Biography

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1642, on the auspicious day of Christmas, in the Manor House at the Hamlet of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire. He was born prematurely and was very small at birth. It is a coincidence that his great scientific predecessor Galileo died in the same year. His father was uneducated and vagrant and a weak man. He died three months before the birth of his son. His mother was generally regarded as a hardworking frugal woman.[br /]
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Hannah Newton married again to 63 year old Barnabas Smith in 1644 and went to live in the village of North Witham. His grandmother then looked after Isaac Newton. This had an indelible imprint on his character.[br /]
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His adult life was to be marred by uncontrollable rages, paranoid vindictiveness and occasional mental instability. Even though he loved his mother she abandoned him. He did not hate her.[br /]
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Newton in his adult life was devoted to long and profound speculations about distant heavenly bodies and the nature of their attraction to each other. Newton grew up a `sober, silent and thinking lad.' But he was also subject to occasional outbursts of `tantrums'. Isaac Newton had grown up in a stereotype puritan domesticity and had all puritan habits of life. He consulted the Bible to find out the wishes of God, the father, and retained this habit throughout his life. In the ever-booming field of Newtonian psychological studies, most have agreed that Newton was carried away by a strong unconscious need to know his father. From his faith he knew that God, the father created the universe, leaving certain clues as to its ultimate nature and His ultimate intentions.[br /]
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Newton was driven to search obsessively for these clues throughout his life, into proper fields. He devoted equal time to pursue biblical and religious studies, as well as to pursue the scientific truth. Finally, he concluded that his religious work would have the most lasting values.Reverend Barnabas Smith died, when Newton was 10, and his mother returned to Woolsthorpe. Newton's prayers had been answered became he had special attach to for the place this birth. Isaac was the eldest and Hannah relied upon him to such an extent, that he became 'the man of the family' in his mother's eyes.At the age of 12, Newton went to the grammar school in Grantham,
which was 10 miles away. At school, he studied mostly Latin and ancient Greek languages. Mathematics was all but ignored in the education system of that period, which remained for the most part Medieval.[br /]
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Newton in his adult life was devoted to long and profound speculations about distant heavenly bodies and the nature of their attraction to each other. Newton grew up a `sober, silent and thinking lad.' But he was also subject to occasional outbursts of `tantrums'. Isaac Newton had grown up in a stereotype puritan domesticity and had all puritan habits of life. He consulted the Bible to find out the wishes of God, the father, and retained this habit throughout his life. In the ever-booming field of Newtonian psychological studies, most have agreed that Newton was carried away by a strong unconscious need to know his father. From his faith he knew that God, the father created the universe, leaving certain clues as to its ultimate nature and His ultimate intentions.[br /]
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Newton was driven to search obsessively for these clues throughout his life, into proper fields. He devoted equal time to pursue biblical and religious studies, as well as to pursue the scientific truth. Finally, he concluded that his religious work would have the most lasting values.Reverend Barnabas Smith died, when Newton was 10, and his mother returned to Woolsthorpe. Newton's prayers had been answered became he had special attach to for the place this birth. Isaac was the eldest and Hannah relied upon him to such an extent, that he became 'the man of the family' in his mother's eyes.[br /]
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At the age of 12, Newton went to the grammar school in Grantham, which was 10 miles away. At school, he studied mostly Latin and ancient Greek languages. Mathematics was all but ignored in the education system of that period, which remained for the most part Medieval.[br /]
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Isaac, the quiet, sensitive country boy was uninterested, and sank to the bottom class. Newton was not intellectually enlightened at that time. It so happened one day at school; a bully put him down and kicked him in his stomach. He was brutally beaten and insulted. This ignited Newton to challenge his opponent the next day in the churchyard. As would be prophesied, Newton brought down his opponent physically. This incident propelled him to ensure that he beat his opponent intellectually in classroom. Since then his intent of displaying brashly his intellectually superiority had been his Impregnable Hallmark. Anger-fuelled vindictiveness was to recur often during his later life and this outbreak merely set the pattern rolling.[br /]
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Once Newton's intellectual faculties had been roused, there was no stopping him. Watching the teenage dullard emerge from his chrysalis and stretch the butterfly wings of a genius must have been a wondrous sight for the townsfolk of Grantham. Newton's intellectual interests had expanded far beyond the limits of his school education. And his main interest was in science and how things worked.When he was 17, his mother called him home to run the farm. As a farmer, the 17-year-old Newton was worse than useless. Fortunately, the mistake was recognized, and Newton was sent back to the grammar school in Grantham, where he had already studied, to prepare for the university. As with many of the leading scientists of the age, he left behind in Grantham anecdotes about his mechanical ability and his skill in building models of machines, such as clocks and windmills.[br /]
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At the school he apparently gained a firm command of Latin but probably received no more than a smattering of arithmetic. When he was a student, he lodged with the local apothecary and eventually became engaged to the apothecary's stepdaughter, Miss Storey, before he went off to Cambridge. But as Newton became engrossed in his studies, the romance cooled and Miss Storey married someone else. It is said that he kept a warm memory of this love. Newton had no other recorded `sweet hearts' and never married. Newton went to Cambridge in June 1661, where he was admitted to Trinity College. At that time, Trinity College was 'the stateliest and most uniform college in Christendom'.At Cambridge, Newton studied mathematics, being especially strongly influenced by Euclid, although he was also influenced by Baconian and Cartesian philosophies.Newton's aim at Cambridge was to achieve a law degree. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle, but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of study. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. The new algebra and analytical geometry of Viete, Descartes, Wallis and the mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him. His scientific genius emerged suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of 1665 and he had to return to Lincolnshire. He was only 25 years old, when he began revolutionary advances in
mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.[br /]
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When the plague subsided and the school reopened in 1667, Newton returned to Trinity College as a professor, and after two years, he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He lectured on Optics, Calculus and Physics; he built telescopes and observed Jupiter's moons, and calculated their orbits. But he was not satisfied; as for him these areas were of his secondary interests. His heart was really in alchemy, theology and the spiritual universe.[br /]
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His first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. He proposed the design and then produced the first reflecting telescope. The Royal Society of London heard tales of this 'Wondrous Instrument' and in 1671 caused such a sensation that it was demonstrated to Charles II, on special request. As a result, Newton was elected a member of the Royal Society, a leading Scientific Society in Europe, to which he donated the reflecting telescope. In the same year 1672, Newton published his first scientific paper on light and color in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.[br /]
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It was well received but Hooke and Huygens his contemporaries objected to Newton's attempt to prove by experiment alone that light consist of small particles in motion rather than waves. Newton's relationships with Hooke deteriorated and he turned in on from the membership of the Royal Society. Newton was psychologically incapable of accepting criticism. As a result of Hooke's accusation, he was unable to contain himself, and his rage knew no bounds. Hooke became his sworn enemy. Newton was so upset that he swore not to publish any scientific work. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke, in 1703. During this time he suffered complete nervous breakdown. When he recovered, Newton was as good as before but he abandoned his scientific researches and engaged himself in biblical and hermetic studies.[br /]
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Newton's greatest achievement was his work in Physics and Celestial Mechanics, which culminated in the theory of Universal Gravitation. By 1666, Newton had started visualizing the three Laws of Motion. He was inspired by the fall of an apple onto the ground. At that time, an idea struck him, which over a period turned into the discovery of the law defining the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. His novel idea of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth's gravity influenced the Moon, counter-balancing its centrifugal force. From the law of centrifugal force and Kepler's third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse-square law.[br /]
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In 1679, Newton applied his mathematical skill to prove a conjecture of Hooke's showing that if a body obeys Kepler's second Law then the body is being acted upon by a centripetal force. This discovery showed the physical significance of Kepler's second law. The manuscript of `Principia' was first sent to the Royal Society, whose secretary was Hooke. As soon as Hooke read Newton's manuscript, he accused Newton of plagiarism. Halley, tired of Hooke's boasting, asked Newton whether he could prove Hooke's conjecture, and was told that Newton had solved the problem five years ago but had now mislaid the paper. At Halley's urging, Newton reproduced the proofs and expanded them into a paper on the laws of motion and problems of orbital mechanics.[br /]
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Halley encouraged Newton to write a full treatise of his new physics and its application to astronomy. Just over a year in 1687, Newton published the 'Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica' or 'Principia', which caused a sensation. Newton became internationally famous. Though his concept of `force' was not generally accepted on the Continent, the leading scientists of the day soon recognized him as a worthy successor of Galileo and Descartes.[br /]
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The `Principia' was recognized as the greatest scientific book ever written. A further generalization led to the law of Universal Gravitation. Newton also attracted a wide following amongst the younger generation of scientists and he took an immediate liking to Fatio de Duillier, a young Swiss mathematician, and had soon formed a close emotional attachment. Close association with Fatio gave the 48-year-old scientist renewed energies. According to his assistant, he continued `about 6 weeks in his laboratory. The Fire scarcely going out either Night or Day and he sitting up one Night, as I did another, till he had finished his Chemical Experiments'.[br /]
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Newton had suffered another mental collapse in 1693. He retired from research and took up a government position in London becoming Warden of the Royal Mint, at a salary of œ 2,000, a vast amount in those days. The appointment of Newton to the Mint was a reward for England's noblest intellectual ornament. In 1699, Newton was promoted to Master of mint and his salary was increased to 3,500.[br /]
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When Hooke died in 1703, Newton accepted the post of the President of the Royal Society and was re-elected every year until his death. The next year, he published his second masterpiece, the 'Opticks'. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted him. The tendency has been to see Newton's later years as the waste of a great talent. He spent his last years with his niece and her husband, who conscientiously noted down his memoirs. Isaac Newton, the finest scientist, died on March 20, 1727, in his sleep at the age of 84. He was buried with full national honors in Westminster Abbey.[br /]
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