Issac Newton

Isaac Newton With the possible exception of Albert Einstein no scientist, so altered the human perception of the Universe as Isaac Newton. His cosmos of absolute space and time drew upon the work of others such as Kepler and Galileo but it was Newton who brought together Galileo’s mechanics and Kapler’s law of planetary motion to fashion a universe which could run without the benefit of continual divine intervention. His successor have pointed Newton as the supreme intellect that the human race has produced—he who in genius surpassed the human kind. The English Physicist, Mathematician Isaac Newton was born on 25th December 1642 in Woolsthrope in England. His father Isaac died at the age of 37, before the birth of his son. Newton was a premature child. His mother Hannah Ayscough married the next door neighbour Barnabas Smith and left the 3 years old Newton to the care of his grandmother. As a child Newton was not robust and was forced to shun the rough games of boys of his age. Instead of playing with them he invented his own diversions in which his genius first showed up. Newton received his early education in the common village school of his vicinity. His maternal uncle William Ayscough was the first able man to recognise the talent of Newton. He persuaded Newton’s mother to send his son to Cambridge instead of keeping at home. On his uncle’s advice he had been sent to the Grantham Grammar School. While preparing for Cambridge Newton lodged with a Mr. Clarke and fell in love with his step daughter Miss Storey to whom he became engaged before leaving for Cambridge. But in Cambridge his growing absorption in work put his romance in the back seat and Newton never married. Newton attributed his success to three greatest mathematicians - Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo. Newton writes- If I have seen a little further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giant. In June 1661, Newton entered Trinity College Cambridge where his maths teacher was Dr. Isaac Barrow. Newton passed his BA degree in January 1664. Till 1664, Newton did nothing great. Though a manuscript dated May 20, 1665 shows that Newton had scientifically developed the principles of Calculus at the age of 23. He called his method Fluxions. He had also discovered the Integration and Binomial Theorem in 1665. The second of his great discovery is the law of universal gravitation in 1666 at Woolsthrope’s apple garden. Newton always preferred to view the Universe as a gigantic watch spring wound up by the hand of God and left to run down on its own. He believed that it was impossible for science to transcend the barrier between our world and the spiritual world and was quite content to leave such speculations to other natural philosophers. He wrote:- We have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power... I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena , and I frame no hypothesis; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypothesises---- have no place in experimental philosophy. In 1667, Newton was elected a Fellow of Trinity and in 1669, at the age of 26, he succeeded Barrow as Lucasian Professor of mathematics. It is said the Isaac Barrow resigned from the Lucasian Professorship of mathematics in favour of his incomparable pupil Newton. His first lecture was on Optics. In 1668, he constructed a reflection telescope with his own hand and used it to observe the satellite of Jupiter. His master piece Principia was published at the cost of his friend Edmund Halley in 1687. It contained the Dynamics, Laws of Gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation. The Principia had no mention of his Calculus. From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multi-coloured spectrum into white light. He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects. This is known as Newton's theory of colour. Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690. In 1696, at the age of 54, Newton became warden of the Royal Mint. His job was to reform the coinage. In the same year Johann Bernoulli and Leibniz concocted two challenges to the mathematician of Europe. The problem baffled the mathematician for next six months and none of the great mathematician of that very time could come up with the exact solution. Newton heard of the problem when a friend communicated him. He was at that time returned from his Mint office. Newton took his dinner and sat to solve the problem and finally got the solution of the two challenging problems. He communicated the solution to the Royal Society anonymously. On seeing the solution Bernoulli at once exclaimed, “Ah! I recognize the lion by his paw.” In 1701-02, Newton represented Cambridge University in Parliament and in 1703 was elected President of Royal Society. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne. Newton had done a great service to mankind by his discovery but he was so humble that he once said: - I don’t know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. Towards the end of his life, Newton took up residence at Cranbury Park, near Winchester with his niece and her husband, until his death in 1727.Newton died in his sleep in London on 31 March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Let’s close the biography of Greatest mathematician of the world with the line of English Poet Alexander Pope:- Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said "Let Newton be" and all was light Rajesh Kumar Thakur rkthakur1974@gmail.com