Newton

Dynamics

Biography

Influences

Astronomy

The scientific revolution

Isaac Newton

SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727) English physicist and mathematician, who was the culminating figure of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century

Optics

But was Isaac Newton the first one?

of gravitation is:

F=G(m1*m2)/r

Sir Isaac Newton was the first scientist to precisely define the gravitational force, but Newton was not the first to suspect that the same force caused both our weight and the motion of planets. Some of Newton’s contemporaries, such as Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and Edmund Halley, had also made some progress toward understanding gravitation. But Newton was the first to propose an exact mathematical form.

The gravitational force is relatively simple. It is always attractive, and it depends only on the masses involved and the distance between them.Newton’s universal law of gravitation states that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force that is directed along a line joining them. The force is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The equation for Newton’s universal law

Astronomy

Isaac Newton still greatly influences our world today. His laws about how things move and the idea of gravity are crucial in physics. Newton's ideas are the basis for classical mechanics, which affects areas like engineering and space exploration. His work on calculus is important in math and many sciences. Newton's impact reaches into technology, shaping progress in mechanics, optics, and astronomy, and contributing to the scientific knowledge we use today.

NOWADAYS

Influences of Isaac Newton in the Scientific Revolution and nowadays

Sir Isaac Newton, an English scientist who developed Three Laws of Motion, was one of the most notable minds of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th-17th centuries. His Three Laws of Motion and Universal Law of Gravity were used to prove the developing heliocentric view of the universe, the idea that the planets revolve around the Sun, rather than the Earth, as was previously believed.

IN THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The mechanics of the Principia was an exact quantitative description of the motions of visible bodies. It rested on Newton's three laws of motion: (1) that a body remains in its state of rest unless it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it, (2) that the change of motion is proportional to the force impressed, and (3) that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Dynamic

In August 1684 Newton was visited by the British astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742). Upon learning that Newton had solved the problem of orbital dynamics, he extracted Newton's promise to send the demonstration. Three months later he received a short tract entitled De Motu ("On Motion"). Already Newton was at work improving and expanding it. In two and a half years, the tract De Motu grew into Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), which is not only Newton's masterpiece but also the fundamental work for the whole of modern science. Significantly, De Motu did not state the law of universal gravitation and did not contain any of the three Newtonian laws of motion. Only when revising De Motu did Newton embrace the principle of inertia (the first law) and arrive at the second law of motion.

Biography

Born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton was the only son of also Isaac Newton, who had died three months before, and of Hannah Ayscough. That same year Galileo Galilei had died; Newton would later pick up his idea of a mathematical science of motion and bring his work to full fruition. By June 1661, he was ready to matriculate at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, somewhat older than the other undergraduates because of his interrupted education. When Newton arrived in Cambridge, the movement now known as the scientific revolution was well advanced.

Some time during his undergraduate career, Newton discovered the works of the French natural philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) and the other mechanical philosophers, who, in contrast to Aristotle, viewed physical reality as composed entirely of particles of matter in motion and who held that all the phenomena of nature result from their mechanical interaction. Newton's scientific career had begun.

Opticks

In 1665, the plague closed the university, and for most of the following two years Newton was forced to stay at his home. During the plague years he extended an earlier insight concerning light into an essay, "Of Colours", that was later revised to become "Book One of his Opticks" (1704). Through a series of experiments performed in 1665 and 1666, in which the spectrum of a narrow beam was projected onto the wall of a darkened chamber, Newton determined that light is complex and heterogeneous and that the phenomena of colours arise from the analysis, or separation, of the heterogeneous mixture into its simple components. He also concluded that rays refract at distinct angles and that phenomena such as the rainbow are produced by refractive analysis. The heterogeneity of light has been the foundation of physical optics since his time.