Sir Isaac Newton Essay Research Paper Isaac

Sir Isaac Newton Essay, Research Paper

Isaac Newton

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I INTRODUCTION

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all

time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered

Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor

of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing in most years, until 1696. Of these

Cambridge years, in which Newton was at the height of his creative power, he singled out 1665-1666

(spent largely in Lincolnshire because of plague in Cambridge) as “the prime of my age for invention”.

During two to three years of intense mental effort he prepared Philosophiae Naturalis Principia

Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as the Principia,

although this was not published until 1687.

As a firm opponent of the attempt by King James II to make the universities into Catholic institutions,

Newton was elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to the Convention Parliament

of 1689, and sat again in 1701-1702. Meanwhile, in 1696 he had moved to London as Warden of the

Royal Mint. He became Master of the Mint in 1699, an office he retained to his death. He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1671, and in 1703 he became President, being annually

re-elected for the rest of his life. His major work, Opticks, appeared the next year; he was knighted in

Cambridge in 1705.

As Newtonian science became increasingly accepted on the Continent, and especially after a general peace

was restored in 1714, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Newton became the most highly

esteemed natural philosopher in Europe. His last decades were passed in revising his major works,

polishing his studies of ancient history, and defending himself against critics, as well as carrying out his

official duties. Newton was modest, diffident, and a man of simple tastes. He was angered by criticism or

opposition, and harboured resentment; he was harsh towards enemies but generous to friends. In

government, and at the Royal Society, he proved an able administrator. He never married and lived

modestly, but was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.

Newton has been regarded for almost 300 years as the founding examplar of modern physical science, his

achievements in experimental investigation being as innovative as those in mathematical research. With

equal, if not greater, energy and originality he also plunged into chemistry, the early history of Western

civilization, and theology; among his special studies was an investigation of the form and dimensions, as

described in the Bible, of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

II OPTICS

In 1664, while still a student, Newton read recent work on optics and light by the English physicists Robert

Boyle and Robert Hooke; he also studied both the mathematics and the physics of the French philosopher

and scientist Ren Descartes. He investigated the refraction of light by a glass prism; developing over a few

years a series of increasingly elaborate, refined, and exact experiments, Newton discovered measurable,

mathematical patterns in the phenomenon of colour. He found white light to be a mixture of infinitely varied

coloured rays (manifest in the rainbow and the spectrum), each ray definable by the angle through which it

is refracted on entering or leaving a given transparent medium. He correlated this notion with his study of

the interference colours of thin films (for example, of oil on water, or soap bubbles), using a simple

technique of extreme acuity to measure the thickness of such films. He held that light consisted of streams of

minute particles. From his experiments he could infer the magnitudes of the transparent “corpuscles” forming

the surfaces of bodies, which, according to their dimensions, so interacted with white light as to reflect,

selectively, the different observed colours of those surfaces.

The roots of these unconventional ideas were with Newton by about 1668; when first expressed (tersely

and partially) in public in 1672 and 1675, they provoked hostile criticism, mainly because colours were

thought to be modified forms of homogeneous white light. Doubts, and Newton’s rejoinders, were printed

in the learned journals. Notably, the scepticism of Christiaan Huygens and the failure of the French physicist

Edm Mariotte to duplicate Newton’s refraction experiments in 1681 set scientists on the Continent against

him for a generation. The publication of Opticks, largely written by 1692, was delayed by Newton until the

critics were dead. The book was still imperfect: the colours of diffraction defeated Newton. Nevertheless,

Opticks established itself, from about 1715, a

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