Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day, 1642 (new date: 4^th of January 1643) in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. His father died before he was born and his mother left him with her new husband while he was still a toddler. His grandfather took care of him and Isaac grew at his farm up. After he attended an elementary school he was sent to a grammar school in Grantham, Lincolnshire. He liked it to experiment e.g. he tried to determine the wind velocity of a storm by jumping in- and against the direction of the wind and compared the results with the results at zero wind.

Two teachers, which saw this "sober, silent, thinking lad" begged his relatives to send him to university rather than work on the family farm.

So in 1661, at the age of 18 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He studies mathematics, physics and classic languages. At this time he started to question the over 1300 years old wisdom of Aristotle. Gravity doesn't exist, things just had a "tendency" to fall to the ground. When his fellow students copied mindlessly the scripts, which they got from their teachers, Newton opened his notebook and wrote "various philosophic questions" and listed everything of what he thought it has to be questioned and criticized, from why things fly through the air to the cause of tides.

From 1666 to 1667 the university was closed because of the outbreak of the plague.

In this two years he was forced to stay at home, but while others did nothing, Isaac used that time to think about things like: "Why do apples fall to the ground?"

The legend says that while Newton was sitting in his mother's garden under an apple tree, an apple dropped down on his head and he came up with the law of gravity. 

"Maybe, Newton thought, the same force that pulled the apple to the ground also pulls the moon towards the Earth. If that were true then it should be possible to work out the strength of gravity on Earth by studying the motion of the moon."  

He set up his own formulas and tried to calculate the gravity, but he didn't know the radius of the Earth so his answer was just nearly right. Close, thought Newton, but not exact. So he putted gravity temporarily aside and thought about optics instead.

In experiments with prisms and lenses, Isaac solved the mystery of where colour comes from. Aristotle thought that white light was somehow "corrupted" and the result was the colour.

Newton showed that it was not the result of "corruption", but the splitting up of white light in a normally invisible rainbow of constitutions.

In 1667 he went back to Cambridge University and he had all the elements for a total scientific revolution in hand - he had uncovered the foundations of a theory of gravity, a whole new understanding of light and the basics of calculus which is one of the most important mathematical toolkit we use today.

In 1669 he became the successor of his teacher, Isaac Barow, a professor at Cambridge.

At the age of 30 Newton went to public with his explanation of colours and walked with this into troubles. Instead of acceptance of his discoveries, he got the target of criticism. The tedious questioning, especially Robert Hook, a self-styled expert in optics, showed an other side of the genius Newton: His incredible delicate ego.

He hated discussions about his work.

1687 he published his book "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica".

After a psychological illness from summer 1693 his genius of his earlier years was gone. This was definitely the end of his scientific career. He took up the position of "Master of Royal Mint" in 1698 where he reformed the national coinage for which he was knighted in 1705 and got the title "Sir".

Newton died on 31^st of May in 1727 at the age of 84 in London and lies now in Westminster Abby.

Once Newton said about himself:

"I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me"