After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1693, he retired from research to seek a government position in London. With the publication of the Principia, Newton was recognized as the leading natural philosopher of the age, but his creative career was over. He solved most of the known problems of astronomy and terrestrial (earth-based) physics. By further generalization, he reached his law of universal gravitation: "every piece of matter attracts every other piece with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them." By common consent the Principia is the greatest scientific book ever written. Newton's great insight of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth's gravity extended to the Moon, counterbalancing its centrifugal force.Īfter 18 months of sustained effort, Newton published (1687) The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or Principia, as it is universally known. (By the way, the story that he discovered universal gravitation in 1666 while watching an apple fall from a tree in his garden is a myth. Newton proposed the theory of universal gravitation. He also constructed the first prototype of the largest modern optical telescopes. Newton argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays, that the different types of rays are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray is responsible for producing a given spectral color. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism, he noted the oblong spectrum of colors-red, yellow, green, blue, violet-that formed on the wall opposite. Newton reached the revolutionary conclusion that white light is not a simple, homogeneous entity (as previously believed). At age 27, he became a professor at Trinity. ![]() There, within 18 months he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.ĭuring the plague years Newton laid the foundation for elementary differential and integral Calculus, several years before its independent discovery by the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz. His scientific genius emerged suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of 1665 and he had to return to Lincolnshire. At this stage Newton showed no great talent. Three years later his mother remarried and moved to a nearby village, leaving Newton in the care of his maternal grandmother.Įven though instruction at Cambridge was still dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle, some freedom of study was permitted in the student's third year. His father died several months before he was born. Newton came from a family of modest yeoman farmers. The areas, which revolving bodies describe by radii drawn to an immovable centre of force do lie in the same immovable planes, and are proportional to the times in which they are described.Perhaps the greatest scientific genius of all time, Newton made fundamental contributions to every major area of scientific and mathematical concern to his generation. In the Principia, Newton stated Kepler’s second law as follows: The line joining a planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet travels following an elliptical orbit. However in the Principia the modern language of calculus was absent, and Newton mostly gave proofs in a geometric form of infinitesimal calculus, based on limits of ratios of vanishing small geometric quantities.Īs an example, Kepler’s second law of motion states that: In this important book Newton’s laws of motion are stated, and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion as well as Newton’s law of universal gravitation are derived. Newton published his book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed his own form of calculus a few years after Newton had developed the principles of differential calculus, but Leibniz published his discovery of differential calculus a few years before Newton published his own findings about the subject. ![]() He called his findings and methods about this subject the Fluxional Calculus or also the ‘method of fluxions and fluents’. ![]() Isaac Newton started developing methods of the Differential calculus as early as 1666.
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