Newton Flashcards
Bio
Lived 1643 to 1727.
Father Isaac Newton. Farmer. Died before Newton born.
Mother: Hannah Ayscough, married a churchman when Newton was three years old.
Birth: village of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England.
Age 12, Newton attended The King’s School, Grantham. At18, Newton began studying for a law degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College
His natural philosophy lecturers based their courses on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas from Ancient Greece. This was despite the fact that 25 years earlier, in 1638, Galileo Galilei had published his physics masterpiece Two New Sciences establishing a new scientific basis for the physics of motion.
Newton began to disregard the material taught at his college, preferring to study the recent (and more scientifically correct) works of Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, and Kepler.
After three years at Cambridge he won a four-year scholarship, allowing him to devote his time fully to academic studies.
Lukasian professor
At the age of 24, in 1667, he 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
Optics and Light
Showed that sunlight is made up of all of the colors of the rainbow. He used one glass prism to split a beam of sunlight into its separate colors, then another prism to recombine the rainbow colors to make a beam of white light again.
Built the world’s first working reflecting telescope.
Mathematics.
Generalized the binomial theorem.
Discovered/invented calculus, the mathematics of change, without which we could not understand the behavior of objects as tiny as electrons or as large as galaxies.
Wrote the Principia, one of the most important scientific books ever written; in it he used mathematics to explain gravity and motion. (Principia is pronounced with a hard c.)
Gravitation
F = G * m1*m2
—————
r sq.
Discovered the law of universal gravitation, proving that the force holding the moon in orbit around the earth is the same force that causes an apple to fall from a tree.
showed that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are special cases of Newton’s universal gravitation.
Objects moving in gravitational fields trace conical sections: Circle. Ellipse. Parabola. Hyperbola.
Celestial events are governed by same laws as terrestrial events.
Laws of motion.
Newton’s three laws of motion still lie at the heart of mechanics.
First law: Objects remain stationary or move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force. This law was actually first stated by Galileo, whose influence Newton mentions several times in the Principia.
Second law: The force F on an object is equal to its mass m multiplied by its acceleration: F = ma.
Third law: Action-Reaction. When one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts a force equal in size and opposite in direction on the first object.
Calculus Controversy
Gottfried Leibniz starting publishing his own version of calculus. Newton was already a master of this branch of mathematics, but had published very little of it. Again Newton’s insecurity got the better of him, and he angrily accused Leibniz of stealing his work. The pros and cons of each man’s case have long been debated by historians. Most mathematicians regard Newton and Leibniz as equally responsible for the development of calculus.
Religion.
Newton was a very religious man with somewhat unorthodox Protestant Christian views. He spent a great deal of time and wrote a large body of private works concerned with theology and his interpretation of the Bible.
His scientific work had revealed a universe that obeyed logical mathematical laws. He had also discovered that starlight and sunlight are the same, and he speculated that stars could have their own systems of planets orbiting them. He believed such a system could only have been made by God.
God.
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun.”
Later career
In 1696, Newton was appointed as a Warden of the Royal Mint. In 1700, he became Master of the Mint, leaving Cambridge for London, and more or less ending his scientific discovery work. He took his new role very seriously, going out into London’s taverns in disguise gathering evidence against counterfeiters.
In 1703, he was elected President of the Royal Society.
In 1705, he was knighted, becoming Sir Isaac Newton.
Isaac Newton died on March 31, 1727, aged 84. He had never married and had no children.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, London.
Alchemy
Although he is one of the greatest scientists in history, Newton’s laboratory papers show that he probably devoted more of his time to alchemy than to anything we would recognize as science.
