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Isaac Newton (Alan Sinder)

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Worth pondering upon: Enoch Root said neither young Newton or Leibniz was the one to Clarke.

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Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), a scientist, astronomer, and mathematician, invented a new kind of mathematics, discovered the secrets of light and color, and showed how the universe is held together. Described as "one of the greatest names in the history of human thought" because of his great contributions to mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Clearly he thought more highly of himself than did many and in the end may retain his fame more because of his spats with other gifted polymaths.NewtSparkyMW.jpg
Isaac as a Gentleman
He's wearing a sword

Newton discovered how the universe is held together through his theory of gravitation. He opened the secrets of light and color. He invented a branch of mathematics, calculus, also invented independently by Gottfried Leibniz, a mathematician. Newton made these three discoveries within 18 months from 1665 to 1667 - his miracle year.

The Theories of Motion and Gravitation

Newton said the concept of a universal force came to him while he was alone in the country. He had been forced to flee there because of the outbreak of plague in the city of Cambridge. During this time, Newton suddenly realized that one and the same force pulls an object to earth and keeps the moon in its orbit. He found that the force of universal gravitation makes every pair of bodies in the universe attract each other. The force depends on: 1. the amount of matter in the bodies being attracted and, 2. the distance between the bodies.

The force by which the earth attracts or pulls a large rock is greater than the pull on a small pebble because the rock contains more matter. The earth's pull is called the weight of the body. With this theory, Newton explained why a rock weighs more than a pebble.

He also proved that many types of motion are due to one kind of force. He showed that the gravitational force of the sun keeps the planets in their orbits, just as the gravitational force of the earth attracts the moon. The falling of objects on earth seems different from the motion of the moon because the objects fall straight down to the earth, while the moon moves approximately in a circle around the earth. Newton showed that the moon falls just like an object on earth. If the moon did not fall constantly toward the earth, it would move in a straight line and fly off at a tangent to its orbit. Newton calculated how much the moon falls in each second and found the distance is 1/3600 of the distance an object on earth falls in a second. The moon is 60 times as far from the earth's center as such an object. The force of the earth on an object 60 times as far away as another object is 1/3600.

Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)

Newton concluded his first investigations on gravity and motion in 1665 and 1666. Nothing was heard of them for nearly 20 years. His original theory had been based on an inaccurate measurement of the earth's radius, and Newton realized differences between the theory and the facts. Although he later learned the true value of the earth's size, he was not led to complete his investigation or to produce a book for publication.

Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren, were discussing what law of force produced the visible motion of the planets around the sun in 1684. They could not solve this problem. Halley went to Cambridge to ask Newton about it where he found Newton in possession of complete proof of the law of gravity. Halley persuaded Newton to publish his findings. Halley paid all the expenses, corrected the proofs, and laid aside his own work to publish Newton's discoveries. Newton's discoveries on the laws of motion and theories of gravitation were published in 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). This work is considered one of the greatest single contributions in the history of science. It includes Newton's laws of motion and theory of gravitation. It was the first book to contain a unified system of scientific principles explaining what happens on earth and in the heavens. It is referred to as the Principia.

The publication of the Principia in 1687 secured Newton’s intellectual reputation. It was the culmination of almost three years of frantic effort by Newton and by Edmond Halley, who saw the book through the press in London. Although many of the ideas in the Principia can be traced back as far as the 1660s, the form in which they were set out and the conclusions that were drawn from them were very much the product of the years 1684–7.

In August 1684, Halley told Newton about a conversation that he had had at the Royal Society concerning planetary motion. Anxious that others might take the credit for discoveries that he felt were already his, Newton went to work to prove his theories of celestial dynamics. Drafts were composed and rushed to Halley in London to indicate Newton’s priority. Copies of some of them were later deposited in the University Library as if they had been his Cambridge classroom lectures. Yet, despite the haste, these manuscripts do show that Newton had indeed solved the principal problems of celestial mechanics then. The final text of the Principia set out his mature thoughts about the operation -- yet not the cause of gravity. Structured to follow the rules of scientific reasoning that Newton developed, the Principia nevertheless baffled many readers, who complained that not even its author could possibly understand it. In the eyes of many of his most distinguished contemporaries, his achievement was qualified by the failure to provide a properly philosophical account of gravity.

Calculations that Halley provided for Newton eventually made their way into the second edition of the Principia. Halley’s work also encouraged Newton to reconsider the effects of the gravitation of the planets on cometary orbits. It was thus related to the ideas that Newton put forward in his treatment of the motion of the moon. Newton’s reliance on Halley is revealing in other ways illustrating the extent to which Newton by the 1690s depended on younger men to enforce the mathematical rigor for which he had once been famous. Which highlights the collaborative nature of the final Newtonian synthesis despite the very solitary methods of Newton’s own original work. Newton’s acceptance of Halley’s assistance draws attention to some of the problems that confronted him in the 1690s.

In that decade of theological paranoia, when accusations of atheism or deism were rife, Halley’s friendship was to some extent a liability because of the reputation for immoral behaviour that he had acquired. This may account for Newton’s reluctance to support Halley in the contest for the Savilian chair of astronomy at Oxford in 1691, when David Gregory was elected. Yet the readiness to court controversy displayed by Newton’s younger friends in general helps to explain why he retreated from publishing many of the bolder statements that he had advanced in private during the 1690s, despite the success of the Principia.

Newton could describe the effects of gravitation but he could not explain them adequately. Newton’s protective friend, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, felt that he had the answer and, for a time in the early 1690s, it seemed possible that he might produce a new edition of the Principia. Others of Newton’s growing band of young disciples, particularly David Gregory, also discussed his plans to augment the work. Still Newton's laws of motion summarized and extended the work of Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. His law of universal gravitation explained both Galileo's law of falling bodies and Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion. To perform some of his calculations, Newton invented a new form of mathematics, now called calculus, but what he referred to as fluxions.

  • To Newton, “second inventors have no right,” resolution of that priority dispute required for him a "fight to the death", not unlike a Roman gladiator.
  • Newton was a consummate master of using surrogates, continuing the struggle even after Leibniz’s burial in in 1716.
  • Why such a diverse group of Royal Society Fellows, some of them of major distinction allowed themselves to be so blatantly manipulated by Newton may have been explained by Enoch Root.

Light and color

His discoveries in optics were equally spectacular. Newton's discoveries explained why bodies appear to be colored. The discoveries also laid the foundation for the science of spectrum analysis. This science allows us to determine the chemical composition, temperature, and even the speed of such hot, glowing bodies as a distant star or an object heated in a laboratory.

Newton claimed that he had discovered the theory of light and colours in the early months of 1666. He demonstrated his idea that white light could be split into a spectrum of seven differently coloured and differently refrangible rays through a series of experiments with prisms. Newton concluded that sunlight is a mixture of light of all colors displayed by passing a beam of sunlight through a glass prism and studied the colors that were produced. A green sweater illuminated by sunlight looks green because it largely reflects the green light in the sun and absorbs most of the other colors. If the green sweater were lighted by a red light or any color light not containing green, it would not appear green.

The study of light led Newton to consider constructing a new type of telescope in which a reflecting mirror was used instead of a combination of lenses. Although Newton described his optical theories in the first series of his Lucasian lectures, it seems likely that he had few hearers. His ideas reached a larger audience as a consequence of his design for a reflecting telescope. Isaac Barrow helped to communicate this to the Royal Society in 1671 and Newton then submitted a paper on light and colors to the Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Newton's first reflecting telescope was 15 centimeters long. Newton saw the satellites of Jupiter through it. Newton published his results in these experiments and studies as Opticks in 1704.

Early Life

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642 OS, at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in southwestern Lincolnshire. In his early years Lincolnshire was a battle-ground of the civil wars, in which the challenging of authority in government and religion was dividing England's population. Also of significance for his early development were circumstances within his family. He was born after the death of his father, and in his third year his mother married the rector of a neighboring parish, leaving Isaac at Woolsthorpe in the care of his grandmother.

After a rudimentary education in local schools, he was sent at the age of 12 to the King's School in Grantham, where he lived in the home of an apothecary named Clark. It was from Clark's stepdaughter that Newton's biographer William Stukeley learned many years later of the boy's interest in her father's chemical library and laboratory and of the windmill run by a live mouse, the floating lanterns, sundials, and other mechanical contrivances Newton built to amuse her. Although she married someone else and he never married, she was the one woman for whom Newton ever seems to have had a romantic attachment.

At birth Newton was heir to the modest estate which, when he came of age, he was expected to manage. But during a trial period midway in his course at King's School, it became apparent that farming was not his métier. In 1661, at the age of 19, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There the questioning of long-accepted beliefs was beginning to be apparent in new attitudes toward man's environment, expressed in the attention given to mathematics and science.Newton-telescopeMW.jpg
Two Views of Newton's Telescope
The Light Gathering Parabolic Mirror is 2" Wide

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1665, apparently without special distinction, Newton stayed on for his master's; but an epidemic of the plague caused the university to close. Newton was back at Woolsthorpe for 18 months in 1666 and 1667. During this brief period he performed the basic experiments and apparently did the fundamental thinking for all his subsequent work on gravitation and optics and developed for his own use his system of calculus. Newton became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669. He lectured once a week on arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, optics, or other mathematical subjects. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1672.

The Public Newton

Newton became active in public life after the publication of Principia. He became the Cambridge University member of Parliament in 1689 and held his seat until Parliament dissolved the following year. He became warden of the mint in 1696. He was appointed master of the mint in 1699, a position he held until his death.

In 1699, he also became a member of the Royal Society council and an associate of the French Academy. He was elected to Parliament again from the university in 1701. He left Cambridge and settled permanently in London in 1701. He became president of the Royal Society in 1703 and was reelected annually until his death. Queen Anne knighted Newton in 1705. He died in 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

[According to Gribbon's Science: A History] - Newton's Knighthood was a tawdy political action not related to his works in Science.

Personal characteristics

Newton was so convinced of his supernatural powers that he once constructed a virtual anagram of his name (Isaacus Neutonus) in terms of “God’s holy one” -- (Jeova sanctus unus). Perhaps as he viewed himself as without peer in his era, Newton did not enjoy the scientific arguments that arose from his discoveries. He did stoop to using catspaws and proxies to defend his priority position. New scientific theories are opposed violently when they are first announced, and Newton's did not escape criticism. He was so sensitive to such criticism that his friends had to plead with him to publish his most valuable discoveries. Frank E. Manuel wrote in one of the great Newton biographies that “the violence, acerbity, and uncontrolled passion of Newton’s attacks, albeit directed into socially approved channels, are almost always out of proportion with the warranted facts and character of the situations” of Newton’s obsessively competitive nature

Newton was a bachelor who spent only part of his time studying mathematics, physics, and astronomy. A student of alchemy who made many alchemical experiments, he also spent a great deal of his time on questions of theology and Biblical chronology. Isaac showed interest in Noah, and Jewish legal and religious development; He was one of the many who misinterpreted the suffering servant in Daniel's prophecies regarding the Book of Revelation. His students considered him very distracted as a professor. Newton was generous to his nephews and nieces, as well to his publishers and lesser scientists who helped him in his work.

Albert Einstein rejected Newton's explanation of universal gravitation but not the fact of its operation. He said that his own work would have been impossible without Newton's discoveries. He also said that the concepts Newton developed "are even today still guiding our thinking in physics."

Summing up Michael White's The Last Sorcerer

Isaac Newton thought that he could reach God, or could achieve some sort of closeness to God by studying nature, and he would look anywhere that he could to find those secrets. He wasn't restricted by just mathematics, or just experiment. He even delved into the occult and spent most of his life researching alchemy, which then of course was considered occult. He he was worried, quite rightly, that his ideas would be too radical and that he would get into trouble with the church, for example, and he made it very clear that God was behind the movement of planets, that they moved by a mechanical process that he was unraveling mathematically, but that God set them in motion and God oversaw the whole thing.

The best example, really, is the dissection and analysis that he had of Solomon's Temple, which he found described in early versions of the Bible in different languages. And Newton found all the descriptions, and from the descriptions in different languages he constructed a floor plan of what the temple would have looked like. And he believed that the layout of the temple was a code, another form of code, in the way it was designed. It sounds incredibly wacky to us, but he really believed that Solomon was tapping into some sort of secret knowledge, in direct communication perhaps with God, to know what the future of man would be, and had designed his temple to reflect the possible future of humanity.

Qualitative Analysis developed from Alchemy

Alchemy was actually illegal during his lifetime and was punishable by death. It's the precursor, or the primitive form of chemistry, different in involving a very large aspect of psychology and occult connections, the alchemist believed that were integral to the outcome of the experiment. It was partly an elevation of their own mind. Likely psychedelic, the alchemist became the experiment as they process altered them, in a religious process. Illegal because it was considered by monarchs and statespeople of the time to be damaging to the status quo. If an alchemist was able to make gold in large quantities, it would destroy the financial systems of the country. And so it was only allowed if they were working for them.

It is obvious Isaac Newton was never trying to make gold. The object at the end was to make the philosopher's stone which was this magical piece of material that could then be mixed with any base metal to turn it into gold. Yet it also had other magical properties, or so it was believed, and that was what he was really after. And what the contention is, is that when he was studying the crucible in his laboratory late at night, after years and years of research, he began to notice certain peculiarities of certain chemicals. He noticed that certain chemicals were drawn to each other and attracted to one another. And others were repelled from each other. This deals in part with electrostatic attraction, the attraction between ions of the negative and ions of the positive, and other things repel each other for similar reasons. Newton's genius then linked it to the path of comets, about the way the moon revolves around the Earth, and in the very small, attraction and repulsion, to the very big that was happening in the cosmos, that he could corelate with the orbit of comets and the moon.

Newton was after this unified theory he called The System of the World, which is what Stephen Hawking and other physicists are trying to achieve today. But, he lacked the infrastructure to ever have achieved that.

Quote

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