Isaac Newton’s thought also emerges from an examination of his alchemy. The issue with alchemy is problematic because alchemical writings are often filled with references to God. And the reason for that I think is because alchemists themselves were constantly under threat of being accused of counterfeiting and so forth. So they tried to build up the picture of themselves as extremely religious people. I really think that’s the case. When [the Newton historian] Betty Jo Dobbs interpreted that material in his manuscripts she came to the conclusion that, ‘Yes, of course, this is really all about Isaac Newton’s religion.’ Yet there’s actually very little evidence to support Dobbs’s view, because if you look at the work Isaac Newton wrote on theology, there are practically no references to alchemy. In reality it appears that he kept these topics in fairly watertight compartments. So as historians we have to be very, very careful not to make assumptions. Typically we want to say all of these things are related, but maybe not. They may simply reflect virtuoso performances in a variety of unrelated or only loosely related areas rather than manifestations of a single underlying quest for unity.
August 5, 2019
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Isaac Newton (born December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], 1727, London) was an English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and ...
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist who developed influential theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics. Years of research culminated with the 1687 ...
In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England, making him Sir Isaac Newton. Early Life and Family Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England.
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 - 20 March 1726/27) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical ...
Isaac Newton quotes. "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica verita." (Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.) —Written in the margin of a notebook ...
Biography Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Issac Newton (1643- 1726) was an English mathematician, physicist and scientist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time, developing new laws of mechanics, gravity and laws of motion. His work Principia Mathematica ( 1687) laid the framework for the Scientific Revolution of the ...
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is best known for having invented the calculus in the mid to late 1660s (most of a decade before Leibniz did so independently, and ultimately more influentially) and for having formulated the theory of universal gravity — the latter in his Principia, the single most important work in the transformation of early modern natural philosophy into modern physical science.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist widely regarded as the single most important figure in the Scientific Revolution for his three laws of motion and universal law of gravity. Newton's laws became a fundamental foundation of physics, while his discovery that white light is made up of a rainbow of colours revolutionised the field of optics.
I INTRODUCTION. Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669.
Biography of Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist. Sir Isaac Newton (Jan. 4, 1643-March 31, 1727) was a superstar of physics, math, and astronomy even in his own time. He occupied the chair of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England, the same role later filled, centuries later, by Stephen Hawking.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was one of the world's most famous and influential thinkers. He founded the fields of classical mechanics, optics and calculus, among other contributions to algebra and thermodynamics. His concept of a universal law--one that applies everywhere and to all things--set the bar of ambition for physicists since. Newton held the position of Lucasian Professor of ...
Fellow and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. At age 24, in 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge, where events moved quickly. First he was elected as a fellow of Trinity College. A year later, in 1668, he was awarded an M.A. degree. A year after that, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Isaac Barrow, resigned and Newton was ...
A drawing of Sir Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism.; Photo: Apic/Getty Images The next time you look up at a rainbow in the sky, you can thank Newton for helping us first understand ...
NEWTON, ISAAC(b. Woolsthorpe, England, 25 December 1642; d. London, England, 20 March 1727)mathematics, dynamics, celestial mechanics [1], astronomy, optics, natural philosophy.Isaac Newton was born a posthumous child, his father having been buried the preceding 6 October. ... Sir Isaac Newton. Newton, Isaac. gale. views updated May 17 2018 ...
A genius with dark secrets. Isaac Newton changed the way we understand the Universe. Revered in his own lifetime, he discovered the laws of gravity and motion and invented calculus. He helped to ...
Sir Isaac Newton's Education, Awards and Achievements. Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem.
He never knew his father Isaac, who had died months before he was born. Newton's own chances of survival seemed slim at the beginning. He was a premature and sickly infant that some thought ...
Born: January 4, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England. Died: March 31, 1727 in London, England. Best known for: Defining the three laws of motion and universal gravitation. Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller. Biography: Isaac Newton is considered one of the most important scientists in history. Even Albert Einstein said that Isaac Newton was the smartest ...
Sir Isaac Newton at 46 in Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait.. The following article is part of a biography of Sir Isaac Newton, the English mathematician and scientist, author of the Principia.It portrays the years after Newton's birth in 1642, his education, as well as his early scientific contributions, before the writing of his main work, the Principia Mathematica, in 1685.
Video summary. Dick, Dom and Fran Scott from 'Absolute Genius' describe the life and scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton. He was born in 1643 at a time when the laws of nature were a mystery. He ...
1 Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton by Richard S. Westfall. 2 A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank E. Manuel. 3 Newton and the Origins of Civilization by Jed Z. Buchwald & Mordechai Feingold. 4 Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe. 5 Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy by Niccolò Guicciardini.