In a letter of 1672 to the secretary of the Royal Society, he says that in 1666 he had bought a prism "to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours." He continues, "In order thereto having darkened the room and made a small hole in my window-shuts to let in a convenient quantity of the Suns light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall." He had been surprised to see the various colors appear on the wall in an oblong arrangement (the vertical being the greater dimension), "which according to the received laws of refraction should have been circular." Proceeding from this experiment through several stages to the "crucial" one, in which he had isolated a single ray and found it unchanging in color and refrangibility, he had drawn the revolutionary conclusion that "Light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays." Newton's main interest at the time of his appointment was optics, and for several years the lectures required of him by the professorship were devoted to this subject. Newton became Lucasian professor of mathematics at 27 and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for 27 years.Įxperiments in Optics. His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability, and when, in 1669, Barrow resigned to devote himself to theology, he recommended Newton as his successor. Returning to Cambridge in 1667, Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then entered upon a period of elaboration of the work begun at Woolsthorpe. The story that the idea of universal gravitation was suggested to him by the falling of an apple seems to be authentic: Stukeley reports that he heard it from Newton himself. 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 was back at Woolsthorpe for 18 months in 16. 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.Īfter 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. In 1661, at the age of 19, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. But during a trial period midway in his course at King's School, it became apparent that farming was not his métier. Although she married someone else and he never married, she was the one person for whom Newton seems to have had a romantic attachment.Īt birth Newton was heir to the modest estate which, when he came of age, he was expected to manage. 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. 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.Īfter 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. Also of significance for his early development were circumstances within his family. In his early years Lincolnshire was a battleground of the civil wars, in which the challenging of authority in government and religion was dividing England's population. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in southwestern Lincolnshire. Isaac Newton made major contributions in mathematics and theoretical and experimental physics and achieved a remarkable synthesis of the work of his predecessors on the laws of motion, especially the law of universal gravitation. Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), English scientist and mathematician.
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