Unit 3. Isaac newton

Isaac Newton, the man of powerful mathematical ability, was born into a family of a farmer in 1642, the year Galileo died. The early days of Isaac's life were rather unhappy. The child was so weak and slow-witted that his grandmother had pity on him and didn't send him to school till the boy was twelve. While at school and later at Cambridge Newton studied with no particular distinction, though he was extremely skilful in making models, intricate mechanical toys, sun clocks and so on.

At the age of 18 he was sent to Cambridge and there he followed the ordinary mathematical courses of his time. Some years after having taken his degree he was appointed professor to the chair of physics and mathematics at Cambridge.

His first "tutor" in science and the man who impressed Isaac most by his great charm and popularity was Descartes, who died when Newton was eight years old. Descartes' powerful imagination had enabled him to write not only serious scientific papers but a great number of popular scientific books and even science-fiction novels. In his serious scientific papers Descartes was able to concentrate the most advanced scientific ideas of his time widely ranging from philosophy to many fields of exact sciences including physics. In his fancy-novels the features of real and imaginable worlds were so fantastically interconnected that Isaac Newton was completely carried away by this brilliant, charming, powerfully clever and so popular Frenchman in those years. Descartes' influence on Newton can be felt in all the latter's works and through all his life. As to scientific ideas it was much later, that Newton understood the weakness of Descartes' approach to solution of specific problems.

Newton delivered an extended course of lectures in optics which were not published until some sixty years later. While quite a young man he developed a mathematical method indispensable for all questions involving motion. This method which is now known under the name of the differential and the integral calculus was developed at the same time by the German scientist and philosopher Leibnitz.

The theory of gravity was developed by Newton in its essential features when he was only 24, but some twenty years later he returned to this subject. Having been brought, by the fall of the apple, to the conclusion that the apple and the earth were pulling one another, he began to think of the same pull of gravity extending far beyond the earth. The problem of the paths of the planets, one of the greatest problems of those times, was “what laws could account for the ceaseless motion of the planets round the sun?”

Newton deduced and calculated the force of gravity acting between the sun and the planets, thus establishing the law of gravitation in its most general form. By discovering this law, he demonstrated the uniformity of things and found a connecting link between the mechanics of the earth and the mechanics of the heavens. His great work Principia, published in 1687, gave an insight into the structure and mechanics of the universe.

He also discovered the laws of motion which we still consider to be the basis of all calculations concerning motion.

He died in 1727, at the age of 84. His funeral ceremonies were those of a natural hero. It was the first time that national honours of this kind have been accorded in England to a man of science or to any figure of thought, learning or art.