Newton – the force awakens
Sir Isaac Newton was a giant amongst men, a towering genius who developed mechanics, invented calculus, developed modern optics, made a reflecting telescope, refined the scientific method and was responsible for numerous other contributions in the field of mathematics. He was a key figure in a scientific revolution that changed the world. He is, however, perhaps most famous for his work on forces and, in particular, for ‘discovering’ gravity.
Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642, three months after his father’s death. He was a puny, sickly child who spent his early years with his mother before being looked after by his grandmother when his mother remarried. At the age of 12 he attended a public school in Grantham. It was here that Newton’s ingenuity and mischievousness began to show as he invented, amongst other things, a mouse powered windmill, a water clock, a mechanical carriage and flying lanterns attached to kites to scare the local villagers.
Newton’s family removed him from the school and tried to force him to become a farmer, something which he hated. After his uncle found him hard at work on a mathematical solution in a field, rather than doing hard farm work where he was supposed to be, he persuaded his mother to let him leave and continue his education.
Newton’s apple?
Newton was admitted to trinity college at Cambridge in 1661 where he studied mathematics to great effect. In October 1665, a plague epidemic forced the university to close and Newton returned to his mother’s home in Lincolnshire. Legend has it that it was here that he observed an apple falling from a tree which inspired him to formulate his theories on gravity. This became one of the most famous stories in science, embellished by Newton himself and others over the years. Sadly, there is no evidence to suggest that the apple actually hit him on the head. That very same apple tree can still be seen at the family home of Woolsthorpe Manor, where it still grows in sight of Newton’s bedroom window to this day.
So did Newton ‘discover gravity’? Not exactly, people obviously already knew that things fell to the ground. Indeed, Galileo had already shown that gravity works on objects regardless of their mass when he, again allegedly, is said to have dropped balls of the same shape but different weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove that they hit the ground at the same time.
So why was Newton such a genius? Quite simply, Newton had worked out that gravity was a force. He had also discovered that the principle of gravitational attraction applied not only to the Earth but to every mass in the entire universe. Everything was attracted to each other by an equal and opposite gravitational force. Newton had found laws that were valid on a universal scale.
A giant of science
He died on 31 March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Despite his ideas on gravity being superseded by the work of Einstein and others, Newton’s laws are still used every day. From the class room to engineering and spaceflight, his legacy remains. So why was he considered a genius? At the age of 75 Newton said with unusual humility “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Did you know?
Newton also conducted experiments on the composition of light, discovering that white light is composed of different colours and went on to establish the scientific field of optics.
In 1689, Newton was elected member of parliament for Cambridge University. This was not a great success as the only time he actually spoke in parliament as an MP was when he asked an usher to close a window during a debate. His studies of bible scripture lead him to declare that the world will end in 2060. Let us hope he wasn’t a genius in the field of prophecy too!