When isaac newton was born and died

In January , following the Glorious Revolution at the end of , he was elected to represent Cambridge University in the Convention Parliament, which he did until January During this time he formed friendships with John Locke and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and in the summer of he finally met Christiaan Huygens face to face for two extended discussions. Perhaps because of disappointment with Huygens not being convinced by the argument for universal gravity, in the early s Newton initiated a radical rewriting of the Principia.

During these same years he wrote but withheld his principal treatise in alchemy, Praxis ; he corresponded with Richard Bentley on religion and allowed Locke to read some of his writings on the subject; he once again entered into an effort to put his work on the calculus in a form suitable for publication; and he carried out experiments on diffraction with the intent of completing his Opticks , only to withhold the manuscript from publication because of dissatisfaction with its treatment of diffraction.

The radical revision of the Principia became abandoned by , during the middle of which Newton suffered, by his own testimony, what in more recent times would be called a nervous breakdown. In the two years following his recovery that autumn, he continued his experiments in chymistry and he put substantial effort into trying to refine and extend the gravity-based theory of the lunar orbit in the Principia , but with less success than he had hoped.

Throughout these years Newton showed interest in a position of significance in London, but again with less success than he had hoped until he accepted the relatively minor position of Warden of the Mint in early , a position he held until he became Master of the Mint at the end of He again represented Cambridge University in Parliament for 16 months, beginning in , the year in which he resigned his Fellowship at Trinity College and the Lucasian Professorship.

Newton thus became a figure of imminent authority in London over the rest of his life, in face-to-face contact with individuals of power and importance in ways that he had not known in his Cambridge years. His everyday home life changed no less dramatically when his extraordinarily vivacious teenage niece, Catherine Barton, the daughter of his half-sister Hannah, moved in with him shortly after he moved to London, staying until she married John Conduitt in , and after that remaining in close contact.

It was through her and her husband that Newton's papers came down to posterity. Catherine was socially prominent among the powerful and celebrated among the literati for the years before she married, and her husband was among the wealthiest men of London. The London years saw Newton embroiled in some nasty disputes, probably made the worse by the ways in which he took advantage of his position of authority in the Royal Society. In the first years of his Presidency he became involved in a dispute with John Flamsteed in which he and Halley, long ill-disposed toward the Flamsteed, violated the trust of the Royal Astronomer, turning him into a permanent enemy.

Ill feelings between Newton and Leibniz had been developing below the surface from even before Huygens had died in , and they finally came to a head in when John Keill accused Leibniz in the Philosophical Transactions of having plagiarized the calculus from Newton and Leibniz, a Fellow of the Royal Society since , demanded redress from the Society.

The Society's published response was anything but redress. Newton not only was a dominant figure in this response, but then published an outspoken anonymous review of it in in the Philosophical Transactions. Leibniz and his colleagues on the Continent had never been comfortable with the Principia and its implication of action at a distance.

With the priority dispute this attitude turned into one of open hostility toward Newton's theory of gravity — a hostility that was matched in its blindness by the fervor of acceptance of the theory in England.

The public elements of the priority dispute had the effect of expanding a schism between Newton and Leibniz into a schism between the English associated with the Royal Society and the group who had been working with Leibniz on the calculus since the s, including most notably Johann Bernoulli, and this schism in turn transformed into one between the conduct of science and mathematics in England versus the Continent that persisted long after Leibniz died in Although Newton obviously had far less time available to devote to solitary research during his London years than he had had in Cambridge, he did not entirely cease to be productive.

The first English edition of his Opticks finally appeared in , appended to which were two mathematical treatises, his first work on the calculus to appear in print. This edition was followed by a Latin edition in and a second English edition in , each containing important Queries on key topics in natural philosophy beyond those in its predecessor. The second edition of the Principia , on which Newton had begun work at the age of 66 in , was published in , with a third edition in Though the original plan for a radical restructuring had long been abandoned, the fact that virtually every page of the Principia received some modifications in the second edition shows how carefully Newton, often prodded by his editor Roger Cotes, reconsidered everything in it; and important parts were substantially rewritten not only in response to Continental criticisms, but also because of new data, including data from experiments on resistance forces carried out in London.

Focused effort on the third edition began in , when Newton was 80 years old, and while the revisions are far less extensive than in the second edition, it does contain substantive additions and modfications, and it surely has claim to being the edition that represents his most considered views. Newton died on 20 March at the age of His contemporaries' conception of him nevertheless continued to expand as a consequence of various posthumous publications, including The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended ; the work originally intended to be the last book of the Principia , The System of the World , in both English and Latin ; Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St.

Even then, however, the works that had been published represented only a limited fraction of the total body of papers that had been left in the hands of Catherine and John Conduitt. The five volume collection of Newton's works edited by Samuel Horsley —85 did not alter this situation. Through the marriage of the Conduitts' daughter Catherine and subsequent inheritance, this body of papers came into the possession of Lord Portsmouth, who agreed in to allow it to be reviewed by scholars at Cambridge University John Couch Adams, George Stokes, H.

Luard, and G. They issued a catalogue in , and the university then retained all the papers of a scientific character. With the notable exception of W. The remaining papers were returned to Lord Portsmouth, and then ultimately sold at auction in to various parties. Serious scholarly work on them did not get underway until the s, and much remains to be done on them.

Three factors stand in the way of giving an account of Newton's work and influence. First is the contrast between the public Newton, consisting of publications in his lifetime and in the decade or two following his death, and the private Newton, consisting of his unpublished work in math and physics, his efforts in chymistry — that is, the 17th century blend of alchemy and chemistry — and his writings in radical theology — material that has become public mostly since World War II.

Only the public Newton influenced the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet any account of Newton himself confined to this material can at best be only fragmentary. Second is the contrast, often shocking, between the actual content of Newton's public writings and the positions attributed to him by others, including most importantly his popularizers.

Third is the contrast between the enormous range of subjects to which Newton devoted his full concentration at one time or another during the 60 years of his intellectual career — mathematics, optics, mechanics, astronomy, experimental chemistry, alchemy, and theology — and the remarkably little information we have about what drove him or his sense of himself.

Biographers and analysts who try to piece together a unified picture of Newton and his intellectual endeavors often end up telling us almost as much about themselves as about Newton. Compounding the diversity of the subjects to which Newton devoted time are sharp contrasts in his work within each subject. The most important element common to these two was Newton's deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory.

Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses — putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them. Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena.

This stance is perhaps best summarized in his fourth Rule of Reasoning, added in the third edition of the Principia , but adopted as early as his Optical Lectures of the s:. In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be taken to be either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions.

This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses. Such a commitment to empirically driven science was a hallmark of the Royal Society from its very beginnings, and one can find it in the research of Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, and in the experimental efforts of the Royal Academy of Paris.

Returning to Cambridge in , Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then began a period of expanding on the work he had started at Woolsthorpe. His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability.

When Barrow resigned to take another job in , he recommended that Newton take his place. Newton became a professor of mathematics at age twenty-seven and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for twenty-seven years. Newton's main interest at the time was optics, and for several years his lectures were devoted to the subject. His experiments in this area had grown out of his interest in improving the effectiveness of telescopes instruments that enable the user to view distant objects through the bending of light rays through a lens.

His discoveries about the nature and properties of light had led him to turn to suggestions for a reflecting telescope rather than current ones based on the refractive bending principle. Newton built several reflecting models in which the image was viewed in a concave rounded like the inside of a bowl mirror through an eyepiece in the side of the tube. In he sent one of these to the Royal Society Great Britain's oldest organization of scientists.

Newton was honored when the members of the Royal Society were impressed by his reflecting telescope and when they elected him to their membership.

But when he decided to send the society a paper describing his experiments on light and the conclusions he had drawn from them, the results almost changed history for the worst.

The paper was published in the society's Philosophical Transactions. Many scientists refused to accept the findings, and others were strongly opposed to conclusions that seemed to show that popular theories of light were false. At first Newton patiently answered his critics with further explanations, but when these produced more criticism, he became angry. He vowed he would never publish again, even threatening to give up science altogether. Several years later, at the urging of the astronomer Edmund Halley c.

Newton's greatest work, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, was completed in eighteen months. It was first published in Latin in , when Newton was forty-five. Its appearance established him as the leading scientist of his time, not only in England but in the entire Western world.

In the Principia Newton, with the law of universal gravitation, gave mathematical solutions to most of the problems relating to motion with which earlier scientists had struggled. In the years after Newton's election to the Royal Society, the thinking of his peers and of scholars had been slowly developing along lines similar to those which his had taken, and they were more open to his explanations of the behavior of bodies moving according to the laws of motion than they had been to his theories about the nature of light.

Yet the Principia 's mathematical form made it difficult for even the sharpest minds to follow. Those who did understand it saw that it needed to be made easier to read. As a result, in the years from to Newton's death, the Principia was the subject of many books and articles attempting to better explain Newton's ideas. After the publication of the Principia, Newton became depressed and lost interest in scientific matters. He became interested in university politics and was elected a representative of the university in Parliament.

Later he asked friends in London to help him obtain a government appointment. The result was that in , at the age of fifty-four, he left Cambridge to become warden and then master of the Mint place where money is printed or manufactured. Newton took the job just as seriously as he had his scientific pursuits and made changes in the English money system that were effective for over one hundred years. Newton's London life lasted as long as his professorship.

He received many honors, including the first knighthood given for scientific achievement and election to life presidency of the Royal Society. In he published the Opticks, mainly a collection of earlier research, which he revised changed three times. She brought along her three small children from her second marriage. Newton was enrolled at the King's School in Grantham, a town in Lincolnshire, where he lodged with a local apothecary and was introduced to the fascinating world of chemistry.

His mother pulled him out of school at age Her plan was to make him a farmer and have him tend the farm. Newton failed miserably, as he found farming monotonous. Newton was soon sent back to King's School to finish his basic education.

Perhaps sensing the young man's innate intellectual abilities, his uncle, a graduate of the University of Cambridge's Trinity College , persuaded Newton's mother to have him enter the university. Newton enrolled in a program similar to a work-study in , and subsequently waited on tables and took care of wealthier students' rooms. When Newton arrived at Cambridge, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was already in full force.

The heliocentric view of the universe—theorized by astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and later refined by Galileo —was well known in most European academic circles. Yet, like most universities in Europe, Cambridge was steeped in Aristotelian philosophy and a view of nature resting on a geocentric view of the universe, dealing with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. During his first three years at Cambridge, Newton was taught the standard curriculum but was fascinated with the more advanced science.

All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers. The result was a less-than-stellar performance, but one that is understandable, given his dual course of study. It was during this time that Newton kept a second set of notes, entitled "Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae" "Certain Philosophical Questions". The "Quaestiones" reveal that Newton had discovered the new concept of nature that provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.

Though Newton graduated without honors or distinctions, his efforts won him the title of scholar and four years of financial support for future education. In , the bubonic plague that was ravaging Europe had come to Cambridge, forcing the university to close.

After a two-year hiatus, Newton returned to Cambridge in and was elected a minor fellow at Trinity College, as he was still not considered a standout scholar. In the ensuing years, his fortune improved.

Newton received his Master of Arts degree in , before he was During this time, he came across Nicholas Mercator's published book on methods for dealing with infinite series. Newton quickly wrote a treatise, De Analysi , expounding his own wider-ranging results. He shared this with friend and mentor Isaac Barrow, but didn't include his name as author.

In August , Barrow identified its author to Collins as "Mr. Newton's work was brought to the attention of the mathematics community for the first time. Shortly afterward, Barrow resigned his Lucasian professorship at Cambridge, and Newton assumed the chair. Newton made discoveries in optics, motion and mathematics. Newton theorized that white light was a composite of all colors of the spectrum, and that light was composed of particles.

His momentous book on physics, Principia , contains information on nearly all of the essential concepts of physics except energy, ultimately helping him to explain the laws of motion and the theory of gravity. Along with mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Newton is credited for developing essential theories of calculus.

Newton's first major public scientific achievement was designing and constructing a reflecting telescope in As a professor at Cambridge, Newton was required to deliver an annual course of lectures and chose optics as his initial topic. He used his telescope to study optics and help prove his theory of light and color. The Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope in , and the organization's interest encouraged Newton to publish his notes on light, optics and color in Sir Isaac Newton contemplates the force of gravity, as the famous story goes, on seeing an apple fall in his orchard, circa Between and , Newton returned home from Trinity College to pursue his private study, as school was closed due to the Great Plague.

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