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Isaac Newton: Influential Genius

Decent Essays

Sophie Griffin 9C
Ms. Tinsley
Enrichment
11/2/15
Isaac Newton: Influential Genius
Isaac Newton and his laws and observations made indelible marks on science and mathematics that continue to influence these fields even today. His contributions to optics, how bodies move, gravitation, his invention of the reflecting telescope, and many other innovations are important today, and were in the past. Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Meadows 70) Newton became a giant so tall that generations of scientists and mathematicians saw further on his shoulders.
On Christmas Day in Woolsthorpe, 1642, a tiny baby was born prematurely-Isaac Newton. His father had died and when he was only a toddler his mother …show more content…

In his undergraduate years he was not a great student, partially due to his own study of Decartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes. “In 1665 Newton took his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge without honors or distinction. Since the university was closed for the next two years because of plague, Newton returned to Woolsthorpe in midyear.”(Hatch, “Sir Isaac Newton”) He spent a year and a half there, in which he made many of his important revolutions. His time was spent on the development of infinitesimal calculus, the beginnings of his work on color and light, and planetary motion. Newton became a minor fellow in April of 1667, and by 1669 he was a senior fellow and Lucisian professor of mathematics. He was elected into the Royal Society, the premiere place for scientific research. In the next few years, he was criticized by Hooke who accused him of plagiarizing papers, his mother died, and he had an emotional breakdown. These led to him cutting ties and secluding himself to practice alchemy. In around 1680, Newton began to figure out the puzzle of planetary motion, which confused scholars at the time. In 1684, Hooke and Halley asked him about what kind of curve a planet’s motion has when it goes around the sun. He told them it was an …show more content…

His greatest work, the Principia, contains three books. The first contained basic principles. The three laws newton but in the first book said: “an object not being pushed or pulled by a force would either sit still, or move in a straight line” (Meadows 73), the second said that when a force is applied to said object, the object accelerates in the direction of force, for a given force, the amount of acceleration depends on the mass of the object. (Meadows 73) The last law said “if you push or pull an object, it will push or pull you to an equal extent. (Meadows 74) These laws are called Newton’s laws of motion even though others knew them. Gravitation was also discussed in the first book. He detailed what forces keep planets in the suns orbit. He used his three laws and gravitation to solve Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which before had only been seen. The item of greatest significance in book one was gravity-that all objects in the universe attract all other objects in the universe, whether the object is an apple or a planet. Another part of this is the difference between weight and mass. Newton saw the important distinction. Book two of Principia was concerned with Newton disproving Decartes theory that the universe is filled with a king of fluid, called ether. The final book of Principia uses what was discussed in the first two books and applies them. “Newton showed that a planet is held together because of

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