How Did Isaac Newton Contribute To The Scientific Revolution
Introduction
Throughout history, many brilliant individuals have impacted the world with their ideas and discoveries, and many of those influences live on today. During the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, a breakthrough in scientific discovery brought forth numerous findings that greatly contrasted many of the theories and thought processes that dominated at the time. One man in particular, Sir Isaac Newton, took the world by storm from 1643 to 1747. As a student, Newton was not a stellar academic and was overlooked for many of his advancements as a young man. Little did his family and professors know that Newton would revolutionize the world of science.
Sir Isaac Newton is often credited as being one of the primary leaders of the Scientific Revolution with his exceptional work in optics, calculus, alchemy, mathematics, motion, and gravity. Newton published many of his experimental findings in one of his greatest works, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica …show more content…
(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which he published in 1687. This book is said to be one of the most significant books in the physics world to this day as well as one of the greatest scientific books ever written. After dedicating much of his life to science, Newton turned to politics in his later life by serving as President of the Royal Society in London until his death in 1727 at the age of 84. Though Newton led a successful and influential life, it did not come without its share of complications and hardships. Newton is said to have had numerous psychotic episodes and outbursts toward his critics. However, he is only human. Newton’s ideas transformed the thinking of many individuals in the world, and his life and accomplishments continue to influence the way science is viewed throughout the world today.
Newton’s Early Life Some biographers claim Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642, which is attributed to the “Old Style” Julian calendar. However, Newton’s birthdate is more commonly noted using the Gregorian calendar in Roman Catholic Europe as January 4, 1643. Newton’s father, also name Isaac Newton, was a successful farmer. Unfortunately, he died three months prior to his son’s premature birth. Hannah Ayscough gave birth to baby Isaac Newton in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Young Newton was not expected to live past a few days, but he ended up surviving to the ripe age of 84. Within two years of Newton’s life, his mother married a minister named Barnabas Smith. Hannah left Newton in the care of her mother and moved to a nearby village to begin raising a family with Smith. Newton’s abandonment by his mother left him scarred mentally, and numerous psychotic tendencies followed him throughout his adult life. Newton personally documented some of his own psychotic episodes in a notebook in 1662 that is now owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. In one portion of this work, Newton exposed forty-seven sins he committed in his younger days. One of those sins was, “Threatening my mother and father Smith to burne them and the house over them.” (CONNOR/ ROBERTSON, 2000:1). Barnabas Smith died in 1653 when Newton was twelve. The widowed Hannah moved back to Woolsthorpe to be near Newton and her mother, bringing along Newton’s half-brother and two half-sisters. However, Newton began attending The King’s College in Grantham and moved in with an apothecary where he was introduced to chemistry. Newton was not a stellar academic, and his mother soon pulled him from the school to manage her estate. Newton was not a fan of his new lifestyle, though, and he returned to complete his education in Grantham.
Life at Trinity College, Cambridge Newton decided to further his education at Trinity College Cambridge on June 5, 1661 due to the encouragement of his uncle and the headmaster, Henry Stokes, of King’s College. He served as a sizar, or student servant, to receive monetary assistance toward his higher education. Trinity College was heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, centered around the ideas of a geocentric view of the universe and the assumption that nature is qualitative, not quantitative. Newton, however, expanded his learning by reading the works of other philosophers, including Plato, Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Fascinated by the new ideas of these men, Newton jotted down questions that sparked within him as he researched the new ideals and advancements in science.
Newton’s notebook of questions, titled Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae, was the first indicator that Newton was starting to form ideas for himself. At the beginning of this text, Newton stated, “Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas” which can be translated to “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.” (BORTZ, 2014:9). This statement clearly reveals that Newton respected Plato and Aristotle, but he thought there were undiscovered truths that he had the potential to discover. Newton took a special liking to mechanical philosophy and a quantitative view of nature. He also engrossed himself in mathematics through studies of geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. Newton received his Bachelor’s degree in April of 1665 after studying four years of law. He planned to pursue higher education, but his plans were thwarted when the Great Plague forced the university to close its doors from 1665-1667. Little did everyone know that Newton would change the world during this period.
Work During the Plague Years With the university closed, Newton moved back to his home in Woolsthorpe where he laid the foundation for most of his greatest works.
While much of his time was dedicated to mathematics and optics during these years, he also examined circular motion, analyzed the moon and the planets, and laid the foundations for his laws of gravity. Newton studied Descartes La Géometrie among other mathematical works and discovered the binomial theorem. He also discovered the method of fluxions, which was his realization that “the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure of differentiating it.” (CONNOR/ ROBERTSON, 2000:3) Using his new discovery of fluxions, Newton wrote On Analysis by Infinite Series (1669) and On the Methods of Series and Fluxions (1671) and invented new methods to find areas, tangents, minimum and maximum points on graphs, and the length of curves. Newton also expressed his belief in an infinite series and developed both differential and integral
calculus.
Newton also dedicated a significant amount of time to optics. He followed Descartes belief in a mechanistic nature and claimed that light is made of atoms in motion. Through experiments with white light, Newton discovered that color arises from the analysis of the heterogeneous mixture of light into its simple components. Newton also found that light rays refract at specific angles and that chromatic aberration, or the failure of a lens to bring all wavelength of color to a singular focal plane, disproved the Aristotelian idea that light was a single entity. Therefore, Newton invented the reflecting telescope using a mirror to eliminate the negative effects of chromatic aberration. Newton lectured on his work in optics when Cambridge reopened in 1667 and wrote Opticks: Or, a treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light.
Major Accomplishments In 1669, two years after Trinity College reopened, Newton was appointed Lucasian Professor, one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world, where he continued his work in optics. He served as Lucasian Professor until 1702. In 1672, Newton was appointed as a fellow of the Royal Society because of his contribution of the reflecting telescope. In 1678, Newton suffered a nervous breakdown because of criticism from fellow members in the Royal Society and the death of his mother in 1679. He took a six month hiatus and returned his focus to gravity and the motions of planets.
By 1687, Newton was ready to publish what is considered to be one of the most influential scientific books of all time, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In this publication, Newton not only discussed the quantitative descriptions of the motions of visible bodies, but he laid down his three laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. Newton conceptualized the ideas of inertia, acceleration, and action and reaction through his study of the tides, comets, and the movement of the planets. Newton believed gravity “kept the universe balanced, made it work, and brought heaven and earth together in one great equation” (“Sir Isaac Newton”: 2014). Through Principia, Newton became one of the most prominent minds of the Scientific Revolution.
Newton also studied religion and alchemy in the 1680s. He believed in a supreme, all-knowing, ever present God. Newton rejected the idea of the Trinity, refusing to believe that Jesus and the Holy Ghost held the same prominence as God. He believed God constantly observed the world and that all laws of science were known and understood in the Garden of Eden. Newton’s belief that God created all of the elements and minerals in the universe influenced his work in alchemy and the association of certain chemicals with one another. In his book The Religion of Isaac Newton, F.E. Manuel states:
"The more Newton’s theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work is examined as a whole corpus, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in his moments of grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God’s will in actions, living on the fulfillment of times." (MANUEL, 1974).
Newton was heavily influenced by God’s will in his life and his work. Newton is associated with the first transmutation of lead into gold. In 1693, Newton is said to have had another nervous breakdown, though the reason is unknown. This breakdown caused Newton to retire from research and to politics for the remaining years of his life.
It is believed that Newton’s advancement in alchemy is what prompted Newton to pass up professorship at Cambridge and move to London to become Warden, and eventually Master of the Mint in 1699. In this government position, Newton was responsible for accounting for England’s repository of gold. Newton is said to have severely punished counterfeiters and to have moved the British currency from silver to gold standard. In 1703, Newton was elected President of the Royal Society where he served until his death in 1727. Queen Anne of England knighted Sir Isaac Newton in 1705, making him the first scientist to ever receive such a prestigious honor.
Conclusion
Newton lived his final years with his niece Catherine Barton Conduitt at Cranbury Park, England. He died on March 20, 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The English poet Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph for Newton that stated:
NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. (FORD/FORD 1902).
Sir Isaac Newton swept the world with his scientific discoveries, but even until his death Newton continued to believe that a vast amount of truth lay undiscovered. He is quoted as remarking:
"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." (NEWTON).
Many of Newton’s ideas continue to influence the Western World, with his idea of universal gravitation exists as one of the universal constants in the dogmas of science. Though his life was full of difficulty from a young age, Newton persevered off of sheer will to uncover God’s will for his life and to think beyond what many philosophers thought before his time. He was one of the last prominent leaders of the Scientific Revolution, and he is a man that will never be forgotten for his contributions to the world.
Throughout history, many brilliant individuals have impacted the world with their ideas and discoveries, and many of those influences live on today. During the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries, a breakthrough in scientific discovery brought forth numerous findings that greatly contrasted many of the theories and thought processes that dominated at the time. One man in particular, Sir Isaac Newton, took the world by storm from 1643 to 1747. As a student, Newton was not a stellar academic and was overlooked for many of his advancements as a young man. Little did his family and professors know that Newton would revolutionize the world of science.
Sir Isaac Newton is often credited as being one of the primary leaders of the Scientific Revolution with his exceptional work in optics, calculus, alchemy, mathematics, motion, and gravity. Newton published many of his experimental findings in one of his greatest works, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica …show more content…
(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which he published in 1687. This book is said to be one of the most significant books in the physics world to this day as well as one of the greatest scientific books ever written. After dedicating much of his life to science, Newton turned to politics in his later life by serving as President of the Royal Society in London until his death in 1727 at the age of 84. Though Newton led a successful and influential life, it did not come without its share of complications and hardships. Newton is said to have had numerous psychotic episodes and outbursts toward his critics. However, he is only human. Newton’s ideas transformed the thinking of many individuals in the world, and his life and accomplishments continue to influence the way science is viewed throughout the world today.
Newton’s Early Life Some biographers claim Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642, which is attributed to the “Old Style” Julian calendar. However, Newton’s birthdate is more commonly noted using the Gregorian calendar in Roman Catholic Europe as January 4, 1643. Newton’s father, also name Isaac Newton, was a successful farmer. Unfortunately, he died three months prior to his son’s premature birth. Hannah Ayscough gave birth to baby Isaac Newton in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Young Newton was not expected to live past a few days, but he ended up surviving to the ripe age of 84. Within two years of Newton’s life, his mother married a minister named Barnabas Smith. Hannah left Newton in the care of her mother and moved to a nearby village to begin raising a family with Smith. Newton’s abandonment by his mother left him scarred mentally, and numerous psychotic tendencies followed him throughout his adult life. Newton personally documented some of his own psychotic episodes in a notebook in 1662 that is now owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. In one portion of this work, Newton exposed forty-seven sins he committed in his younger days. One of those sins was, “Threatening my mother and father Smith to burne them and the house over them.” (CONNOR/ ROBERTSON, 2000:1). Barnabas Smith died in 1653 when Newton was twelve. The widowed Hannah moved back to Woolsthorpe to be near Newton and her mother, bringing along Newton’s half-brother and two half-sisters. However, Newton began attending The King’s College in Grantham and moved in with an apothecary where he was introduced to chemistry. Newton was not a stellar academic, and his mother soon pulled him from the school to manage her estate. Newton was not a fan of his new lifestyle, though, and he returned to complete his education in Grantham.
Life at Trinity College, Cambridge Newton decided to further his education at Trinity College Cambridge on June 5, 1661 due to the encouragement of his uncle and the headmaster, Henry Stokes, of King’s College. He served as a sizar, or student servant, to receive monetary assistance toward his higher education. Trinity College was heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, centered around the ideas of a geocentric view of the universe and the assumption that nature is qualitative, not quantitative. Newton, however, expanded his learning by reading the works of other philosophers, including Plato, Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Fascinated by the new ideas of these men, Newton jotted down questions that sparked within him as he researched the new ideals and advancements in science.
Newton’s notebook of questions, titled Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae, was the first indicator that Newton was starting to form ideas for himself. At the beginning of this text, Newton stated, “Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas” which can be translated to “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.” (BORTZ, 2014:9). This statement clearly reveals that Newton respected Plato and Aristotle, but he thought there were undiscovered truths that he had the potential to discover. Newton took a special liking to mechanical philosophy and a quantitative view of nature. He also engrossed himself in mathematics through studies of geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. Newton received his Bachelor’s degree in April of 1665 after studying four years of law. He planned to pursue higher education, but his plans were thwarted when the Great Plague forced the university to close its doors from 1665-1667. Little did everyone know that Newton would change the world during this period.
Work During the Plague Years With the university closed, Newton moved back to his home in Woolsthorpe where he laid the foundation for most of his greatest works.
While much of his time was dedicated to mathematics and optics during these years, he also examined circular motion, analyzed the moon and the planets, and laid the foundations for his laws of gravity. Newton studied Descartes La Géometrie among other mathematical works and discovered the binomial theorem. He also discovered the method of fluxions, which was his realization that “the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure of differentiating it.” (CONNOR/ ROBERTSON, 2000:3) Using his new discovery of fluxions, Newton wrote On Analysis by Infinite Series (1669) and On the Methods of Series and Fluxions (1671) and invented new methods to find areas, tangents, minimum and maximum points on graphs, and the length of curves. Newton also expressed his belief in an infinite series and developed both differential and integral
calculus.
Newton also dedicated a significant amount of time to optics. He followed Descartes belief in a mechanistic nature and claimed that light is made of atoms in motion. Through experiments with white light, Newton discovered that color arises from the analysis of the heterogeneous mixture of light into its simple components. Newton also found that light rays refract at specific angles and that chromatic aberration, or the failure of a lens to bring all wavelength of color to a singular focal plane, disproved the Aristotelian idea that light was a single entity. Therefore, Newton invented the reflecting telescope using a mirror to eliminate the negative effects of chromatic aberration. Newton lectured on his work in optics when Cambridge reopened in 1667 and wrote Opticks: Or, a treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light.
Major Accomplishments In 1669, two years after Trinity College reopened, Newton was appointed Lucasian Professor, one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world, where he continued his work in optics. He served as Lucasian Professor until 1702. In 1672, Newton was appointed as a fellow of the Royal Society because of his contribution of the reflecting telescope. In 1678, Newton suffered a nervous breakdown because of criticism from fellow members in the Royal Society and the death of his mother in 1679. He took a six month hiatus and returned his focus to gravity and the motions of planets.
By 1687, Newton was ready to publish what is considered to be one of the most influential scientific books of all time, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In this publication, Newton not only discussed the quantitative descriptions of the motions of visible bodies, but he laid down his three laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. Newton conceptualized the ideas of inertia, acceleration, and action and reaction through his study of the tides, comets, and the movement of the planets. Newton believed gravity “kept the universe balanced, made it work, and brought heaven and earth together in one great equation” (“Sir Isaac Newton”: 2014). Through Principia, Newton became one of the most prominent minds of the Scientific Revolution.
Newton also studied religion and alchemy in the 1680s. He believed in a supreme, all-knowing, ever present God. Newton rejected the idea of the Trinity, refusing to believe that Jesus and the Holy Ghost held the same prominence as God. He believed God constantly observed the world and that all laws of science were known and understood in the Garden of Eden. Newton’s belief that God created all of the elements and minerals in the universe influenced his work in alchemy and the association of certain chemicals with one another. In his book The Religion of Isaac Newton, F.E. Manuel states:
"The more Newton’s theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work is examined as a whole corpus, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in his moments of grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God’s will in actions, living on the fulfillment of times." (MANUEL, 1974).
Newton was heavily influenced by God’s will in his life and his work. Newton is associated with the first transmutation of lead into gold. In 1693, Newton is said to have had another nervous breakdown, though the reason is unknown. This breakdown caused Newton to retire from research and to politics for the remaining years of his life.
It is believed that Newton’s advancement in alchemy is what prompted Newton to pass up professorship at Cambridge and move to London to become Warden, and eventually Master of the Mint in 1699. In this government position, Newton was responsible for accounting for England’s repository of gold. Newton is said to have severely punished counterfeiters and to have moved the British currency from silver to gold standard. In 1703, Newton was elected President of the Royal Society where he served until his death in 1727. Queen Anne of England knighted Sir Isaac Newton in 1705, making him the first scientist to ever receive such a prestigious honor.
Conclusion
Newton lived his final years with his niece Catherine Barton Conduitt at Cranbury Park, England. He died on March 20, 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The English poet Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph for Newton that stated:
NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. (FORD/FORD 1902).
Sir Isaac Newton swept the world with his scientific discoveries, but even until his death Newton continued to believe that a vast amount of truth lay undiscovered. He is quoted as remarking:
"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." (NEWTON).
Many of Newton’s ideas continue to influence the Western World, with his idea of universal gravitation exists as one of the universal constants in the dogmas of science. Though his life was full of difficulty from a young age, Newton persevered off of sheer will to uncover God’s will for his life and to think beyond what many philosophers thought before his time. He was one of the last prominent leaders of the Scientific Revolution, and he is a man that will never be forgotten for his contributions to the world.