As the anecdote was told, the young Isaac Newton was sitting in his garden when an apple fell on his head and, in a stroke of brilliant insight; he suddenly came up with his theory of gravity. But what evidence is there that Newton was really inspired by a falling apple? He left no written account suggesting this, although there were other documents suggesting that he had spoken to others about it when he was an old man.
It was 1666 at age 24, the plague had closed many public buildings and meetings. Newton had to abandon Cambridge for Woolsthorpe Manor, the modest house where he was born, to contemplate the stellar problems he had been pursuing at the university. He observed an apple falling from a tree in his mother’s garden, although there is no evidence to suggest that it hit him on the head.
The story of the falling apple has gone down in history as the second-greatest “eureka moment” in science, after Archimedes discovered how to work out the volume of objects while he was in the bath.
Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642, at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a small village in the county of Lincolnshire, England. He was born three months after the death of his father, a prosperous farmer also named Isaac Newton. Born prematurely, he was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug (≈ 1.1 litres). Newton was brought up by his mother until the age of three, when she remarried and went to live with her new husband, a wealthy clergyman. Newton was abandoned to the care of his maternal grandmother in a devout atmosphere. He was brought up in a farmhouse some distance from any village, and he would have been discouraged by his grandmother to play with other “common” children of the cottage. Of necessity the child Newton learned how to live within his head and be self-sufficient. Newton went to two local schools until he was twelve. He then was sent away to the nearby market town of Grantham to attend the grammar school (a secondary school corresponding to a U.S. high school) at 12 where he learned Latin that paved his way to be a scholar later.
He lodged with a local apothecary where he learned herb medicines and chemicals. Almost immediately, it became obvious that his intelligence was of a different order from that of his classmates. He showed interests in mechanics and spent all the money his mother gave him on tools. He built working water mills for his own amusement and dolls’ furniture for the daughter of his landlord. He designed and constructed a four feet tall working water clock, and made sun dials so accurate that his family and neighbors came to rely on “Isaac’s dials” to measure their days. He related an incident when he was kicked in the stomach by a boy marked “above” him in the class; he promptly beat him, dragged him by the ear, and rubbed his nose against the wall. It is an indication of his violent temper and ruthless behavior which tends to crush his opponents in his career.
As a teen ager, Newton disliked his stepfather and had an enmity relationship with his mother for marrying him. At sixteen, Newton had no idea how to reconcile his abilities to his place in life. His mother decided to pull him out of school in 1659 to run the family estate. She demanded him to tend sheep and raise grain on the farm but Newton made a miserable farmer. The adult Newton never permitted himself real emotional dependence on another human being. It is possible that he turned his emotions toward the Heavenly Father as he had written many papers in his theological pursuit. Newton never married in his life.
Fortunately, the former school master who had spotted Newton’s talents at an early stage came to the rescue. Newton was allowed to go back to Grantham. He boarded with the school master and completed the school learning required in preparation for college. With the persuasion of his uncle, a graduate of Trinity College, Newton was sent to university with limited allowance as Hannah disdained book learning. Newton wasted no time getting out of town in June 1661. He took almost nothing with him and entered Trinity (a college of University of Cambridge, England today) as a subsizar – the name Cambridge gave to those students who paid their way by doing the tasks that the sons of richer men would not do for themselves. He was no saint, and he admitted wrong done to his fellow man: stealing, cheating, gluttony, and counterfeit. Above all, he studied ferociously on many subjects mostly on his own and surpassed all but one or two of the men on the faculty who could have instructed him. After two hard years, Newton paused to sum up his learning in a document he modestly called Certain Philosophical Questions in 1664. He posed questions on the universe, physics, lights, and was confused about the property called gravity. He offered no definitive answers, but demonstrated his ambition and intellectual capacity.
Starting in April 1664, Newton received his scholarship that the college would pay his board and give him a small stipend. He now could pursue his academic interests without the financial constraints from his mother. However, the plague by rats through ships from the continent since early 1665 interrupted his studies at the college. Newton received his bachelor’s of arts degree in August 1665 and soon Cambridge closed down because of the plague in London. Newton headed home. Most of his academic inventions were rooted during this period of time. He experimented with the origin of colors and the nature of gravity, and created what we know as calculus today.
Cambridge reopened in 1667, and Newton returned to study for his Master of Arts degree. He was given a fellowship, a special award where he is paid to study. In 1669 at age 27, he was made a professor of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics succeeding Isaac Barrow who was one of Newton’s teachers and had recognized his talents. This post provided him with room, board, and about one hundred pounds a year which is plenty for an unmarried man and virtually no living expenses. He also got a lot of time for himself that he only had to deliver one course of lectures every three terms. Newton was still little known to the world and did not attract much attention in the college either. He kept all the ideas in his head and on notebooks. His creative minds worked on multiple fronts trying to make senses of the universe in lights, relationship of earth and sun, and philosophy. He worked alone for long hours (skip meals and minimal sleeps) seven days a week. There were stories that he boiled his watch instead of eggs, his cat ate his meals and got fat, and seldom interacted with people. He spent all his awaking hours in research.
The world began to recognize his ingenuity in the improved telescope known as Newtonian telescope today. In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colors exiting a prism is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colors by different angles. He then showed the white sun light could be dispersed into color lights through a prism. As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using a mirror as the objective to bypass that problem rather than the conventional lens of any refracting telescope which would suffer from the dispersion of light into colors. He made everything by himself and grinded the mirror by hand in late 1668. Newton demonstrated the functional reflecting telescope to the Royal Society of London, the country’s most famous scientific society. The members were so impressed they invited Newton to join in 1671. However, Newton did not publish the first edition of his Opticks until February 1704 almost ten years after his first observation of lights. Newton had adversaries all along his publications, notably, Robert Hooke in optics and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in mathmetics.
Leibniz and Newton are usually both credited with the invention of calculus. Newton’s work in calculus first came up in a manuscript in October 1666. In June 1669, Newton’s manuscript on infinite equations was reviewed by Isaac Barrow. Newton was referred to as an ‘extraordinary genius’ by Barrow in August 1669. Newton was the first to apply calculus to general physics and Leibniz developed much of the notation used in calculus today. The basic insights that both Newton and Leibniz provided were the laws of differentiation and integration, second and higher derivatives, and the notion of an approximating polynomial series. A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton shows that they arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting first with integration and Newton with differentiation. Today, both Newton and Leibniz are given credit for developing calculus independently. It is Leibniz, however, who gave the new discipline its name. Newton called his calculus “the science of fluxions”.
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“the Principia”), first published on 5 July 1687 represents the pinnacle of achievement by Newton. It had been twenty years since the epiphany from the falling apple in 1666. Newton stated the three universal laws of motion in an elegant way that enabled many of the advances of the Industrial Revolution which soon followed (mechanical physics), and were not to be improved upon for more than 200 years, and are still the underpinnings of the non-relativistic technologies of the modern world (rocket launch in the space program).
The Principia was published with encouragement and financial help from Edmond Halley, a member of the Royal Society. Edmond Halley used Newton’s new laws to calculate the gravitational effects of Jupiter and Saturn on cometary orbits in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. This calculation enabled him, after examining historical records, to conclude that all three comets that had appeared in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were in fact the same object returning every 76 years, a period that has since been amended to every 75–76 years. After a rough estimate of the perturbations the comet would sustain from the gravitational attraction of the planets, he predicted its return for 1758. His prediction of the comet’s return proved to be correct, although it was not seen until 25 December 1758. Halley himself did not live to see the comet return, as he died in 1742. The confirmation of the comet’s return was the first time anything other than planets had been shown to orbit the Sun. It was also one of the earliest successful tests of Newtonian physics, and a clear demonstration of its explanatory power. The comet was named in Halley’s honor afterwards.
For most of his career, Newton was deeply involved in his alchemical program even though mostly in private. He experimented furiously in his private laboratory within the alchemical tradition – searching a method in manipulation of matter and heat to transform the base metal into pure lustrous gold. He applied scientific disciplines in the experiments recording steps, amount of materials, and temperatures with details whereas gained tremendous knowledge in metallurgy. After his death, Newton’s hair was examined and found to contain mercury, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton’s eccentricity in late life.
Newton has his Dark Year after his major great achievements in sciences by age 50. He was plagued by depression and insomnia, and apparently suffers a nervous breakdown in 1693 which lasted about 18 months. He recovered from the worst of it, but he had suffered a major burnout. His scientific drive had gone stale. Then the Crown began consulting him on economics and currency. England was at wars with continent and demanded money to pay for the wars. However, there was a big hole in government finance which drained the revenues.
Counterfeiting monetary bills and coin shaving had been blatant for a long time. The silver content of coins was badly regulated. The newer coins contained more silvers than the old ones. For a given lump sum weight of silver, one could buy more gold in the continent than in London. As a result, the traders collected good silver coins in England, melted them into ingots, shipped them across the Channel, bought gold, and then use the gold to buy more silver coins. The situation was a mess and Newton was among those calling for a recall of all old coins and for minting of completely new coinage.
Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696. Newton tore into the job. He reorganized the Mint, bought new equipment, and took advantage of his alchemical knowledge of metallurgy. He brought order out of chaos. The Master of the Mint died after three years, and Newton got his job in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.
Newton also became a detective, hunting down counterfeiters. He enforced the neglected death-by-hanging-drawing-and-quartering penalty. He could be found in taverns and the halls of Newgate prison searching for leads. The flip side of this life was that Newton changed from an isolated academic, wrapped in a brown study, to a wealthy London social figure. He re-invented himself as well as England’s monetary system. He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercised his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. As Master of the Mint in 1717 in the “Law of Queen Anne” Newton moved the Pound Sterling de facto from the silver standard to the gold standard. The shilling, pound, and pence were redefined so that twenty-one shillings and six pence would stay equivalent to one gold guinea.
Newton achieved a new high by becoming the President of the Royal Society in 1703. Newton reached the zenith of his life and career when he was awarded a Knighthood by Queen Anne in April 1705.
Newton died in his sleep in London on 20 March 1727 at 84 and was buried in Westminster Abbey where it is one of the most notable religious buildings in the United Kingdom, and is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English, later British monarchs.
Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” It is true that the accumulation of knowledge is due to the hard work of many including Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei in astronomy. “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” The passion of pursuit in knowledge with his broad interests in multiple disciplines makes Isaac Newton one of the greatest scientists of all time. He laid the corner stone of modern sciences of mathematics and experiments. He completed the theory with simple mathematical laws that governed the researches and experiments for three hundred years.
Newton was effective in all he set out to do. Newton brought intense focus and dedication to bear on everything he did. He certainly had talents, but we need to remember that passion, focus, and hard work were the alchemy of his astonishing abilities — as it can be the alchemy of ours as well.
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Written in August, 2013