Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1727) was the most famous English mathematician, physicist and astronomer throughout the world. He is considered the founder and ancestor of classical physics, since in one of his works - “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” - Newton outlined the three laws of mechanics and proved the law of universal gravitation, which helped classical mechanics move far forward.
Childhood
Isaac Newton was born on December 25 in the small town of Woolsthorpe, located in the county of Lincolnshire. His father was an average but very successful farmer who did not live to see the birth of his own son and died a couple of months before this event from a severe form of consumption.
It was in honor of the father that the child was named Isaac Newton. This was the decision of the mother, who mourned her deceased husband for a long time and hoped that her son would not repeat his tragic fate.
Despite the fact that Isaac was born at his due date, the boy was very sick and weak. According to some records, it was precisely because of this that they did not dare to baptize him, but when the child grew a little older and stronger, the baptism still took place.
There were two versions about the origin of Newton. Previously, bibliographers were sure that his ancestors were nobles who lived in England in those distant times.
However, the theory was refuted later when manuscripts were found in one of the local settlements, from which the following conclusion was drawn: Newton had absolutely no aristocratic roots; rather, on the contrary, he came from the poorest part of the peasants.
The manuscripts said that his ancestors worked for wealthy landowners and later, having accumulated enough money, bought a small plot of land, becoming yeomen (full landowners). Therefore, by the time Newton's father was born, the position of his ancestors was slightly better than before.
In the winter of 1646, Newton's mother, Anna Ayscough, marries a widower for the second time, and three more children are born. Since the stepfather communicates little with Isaac and practically does not notice him, after a month a similar attitude towards the child can already be discerned in his mother.
She also becomes cold towards her own son, which is why the already sullen and closed boy becomes even more alienated, not only in the family, but also with the classmates and friends around him.
In 1653, Isaac's stepfather dies, leaving his entire fortune to his newfound family and children. It would seem that now the mother should begin to devote much more time to the child, but this does not happen. Rather, on the contrary, now her husband’s entire household is in her hands, as well as children who require care. And despite the fact that part of the fortune still goes to Newton, he, as before, does not receive attention.
Youth
In 1655, Isaac Newton goes to Grantham School, located near his home. Since he has virtually no relationship with his mother during this period, he becomes close to the local pharmacist Clark and moves in with him. But he is not allowed to calmly study and tinker with various mechanisms in his free time (by the way, this was Isaac’s only passion). Six months later, his mother forcibly takes him from school, returns him to the estate and tries to transfer to him some of her own responsibilities for managing the household.
She believed that this way she could not only provide her son with a decent future, but also make her own life much easier. But the attempt was a failure - management was not interesting to the young man. On the estate, he only read, invented new mechanisms and tried to compose poems, showing with all his appearance that he was not going to interfere with the farm. Realizing that she won’t have to wait for help from her son, the mother allows him to continue his studies.
In 1661, having completed his studies at Grantham School, Newton entered Cambridge and successfully passed the entrance exams, after which he was enrolled in Trinity College as a “sizer” (a student who does not pay for his education, but earns it by providing services the institution itself or its wealthier students).
Quite little is known about Isaac’s university education, so it has been extremely difficult for scientists to reconstruct this period of his life. What is known is that the unstable political situation had a negative impact on the university: teachers were fired, student payments were delayed, and the educational process was partially absent.
Beginning of scientific activity
Until 1664, Newton, according to his own notes in his workbooks and personal diary, did not see any benefit or prospects in his university education. However, it was 1664 that became a turning point for him. First, Isaac compiles a list of problems of the surrounding world, consisting of 45 points (by the way, similar lists will appear more than once in the future on the pages of his manuscripts).
Then he meets a new mathematics teacher (and subsequently best friend) Isaac Barrow, thanks to whom he develops a special love for mathematical science. At the same time, he makes his first discovery - he creates a binomial expansion for an arbitrary rational exponent, with the help of which he proves the existence of an expansion of a function in an infinite series.
In 1686, Newton created the theory of universal gravitation, which later, thanks to Voltaire, acquired a certain mysterious and slightly humorous character. Isaac was on friendly terms with Voltaire and shared almost all his theories with him. One day they were sitting after lunch in the park under a tree, talking about the essence of the universe. And at this very moment, Newton suddenly admits to a friend that the theory of universal gravitation came to him at exactly the same moment - during rest.
“The afternoon weather was so warm and good that I definitely wanted to go out into the fresh air, under the apple trees. And at that moment, when I was sitting, completely immersed in my thoughts, a large apple fell from one of the branches. And I wondered why all the objects fall vertically down?”.
Isaac Newton's further scientific work was more than just fruitful. He was in constant correspondence with many famous scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, biologists and physicists. He authored such works as “A New Theory of Light and Colors” (1672), “Motion of Bodies in Orbit” (1684), “Optics or a Treatise on Reflections, Refractions, Bendings and Colors of Light” (1704), “Enumeration of the Lines of the Third order" (1707), "Analysis by means of equations with an infinite number of terms" (1711), "Method of differences" (1711) and many others.
Isaac Newton's work was complex - he worked simultaneously in several fields of knowledge. An important stage in Newton's work was his mathematics, which made it possible to improve the calculation system within the framework of others. Newton's important discovery was the fundamental theorem of analysis. It made it possible to prove that differential calculus is the inverse of integral calculus and vice versa. Newton's discovery of the possibility of binomial expansion of numbers also played an important role in the development of algebra. Newton’s method of extracting roots from equations also played an important practical role, which greatly simplified such calculations.
Newtonian mechanics
Newton made the most significant discoveries. In fact, he created such a branch of physics as mechanics. He formed 3 axioms of mechanics, called Newton's laws. The first law, otherwise called the law, states that any body will be in a state of rest or motion until any force is applied to it. Newton's second law illuminates the problem of differential motion and says that the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the resultant forces applied to the body and inversely proportional to the mass of the body. The third law describes the interaction of bodies with each other. Newton formulated it as the fact that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton's laws became the basis of classical mechanics.
But Newton's most famous discovery was the law of universal gravitation. He was also able to prove that gravitational forces apply not only to terrestrial but also to celestial bodies. These laws were described in 1687 after Newton's publication on the use of mathematical methods in.
Newton's law of gravitation became the first of numerous theories of gravity that subsequently emerged.
Optics
Newton devoted a lot of time to such a branch of physics as optics. He is as important as the spectral decomposition of colors - with the help of a lens he learned to refract white light into other colors. Thanks to Newton, knowledge in optics was systematized. He created the most important device - a reflecting telescope, which improved the quality of observations.
It should be noted that after Newton's discoveries, optics began to develop very quickly. He was able to generalize such discoveries of his predecessors as diffraction, double refraction of a beam and the speed of light.
When studying Newton's laws at school, some students memorize only their theoretical data and formulas, but are absolutely not interested in how great the man was who made such important discoveries. Newton made a huge contribution to the development of man's ideas about the world around him in the 18th century.
Isaac Newton is a famous English mathematician and physicist. The great scientist was born on January 4, 1643 according to the Gregorian calendar (December 25, 1642 according to the Julian calendar) in small Woolsthorpe in England.
Isaac Newton is famous for creating the theoretical foundations of astronomy and mechanics. His achievements include the invention of the reflecting telescope, the discovery of the law of universal gravitation, the writing of extremely important research papers, and the development of integral and differential calculus. True, the last work was done by Newton together with another famous scientist, Leibniz. Isaac Newton is considered the founder of "classical physics".
The great scientist came from a farming family. Little Isaac studied first at Grantham School, then at Trinity College, Cambridge University. After graduation, the future scientist was awarded a bachelor's degree.
The most productive years on the path to great discoveries were the years of seclusion. They fell in the years 1665-1667, when the plague was raging. At this time, Newton was forced to live in Woolsthorpe. It was during this period that the most important research was done. For example, the discovery of the law of universal gravitation.
Isaac Newton is buried in Westminster Abbey. The date of death of the scientist is determined as March 31, 1727 according to the Gregorian calendar (March 20, 1727 - Julian style).
Isaac Newton is a great English theoretical scientist. Newton's years of life are 1642−1727. Life did not spare the great genius. The scientist suffered a lot of grief, pain and loneliness. Financial difficulties, social pressure, rejection of ideas, death of mother, mental disorder. The great Newton survived everything and gave the world his brilliant ideas for the structure of the world and the Universe. Brief biography of the scientist presented in this article.
Childhood of a young scientist
Newton was born into a farming family with little income. A few months before his birth, his father died. The child was born very weak and premature. All relatives believed that he would not survive. Infant mortality in those years was simply monstrous. The baby was so small that it fit in a wool mitten. The boy fell out of this unfortunate mitten twice onto the floor and hit his head.
At the age of three, the boy remains in the care of his grandparents, as his mother marries for the second time and leaves. He will later be reunited with his mother.
Isaac grew up as a very frail, sickly child. It was absolutely introverted personality- “a thing in itself.” The child was very inquisitive, making various objects: paper kites, carts with pedals, mills, and so on. His interest in reading awoke very early. He often retired to the garden with a book and could study the material for hours.
In 1660, Isaac entered Cambridge University. He was one of the disadvantaged students, therefore, in addition to studying, his duties included serving the university staff.
Study of optical phenomena
In 1665, Newton was awarded the degree of Master of Arts. In the same year, a plague epidemic began in England. Isaac settles in Woolsthorpe. It was here that he began to study optics in order to understand the nature of light. He is studying chromatic aberration, performs hundreds of experiments that have become classics and are still used in educational institutions to this day.
While studying optics, the scientist at first professed wave nature of light. Light moves in the form of waves in the ether. Then he abandoned this theory, realizing that the ether must have a certain degree of viscosity that would impede the movement of cosmic bodies, which does not happen in reality.
Over time, the scientist comes to the idea of the corpuscular nature of light. He conducts experiments on the refraction of light, the processes of reflection and absorption of the spectrum.
Laws of mechanics
Gradually, from experiments with light, the scientist’s understanding of the physics of the surrounding world begins to emerge. It will become the main brainchild of I. Newton. Newton studies matter and the laws of its motion in space:
- Thanks to studies of motion, he comes to the idea that if there are no significant influences on an object, then it will move uniformly and rectilinearly in space. This conclusion is called Newton's first law.
- The second states that moving bodies can acquire acceleration under the influence of forces applied to these bodies. Acceleration is directly proportional to the forces applied to the body and inversely proportional to the mass. It is from the consequences of this law that the understanding of the problems of applied forces comes: what kind of forces they are, how they act, how they arise.
- And finally, the third law is the law of counteraction. The action force is equal to the reaction force. With the same force I press on the wall, with the same force it presses on me.
Law of Gravity
One of Newton's main achievements is the discovery of the law of universal gravitation. There is a myth that a scientist was sitting under an apple tree in the garden and an apple fell on his head. This dawned on the scientist: all bodies are drawn to each other. Miscalculations began on paper, endless formulas and, finally, the result - the force of attraction between bodies is proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This formula explained the movement of planets and cosmic bodies. Many physicists met this theory with hostility, since its application seemed very doubtful.
Work in Cambridge
After the plague subsided, Newton returned to Cambridge and joined the mathematics department in 1668. By this time he was already known in narrow circles as the author of the binomial, the theory of fluxions - integral calculus.
While working as a teacher, he is improving the telescope - creating a reflective telescope. The invention was evaluated representatives of the Royal Society of London. Newton receives an invitation to become a member. However, he refuses under the pretext that he has nothing to pay membership fees. He was allowed to be a member of the club for free.
In 1869, Newton's mother became seriously ill with typhus and was bedridden. Newton loved his mother very much and spent 24 hours a day at her sick bedside. He himself prepared her medicine and looked after her. However, the disease progressed, and soon the mother died.
Membership in the society was painful for Newton. His ideas were often perceived as very oppositional, which greatly upset the scientist. This also affected his health. Constant stress and anxiety resulted in a mental disorder. In 1692 there was a fire and all his manuscripts and works were burned.
That same year, Newton became seriously ill. He suffered from mental illness for two years. He stopped understanding his own works.
The constant need for money and loneliness also caused his illness.
In 1699, Newton was appointed caretaker and director of the mint. This improved the scientist’s financial situation. And in 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society of London and was awarded a knighthood.
Published works
Let us list the main works of the scientist that were published:
- “Mathematical principles of natural philosophy”;
- "Optics".
Newton's personal life
Newton spent his entire life alone. There are no surviving references to his partners and life partners. It is believed that Isaac was lonely all his life. This, of course, influenced his sublimated switching of sexual energy into creative potential. But this same fact served as the basis for his emotional disorders.
In his mature years, the scientist had great financial wealth and very generously distributed his money to those in need. He said: if you don’t help people during your life, it will mean that you have never helped anyone. He supported all his distant relatives, donated money to the parish in which he was raised for some time, and appointed individual scholarships for talented and capable students (for example, Maclaurin, the famous mathematician).
Throughout his life, Isaac Newton was extremely modest and shy. He did not publish his works for a long time for this reason. Having the rank of director of the Mint, he was very lenient with employees. He was never rude to students or humiliated them. Although the latter often made fun of the professor.
During his lifetime, Isaac Newton did not take photographs, since photography had not yet been invented at that time, but there are a huge number of portraits of the scientist.
Since 1725, Newton, already at an advanced age, stopped working. In 1727, a new wave of plague epidemic began in Great Britain. Newton falls ill with this terrible disease and dies. In England, mourning is being held in honor of the great scientist. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. On his tombstone there is an inscription: “Let those now living rejoice that such beauty of the human race was in their world.”
NEWTON, Isaac
English mathematician, physicist, alchemist and historian Isaac Newton was born in the town of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire into a farmer's family. Newton's father died shortly before his birth; the mother soon remarried a priest from a neighboring town and moved in with him, leaving her son with his grandmother in Woolsthorpe. Some researchers explain Newton's painful unsociability and bileness, which later manifested itself in his relationships with others, as a mental breakdown in childhood.
At the age of 12, Newton began studying at Grantham School, and in 1661 he entered St. Trinity College (Trinity College) of the University of Cambridge as a subsidizer (the so-called poor students who performed the duties of servants in the college to earn money), where his teacher was the famous mathematician I. Barrow. After graduating from the university, Newton received a bachelor's degree in 1665. In 1665-1667, during the plague epidemic, he was in his home village of Woolsthorpe; These years were the most productive in Newton's scientific work. Here he developed mainly those ideas that led him to the creation of differential and integral calculus, to the invention of a reflecting telescope (made by him with his own hands in 1668), the discovery of the law of universal gravitation, and here he conducted experiments on the decomposition of light.
In 1668, Newton was awarded a master's degree, and in 1669, Barrow transferred to him the chair of physics and mathematics, which Newton occupied until 1701. In 1671, Newton built a second reflecting telescope - larger in size and of better quality. The demonstration of the telescope made a strong impression on his contemporaries, and soon after, in January 1672, Newton was elected a member of the Royal Society of London (he became its president in 1703). In the same year, he presented to the Society his research on the new theory of light and colors, which caused a sharp controversy with Robert Hooke (Newton’s inherent pathological fear of public discussions led to the fact that he published “Optics”, prepared in those years, only 30 years later, after Hooke's death). Newton owns ideas about monochromatic light rays and the periodicity of their properties, substantiated by the finest experiments, that underlie physical optics.
In those same years, Newton was developing the foundations of mathematical analysis, which became widely known from the correspondence of European scientists, although Newton himself did not publish a single line on this subject: Newton’s first publication on the foundations of analysis was published only in 1704, and a more complete one leadership – posthumously (1736).
In 1687, Newton published his grandiose work “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (briefly – “Principles”), which laid the foundation not only for rational mechanics, but also for the entire mathematical science. The “Principles” contained the laws of dynamics, the law of universal gravitation with effective applications to the movement of celestial bodies, the origins of the study of the movement and resistance of liquids and gases, including acoustics.
In 1695, Newton received the position of Superintendent of the Mint (this was apparently facilitated by the fact that Newton was actively interested in alchemy and the transmutation of metals in the 1670s and 1680s). Newton was entrusted with the leadership of the re-minting of all English coins. He managed to put the disordered coinage of England in order, for which in 1699 he received the highly paid lifelong title of Director of the Mint. In the same year, Newton was elected a foreign member of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1705, Queen Anne elevated him to a knighthood for his scientific works. In the last years of his life, Newton devoted a lot of time to theology and ancient and biblical history. Newton was buried in the English national pantheon - Westminster Abbey.
Served as one of the foundations of his great astronomical discovery. Another basis was the works of Kepler, who was already looking for the reasons for the movement of the planets around the sun, the empirical laws of which he discovered. Newton solved this problem.
Isaac Newton's father was a landowner, but not rich. Isaac was born after his death. The mother, who had rich income, gave her son a good upbringing. Young Newton showed very strong curiosity, so at the age of 18 he was sent by his mother to Cambridge, studied mathematics there intensively for six years and quickly studied everything that was then discovered in this branch of knowledge. At the age of 26, he received a position as professor of mathematics at Cambridge, which provided a small salary, and held it for 27 years. During these years, Isaac Newton made almost all of his discoveries. In 1689 he was a member of the Parliament that overthrew the Stuarts, and was soon made master of the London mint. He lived for 32 years, holding this position, coupled with a large salary, respected by his contemporaries, surrounded by secular people of good education and scientists. He was not married, and his niece, Miss Burton, was in charge of his household in London. Isaac Newton died at a ripe old age on March 20, 1727.
Portrait of Isaac Newton. Artist G. Kneller, 1702
At the beginning of his scientific career, Newton discovered a new method of calculation for solving astronomical problems that were unsolvable by previous methods. He called this method the calculus of fluxion. In essence it was the same as the infinite calculus discovered by Leibniz (differential and integral calculus). Newton used this method for quite a long time without making it public. Solving difficult problems through it, he showed the accuracy of the results he obtained using formulas of previous methods. Only when Leibniz made public his method of calculus did Newton find it necessary to make his method public. From this a long-lasting dispute arose between German and English scientists about who had the primacy of the discovery, Leibniz or Newton.
Newton made the main subject of his works the study of the causes of natural phenomena and the derivation of consequences from the laws he found for the action of these causes. The means to achieve the goal was to subsume natural phenomena under mathematical formulas. Previous methods of calculation were insufficient for this work; Therefore, Newton began to develop mathematics and made great discoveries in it, the most important of which was the method of “fluxion calculus.” He applied his method of explaining the laws of nature primarily to optics, trying to derive all the variety of optical phenomena from one principle. He considered light to be a very subtle substance, the movement of which occurs according to the laws of mechanics, and with amazing insight of thought he developed a theory of optical phenomena that remained dominant for a long time. Subsequently, it was found that not all optical phenomena are satisfactorily explained by it, and that light should be considered not as a special substance, but as a wave-like movement of substance, as Huygens had previously said.
Even much more important than the great discoveries of Isaac Newton in optics is his discovery, which resolves the question of the cause of the motion of planets and all celestial bodies. Kepler already considered the reason for the movement of the planets around the sun to be its action on them. Newton, who sought to explain natural phenomena by mechanical causes, found this idea sound and began to make calculations to resolve the question of whether the effect of the sun on the planets consists of attraction, as Kepler thought. Calculations showed that this was indeed the case - and Kepler's laws, which were only empirical formulas, turned out to be the necessary results of a law of nature operating everywhere. Newton discovered a law that governs the movements of all masses. He found that this action of matter, moving all its masses that have freedom of movement, is the same action of gravity by which a stone falls to the ground. When applied to the movements of celestial bodies, the word gravity is replaced by the terms gravitation or mutual attraction. Newton showed that the mutual gravitation of masses, or, in another term, their mutual attraction, is a universal law of nature, a general quality of all matter, and with this simple principle he explained with irrefutable certainty many natural phenomena.
The way he came to this main discovery of his was as follows: having found it probable that the movements of celestial bodies are caused by their mutual gravity, he set about testing it. For the first test experiment, he took the movement of the moon around the earth. This test failed: the calculation showed that the moon's motion was not the same as it would have been if it had been caused by gravity. Newton saw this as a refutation of his opinion. But after some time he learned the result of a new measurement of the degrees of the earth's circumference, made in France. According to this measurement, it turned out that the circumference of the globe, that is, its diameter, has a value greater than what was previously accepted. Newton resumed his calculation and saw that the previous discrepancy between the movement of the moon and the idea of universal gravitation was not due to the error of this thought, but from the error of the previous figure for the value of the earth's diameter. Now the result of the calculation turned out to be exactly what one would expect from the idea of universal gravitation. The validity of this idea turned out to be irrefutable, and a law of nature was found according to which all celestial bodies move.
Isaac Newton's discoveries transformed not just astronomy, but all of natural science: he showed the way to clarify the laws of nature by subsuming phenomena under the laws of mechanics.
