ISAAC NEWTON

Isaac Newton 1642-1727

Isaac Newton is a philosopher, mathematician, physicist, alchemist, astronomer and theologian English. Newton is considered one of the greatest geniuses and scholars of human history.
It is the only one, with Einstein, to have successfully attacked the very difficult problem of gravitation, but his interests were many and significant discoveries.
The calculus to mechanics, to optics, its work would have been enough to make the reputation of a dozen scholars. But he took care of chemistry, chronology and especially theology, rather than mathematics and natural philosophy. He tasted the political career and was for over thirty years, a great servant of the state. It is in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire in England was born on Christmas Day 1642, several months after the death of Galileo, Isaac Newton, son of Isaac Newton and Hannah Ayscough.
We know little of the father of Isaac seems he was a man frustrated and quite low. He died at the age of 37, shortly after his marriage and three months before the birth of his only son.
Against by his mother Hannah was from a wealthy family from Yorkshire. Little Newton was baptized on 1 January 1643.
The register of baptism is marked in 1642 but until the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the year in England began March 25.
When he was 2 years old, his mother remarried and lives with her new husband in North Witham.
Newton remains close to his maternal grandmother, under the tutelage of his uncle James Ayscough.

Around the age of 12, Isaac is sent to the school in Grantham.
There had been four years old when his mother reminded Woolstorpe to become a farmer to administer his estate, a gift from her second husband.
A small owner did not need more education. But Isaac's mother noticed that her son was very good at mechanics and care little for cattle.
She returned to school with the hope that it comes into university. At 17, Newton became friends with a classmate, Miss Storey.
At 18, Newton was admitted to Cambridge University where he would spend nearly 40 years, first as a student, then as a teacher. His studies did not allow him to marry Miss Storey and proposed marriage vanishes. Newton remained single all her life.
Voltaire refers to a famous wrote: "In the course of a long life, he had neither passion nor weakness, he never approached any woman is what was confirmed by physician and surgeon who attended her death."
In Cambridge, during his studies, he studied arithmetic, geometry in the elements of Euclid and trigonometry. Meeting with his science teacher, Isaac Barrow, will be decisive for the rest of his academic career.
Professor Barrow realizes very quickly that Newton has exceptional qualities in mathematics and physics, he resigned six years later to make way for Isaac Newton. At 25, Newton became the young bachelor of arts.

Image: Portrait of Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller (1689).

The university to the farm

The plague, which spreads over London in 1665, requires Newton to return to the family farm.
It is from this time that all great discoveries, his friend William Stukeley testify later in the legendary episode of the apple tree that fell on Newton's head, revealing the laws of universal gravitation.
During these two years of forced retirement, decorated with visits to Cambridge, Newton wrote five papers on the new application of infinite series to a general method to solve the properties of curves and areas that limit.
At the age of 29 years, Newton was elected to the Royal Society for the invention of the telescope.
The instrument made by Newton was to a concave mirror and the reflected beam was returned to the side.
In 1672 at the age of 30 years, Newton decided to present a paper describing his important work on the light, which dated from the years 1666 and 1667.
This communication would propel Newton fame and make his discoveries the subject of much controversy. This marks the first brief history of modern physical science. There have been several years of controversy between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke about light and gravity. He did not publish his work on optics, (it shows that the light is not white but consists of a color spectrum), after the death of Hooke.
He died in 1703 and was published in 1704 Optics with two mathematical treatises.

But the biggest controversy between Newton and Hooke is the law of the inverse square.
Hooke which work on the attraction, does not know the law and does not know that Newton has already addressed the issue. Besides a few years later, Hooke claims his priority right, accusing Newton of stealing the idea.
At 51, Newton fell into a nervous breakdown. It seems that the fire in her apartments at Trinity College, which destroyed his chemical laboratory and a large number of manuscripts, which he was anxious, was the last straw. He became suspicious, be saw enemies everywhere, and was repeatedly the victim of hallucinations.
At 54, Newton was appointed guardian of the currency of England and master of money, the following year, without however giving up his chair.
In 1701, it has its law on conduction cooling, as well as observations on the boiling and melting temperatures. Finally he described a thermometer and temperatures between graduation standards.
On December 10, 1701, Newton resigned from the Lucasian chair he had held at the University of Cambridge, although it does more courses for many years.
On November 30, 1703, he was elected president of the Royal Society and re-elected to the presidency until his death. Newton died March 20 at the age of 85.

Image: Replica of the telescope of 6 inches (150 mm) Isaac Newton presented to the Royal Society in 1672. Newton invented the reflecting telescope consists of a concave primary mirror, free of chromatic aberration, called Newtonian.

Newton's theories

In optics, he developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism separates white light into a visible spectrum.
It was not until 1704, he published his treatise Opticks in which exposed his corpuscular theory of light, the study of refraction, diffraction of light and color theory. In mechanics, he developed the theory of motion of bodies, theory known as Newtonian mechanics or classical mechanics.
In mathematics, he has generalized the binomial theorem and invented the method of Newton for finding approximations to a zero of a function of one real variable with real values.
Newton showed that the movement of objects on Earth and celestial bodies are governed by the same natural laws, he developed the universal law of gravitation. Bodies attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
The simplicity and effectiveness of this theory will have a strong influence on other sciences in the eighteenth century.

Image: The work of Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, written in 1686, and published in July 1687, is considered a major work in the history of science. This book is now known as the Principia Mathematica.
It is in it he described universal gravitation, formulated the three laws of motion and laid the foundations of classical mechanics.

Image: The apple or the cannonball!
Newton used the mathematics to develop the law of gravitation. It is not seeing an apple fall, as is often tells, but thinking about a gun and the trajectory of a ball that Newton deciphers the mystery of gravity.
He also reveals in his work "Principia Mathematica" published in 1686.
Isaac Newton made a drawing, which shows a planet and a gun, placed on top of a hill. Newton has realized that if we could take a cannon ball at a speed very high, it will turn around the Earth.
It calculates that even if the ball had reached a speed of 28 000 km/h, it would then enter into orbit.