Encyclopedia
Sir Isaac Newton,
FRS [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727] was an
English physicist, mathematician,
astronomer,
alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest
scientists and
mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work by Isaac Newton [i] publish ...
, in which he described
universal gravitation and the three
laws of motion, laying the groundwork for
classical mechanics. By deriving
Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of
heliocentrism. He also was a devout Christian, studied the Bible daily and wrote more on religion than on natural science.
Although by the calendar in use at the time of his birth he was born on Christmas Day 1642, the date of 4 January 1643 is used because this is the
Gregorian calendar date.
Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of
colours observed when
white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism , and notably argued that
light is composed of particles. He also developed a
law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air. He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and
angular momentum. Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars. Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton spent much of his time working on alchemy rather than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.
Newton played a major role in the
development of calculus, famously sharing credit with
Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist
Joseph Louis Lagrange , often said that Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and once added "and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."
Biography
Early years
Newton was born at
Woolsthorpe Manor, in
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth a
hamlet in the county of
Lincolnshire. By his own later accounts, Newton was born prematurely and no one expected him to live; his mother Hannah Ayscough said that his body at that time could have fit inside a quart mug. His father, also named Isaac, had been a yeoman farmer and had died three months before Newton's birth, at the time of the
English Civil War. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough.
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School, Grantham . He was removed from school and by Oct 1659 he was to be found at
Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, where his mother attempted to make a farmer of him. He was, by later reports of his contemporaries, thoroughly unhappy with the work. It appears to be Henry Stokes, master at the King's School, who persuaded his mother to send him back to school so that he might complete his education. This he did at the age of eighteen, achieving an admirable final report. His teacher said:
- His genius now begins to mount upwards apace and shine out with more strength. He excels particularly in making verses. In everything he undertakes, he discovers an application equal to the pregnancy of his parts and exceeds even the most sanguine expectations I have conceived of him.
In June 1661 he matriculated at
Trinity College, Cambridge. At that time, the college's teachings were based on those of
Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as
Descartes and
astronomers such as
Galileo,
Copernicus and
Kepler. In 1665 he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that would later become
calculus. Soon after Newton had obtained his degree in 1665, the University closed down as a precaution against the
Great Plague. For the next 18 months Newton worked at home on calculus,
optics and law of gravitation. Newton often did not share concepts he had discovered unless he was asked. For example, he formulated calculus 30 years before he told anyone else about it.
Middle years
Mathematical research
Newton became a fellow of
Trinity College in 1669. In the same year he circulated his findings in
De Analysi per Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas , and later in
De methodis serierum et fluxionum , whose title gave rise to the "method of fluxions".
Newton and
Gottfried Leibniz developed the calculus independently, using different notations. Although Newton had worked out his method years before Leibniz, he published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704. Meanwhile, Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684. Moreover, Leibniz's notation and "differential Method" were universally adopted on the Continent, and after 1820 or so, in the British Empire. Newton claimed that he had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared being mocked for it. Starting in 1699, other members of the
Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism, and the dispute broke out in full force in 1711. Thus began the bitter calculus priority dispute with Leibniz, which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716. This dispute created a divide between British and Continental mathematicians that may have retarded the progress of British mathematics by at least a century.
Newton is generally credited with the generalised binomial theorem, valid for any exponent. He discovered Newton's identities,
Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves , made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms , and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. He also discovered a new formula for
pi.
He was elected Lucasian professor of
mathematics in 1669. In that day, any fellow of Cambridge or
Oxford had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder
not be active in the church . Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and
Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. Thus a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.
Optics
From 1670 to 1672 he 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 multicoloured 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. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same colour. Thus the colours we observe are the result of how objects interact with the incident
already-coloured light,
not the result of objects
generating the colour. For more details, see
Newton's theory of colour. Many of his findings in this field were criticized by later theorists, the most well-known being
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who postulated his own colour theories.
From this work he concluded that any refracting
telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope to bypass that problem. By grinding his own mirrors, using
Newton's rings to judge the quality of the
optics for his telescopes, he was able to produce a superior instrument to the refracting telescope, due primarily to the wider diameter of the mirror. In 1671 the
Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes
On Colour, which he later expanded into his
Opticks. When
Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. The two men remained enemies until Hooke's death.
In one experiment, to prove that colour perception is caused by pressure on the eye, Newton slid a darning needle around the side of his eye until he could poke at its rear side, dispassionately noting "white, darke & coloured circles" so long as he kept stirring with "y
e bodkin."
Newton argued that light is composed of particles, but he had to associate them with
waves to explain the
diffraction of light . Later physicists instead favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for diffraction. Today's
quantum mechanics restores the idea of "
wave-particle duality", although
photons bear very little resemblance to Newton's
corpuscles .
Newton is believed to have been the first to explain precisely the formation of the
rainbow from water droplets dispersed in the
atmosphere in a rain shower. Figure 15 of Part II of Book One of the
Opticks shows a perfect illustration of how this occurs.
In his
Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the
ether to transmit forces between particles. Newton was in contact with
Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist who was born in
Grantham, on
alchemy, and now his interest in the subject revived. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on
Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians." Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be isolated from his contributions to science. Had he not relied on the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his theory of gravity.
In 1704 Newton wrote
Opticks is a book written by English [i] physicist Isaac Newton [i] that was released to the ...
, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another,...and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?" Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional
electrostatic generator, using a
glass globe .
Gravity and motion
In 1679, Newton returned to his work on
mechanics, i.e., gravitation and its effect on the orbits of
planets, with reference to
Kepler's laws of motion, and consulting with Hooke and
Flamsteed on the subject. He published his results in
De Motu Corporum . This contained the beginnings of the laws of motion that would inform the
Principia.
The
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work by Isaac Newton [i] publish ...
was published on 5 July, 1687 with encouragement and financial help from
Edmond Halley. In this work Newton stated the three universal laws of motion that were not to be improved upon for more than two hundred years. He used the Latin word
gravitas for the force that would become known as
gravity, and defined the law of
universal gravitation. In the same work he presented the first analytical determination, based on
Boyle's law, of the speed of sound in air.
With the
Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the
Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693. The end of this friendship led Newton to a
nervous breakdown.
Later life
In the 1690s Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the
Bible.
Henry More's belief in the
infinity of the universe and rejection of
Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton's religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to
John Locke in which he disputed the existence of the
Trinity was never published. Later works —
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and
Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John — were published after his death. He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy .
Newton was also a member of the
Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but his only recorded comments were to complain about a cold draft in the chamber and request that the window be closed.
Newton moved to
London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then
Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, somewhat treading on the toes of Master Lucas . Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon Lucas' death in 1699, a position Newton held until his death. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously, retiring from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercising his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. As Master of the Mint Newton unofficially moved the
Pound Sterling to the
gold standard from silver in 1717; great reforms at the time and adding considerably to the wealth and stability of England. It was his work at the Mint, rather than his earlier contributions to science, that earned him a
knighthood from
Queen Anne in 1705.
Newton was made President of the
Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French
Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of
John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing Flamsteed's star catalogue, which Newton had used in his studies.
Newton died in
London on March 20th, 1727, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey. His half-niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, served as his hostess in social affairs at his house on Jermyn Street in London; he was her "very loving Uncle", according to his letter to her when she was recovering from
smallpox. Although Newton, who had no children, had divested much of estate onto relatives in his last years he actually died intestate. His considerable liquid estate was divided equally between his eight half-nieces and half-nephews
After his death, Newton's body was discovered to have had massive amounts of mercury in it, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life.
Religious views
Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."
His scientific fame notwithstanding, Newton's study of the
Bible and of the early Church Fathers were among his greatest passions. He devoted more time to the study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and to
Alchemy than to science, and said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily." Newton himself wrote works on textual criticism, most notably
An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. Newton also placed the crucifixion of
Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which is now the accepted traditional date. He also attempted, unsuccessfully, to find hidden messages within the Bible . Despite his focus on
theology and alchemy, Newton tested and investigated these ideas with the
scientific method, observing, hypothesising, and testing his theories. To Newton, his scientific and religious experiments were one and the same, observing and understanding how the world functioned.
Newton may have rejected the church's doctrine of the
trinity. In a minority view, T.C. Pfizenmaier argues that he more likely held the
Eastern Orthodox view of the Trinity rather than the Western one held by
Roman Catholics,
Anglicans, and most Protestants. In his own day, he was also accused of being a
Rosicrucian .
In his own lifetime, Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and
Baruch Spinoza. Thus, the ordered and dynamically informed
universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason, but this universe, to be perfect and ordained, had to be regular.
Newton's effect on religious thought
Newton and
Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. Thus, the clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and
metaphysical superlatives of both
superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of
atheism, and, at the same time, the second wave of English
deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a "Natural Religion."
The attacks made against pre-
Enlightenment "magical thinking," and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle’s mechanical conception of the
universe. Newton gave Boyle’s ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more important, was very successful in popularising them. Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles. These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed man to pursue his own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect himself with his own rational powers.
Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. But the unforeseen
theological consequence of his conception of God, as Leibniz pointed out, was that God was now entirely removed from the world’s affairs, since the need for intervention would only evidence some imperfection in God’s creation, something impossible for a perfect and omnipotent creator. Leibniz's theodicy cleared God from the responsibility for
"l'origine du mal" by making God removed from participation in his creation. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason, and humans, as Odo Marquard argued, became responsible for the correction and elimination of evil.
On the other hand, latitudinarian and Newtonian ideas taken too far resulted in the millenarians, a religious faction dedicated to the concept of a mechanical universe, but finding in it the same enthusiasm and mysticism that the Enlightenment had fought so hard to extinguish.
Newton and the counterfeiters
As warden of the royal mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were
counterfeit. Counterfeiting was treason, punishable by death by
drawing and quartering. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task.
He gathered much of that evidence himself, disguised, while he hung out at bars and taverns. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed. He later ordered all records of his interrogations to be destroyed.
Newton's greatest triumph as the king's attorney was against William Chaloner. One of Chaloner's schemes was to set up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turn in the hapless conspirators whom he entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman. Petitioning
Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters . He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint's processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins. Newton was outraged, and went about the work to uncover anything about Chaloner. During his studies, he found that Chaloner was engaged in counterfeiting. He immediately put Chaloner on trial, but Mr Chaloner had friends in high places, and to his horror, Chaloner walked free. Newton put him on trial a second time with conclusive evidence. Chaloner was convicted of high treason and
hanged, drawn and quartered on March 23 1699 at
Tyburn gallows.
Enlightenment philosophers
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors—
Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally—as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of
Nature and Natural Law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.
It was Newton’s conception of the universe based upon Natural and rationally understandable laws that became the seed for Enlightenment ideology.
Locke and
Voltaire applied concepts of Natural Law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the
physiocrats and
Adam Smith applied Natural conceptions of
psychology and self-interest to economic systems and the
sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into Natural models of progress.
Monboddo and
Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.
Newton's laws of motion
The famous three laws of Newton are:
- Newton's First Law states that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force.
- Newton's Second Law states that an applied force, , on an object equals the time rate of change of its momentum, . Mathematically, this is written as Assuming the mass to be constant, the first term vanishes. Defining the acceleration to be results in the famous equation which states that the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force acting on the object and inversely proportional to its mass. In the MKS system of measurement, mass is given in kilograms, acceleration in metres per second squared, and force in newtons .
- Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton's apple
A popular story claims that Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of universal gravitation by the fall of an apple from a tree. Cartoons have gone further to suggest the apple actually hit Newton's head, and that its impact somehow made him aware of the force of gravity. John Conduitt, Newton's assistant at the royal mint and husband of Newton's niece, described the event when he wrote about Newton's life:
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge ... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition...
The question was not whether gravity existed, but whether it extended so far from Earth that it could also be the force holding the moon to its orbit. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it "universal gravitation".
A contemporary writer,
William Stukeley, recorded in his
Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726, in which Newton recalled "when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre." In similar terms,
Voltaire wrote in his
Essay on Epic Poetry , "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree." These accounts are probably exaggerations of Newton's own tale about sitting by a window in his home and watching an apple fall from a tree.
Various trees are claimed to be "the" apple tree which Newton describes, the King's School,
Grantham, claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later, the staff of the [now]
National Trust-owned Woolsthrope Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their gardens is the one described by Newton. It is also claimed that the tree was replanted in front of the council buildings in Grantham, which is unlikely, considering that they were built over 300 years after Newton's death. A clone of the original tree can be seen growing outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there.
Newton in popular culture
Newton's achievements have been immortalised in popular culture. Almost everyone is familiar with the story of Newton's apple described above. English poet
Alexander Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:
"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."
Newton has also featured in conspiracy theories and pop fiction. One example receiving recent attention is Newton's alleged participation in the
Priory of Sion as "Grand Master" from 1691–1727, in documents that have been dismissed as a hoax concocted by
Pierre Plantard. This fabrication was incorporated into the 1982 book
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a [[List of controversial non-fiction books|controversial book]...
, which was later one of the primary source books for the bestselling 2003
Dan Brown novel
The Da Vinci Code is a mystery [i]/detective [i] novel [i] by American [i] ...
. Newton is a major character in
The Baroque Cycle by
Neal Stephenson. He has also been turned into the 200 year old fascist Emperor Dornkirk of Zaibach in an anime television series entitled
The Vision of Escaflowne.
Writings by Newton
- Method of Fluxions
- De Motu Corporum in Gyrum
- Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work by Isaac Newton [i] publish ...
- Opticks is a book written by English [i] physicist Isaac Newton [i] that was released to the ...
-
- Arithmetica Universalis was a mathematics [i] text by Isaac Newton [i]. ...
- An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture
- Short Chronicle, The System of the World, Optical Lectures, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, Amended and De mundi systemate were published posthumously in 1728.
Footnotes and references
See also
Resources
References
This well documented work provides, in particular, valuable information regarding Newton's knowledge of Patristics
- "The Invisible Science." Magical Egypt. Chance Gardner and John Anthony West. 2005.
Further reading
- Berlinski, David, Newton's Gift:How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of our World, ISBN 0-684-84392-7 , also in paperback, Simon & Schuster, .
- Christianson, Gale E. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. Collier MacMillan, . 608 pages.
- Dampier, William C. & M. Dampier. Readings in the Literature of Science. Harper & Row, New York, .
- Gjertsen, Derek. The Newton Handbook, Routledge & Kegan Paul, .
- Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Knopf, . hardcover, 288 pages, ISBN 0-375-42233-1.
- Hawking, Stephen, ed. On the Shoulders of Giants. ISBN 0-7624-1348-5 Places selections from Newton's Principia in the context of selected writings by Copernicus
