Reference
- Newton, Isaac (1642-1727)English physicist and mathematician who is regarded as one of the greatest scientists ever to have lived. In physics, he discovered the three laws of motion that bear his name and was the first to explain gravitation, clearly defining the nature of mass, weight, force, inertia, and acceleration. In his honour, the SI unit of force is called the newton. Newton also made fundamental discoveries in optics, finding that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours and inventing the reflecting telescope. In mathematics, Newton's principal contribution was to formulate calculus and the binomial theorem.
Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on 25 December 1642 by the old Julian calendar, but on 4 January 1643 by modern reckoning. His birthplace, Woolsthorpe Manor, is now preserved. Newton's was an inauspicious beginning for he was a premature, sickly baby born after his father's death, and his survival was not expected. When he was three, his mother remarried and the young Newton was left in his grandmother's care. He soon began to take refuge in things mechanical, reputedly making water clocks, kites bearing fiery lanterns aloft, and a model mill powered by a mouse, as well as innumerable drawings and diagrams. When Newton was 12, he began to attend the King's School, Grantham, but his schooling was not to last. His mother, widowed again, returned to Woolsthorpe in 1658 and withdrew him from school with the intention of making him into a farmer. Fortunately, his uncle recognized Newton's ability and managed to get him back to school to prepare for university entrance. This Newton achieved in 1661, when he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and began to delve widely and deeply into the scholarship of the day.
In 1665, the year that he became a BA, the university was closed because of the plague and Newton spent 18 months at Woolsthorpe, with only the occasional visit to Cambridge. Such seclusion was a prominent feature of Newton's creative life and, during this period, he laid the foundations of his work in mathematics, optics, dynamics, and celestial mechanics, performing his first prism experiments and reflecting on motion and gravitation...
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Perspectives
The Principia: the Authoritative Translation
In his monumental 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known familiarly as the Principia, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles. This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the Principia also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system. The translation-only edition of this preeminent work is truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral--an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names--mass, gravity, velocity--things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo's discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation. James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton's reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion--ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it can truly be said: We are all Newtonians.
Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy
Isaac Newton is one of the greatest scientists in history, yet the spectrum of his interests was much broader than that of most contemporary scientists. In fact, Newton would have defined himself not as a scientist, but as a natural philosopher. He was deeply involved in alchemical, religious, and biblical studies, and in the later part of his life he played a prominent role in British politics, economics, and the promotion of scientific research. Newton's pivotal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which sets out his laws of universal gravitation and motion, is regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science. Niccolò Guicciardini's enlightening biography offers an accessible introduction both to Newton's celebrated research in mathematics, optics, mechanics, and astronomy and to how Newton viewed these scientific fields in relation to his quest for the deepest secrets of the universe, matter theory and religion. Guicciardini sets Newton the natural philosopher in the troubled context of the religious and political debates ongoing during Newton's life, a life spanning the English Civil Wars, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian succession. Incorporating the latest Newtonian scholarship, this fast-paced biography broadens our perception of both this iconic figure and the great scientific revolution of the early modern period.
Newton's Metaphysics
In this collection of new and previously published essays, noted philosopher Eric Schliesser offers new interpretations of the signifance of Isaac Newton's metaphysics on his physics and the subsequent development of philosophy more broadly. Schliesser address Newton's account of space, time, gravity, motion, inertia, and laws-all evergreens in the literature; he also breaks new ground in focusing on Newton's philosophy of time, Newton's views on emanation, and Newton's modal metaphysics. In particular, Schliesser explores the rich resonances between Newton's and Spinoza's metaphysics. Schliesser presents a new argument of the ways in which Newton and his circle respond to the treatment and accusations of Spinozism, illuminating both the details of Newton's metaphysics and the content of Spinoza's. Schliesser provides a fine-grained analysis of some of the key metaphysical concepts in Newton's physics, including controversial interpretations of Newton's ideas on space, time, inertia, and necessity. Schliesser restates his provocative interpretation of Newton's views on action at a distance as he was developing the Principia. Newton's Metaphysics contains a substantive introduction, two chapters co-authored with Zvi Biener and with Mary Domski, new chapters on Newton's modal metaphysics and his theology, and two postscripts in which Schliesser responds to some of his most important critics, including Katherine Brading, Andrew Janiak, Hylarie Kochiras, Steffen Ducheyne, and Adwait Parker. The collection presents new and varied analyses on familiar focuses of Newton's work, adding important perspectives to the recent revival of interest in Spinoza's metaphysics.
Reversibility and the Laws of Physics
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window
Isaac Newton's laws of physics are fully reversible; particles can move forward or backward in time without any inconsistency. But this is not our experience in the world, where the arrow of time is fundamentally connected to irreversible processes and the increase in entropy.
Falling Freely
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowUse concepts from the previous episode to analyze motion when an object is under constant acceleration due to gravity. In principle, the initial conditions in such cases allow the position of the object to be determined for any time in the future, which is the idea behind Isaac Newton's clockwork universe.
Newton
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThis program is a dramatized presentation of the life of Sir Isaac Newton, as told by his friend and colleague Edmund Halley. Using both 17th- and 20th-century perspectives, this account takes viewers from Newton's study to the moon launching pad. We meet the man and the genius who contributed the law of universal gravitation, differential calculus, and the reflecting telescope to our world.
"The life of Isaac Newton and the implications for presentday science of his monumental work, the Principia, are brought together in this ambitious presentation."-- Journal of College Sciences Teaching.
Online Resources
- Isaac Newton's 'Of Quadrature by Ordinates'In Of Quadrature by Ordinates (1695), Isaac Newton tried two methods for obtaining the Newton—Cotes formulae. The first method is extrapolation and the second one is the method of undetermined coefficients using the quadrature of monomials. The first method provides n-ordinate Newton—Cotes formulae only for cases in which n = 3, 4 and 5. However this method provides another important formulae if the ratios of errors are corrected. It is proved that the second method is correct and provides the Newton—Cotes formulae. Present significance of each of the methods is given.
- Newton: From Certainty to Probability?Newton’s earliest publications contained scandalous epistemological claims: not only did he aim for certainty; he also claimed success. Some commentators argue that Newton ultimately gave up claims of certainty in favor of a high degree of probability. I argue that no such shift occurred. I examine the evidence of a probabilistic shift: a passage from query 23/31 of the and rule 4 of the . Neither passage supports a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy. The aim of certainty, then, was an enduring feature of Newton’s methodology
- The religion of the young Isaac NewtonHalf a century ago, Frank Manuel published an original and provocative ‘portrait’
of Isaac Newton. Seeking to better comprehend the elusive mind-set of the great
man, Manuel availed himself of psychoanalytic tools as he conjured the possibility
of a profound emotional bond between Newton and God. Manuel was unable to
determine ‘the precise origins’ of Newton’s anti-Trinitarianism. What he did
locate, however, was a ‘religious dedication’ which, Manuel was convinced, permeated all of Newton’s works. Three years later, after consulting the Yahuda manuscripts in Jerusalem, Manuel found confirmation of his previous intuitive
assessment: Newton conceived himself to be the elected ‘priest-scientist’ of his
generation, from whom ‘nothing had been withheld’.
Science and Progress
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThe second episode in this series explores one of the towering geniuses of science, Sir Isaac Newton.