Isaac newton inventions and biography
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Second is the contrast, often shocking, between the actual content of Newton's public writings and the positions attributed to him by others, including most importantly his popularizers.
On Christmas Day, 1642, as England stood on the edge of civil war, a frail and fatherless boy was born in the rural hamlet of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in Lincolnshire.
He withdrew again from public debate. Clairaut's successful prediction of the month of return of Halley's comet at the end of this decade made a larger segment of the educated public aware of the extent to which empirical grounds for doubting Newton's theory of gravity had largely disappeared. But against every odd, the child drew breath and lived. Initially the work was to have a two book structure, but Newton subsequently shifted to three books, and replaced the original version of the final book with one more mathematically demanding.
I doubt not but that by your excellent method you will easily find out what the Curve must be, and it proprietys, and suggest a physicall Reason of this proportion.[3]
Newton apparently discovered the systematic relationship between conic-section trajectories and inverse-square central forces at the time, but did not communicate it to anyone, and for reasons that remain unclear did not follow up this discovery until Halley, during a visit in the summer of 1684, put the same question to him.
He extended this logic further—if he could understand gravity, he could predict the motion of planets, the tides, and perhaps even comets.
He did not publish these ideas immediately. 10 of Sir Isaac Newton's Inventions
At this point, you probably have a good sense of Newton's obsessive nature. By 1730, however, some of these loose-ends had been cited in Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's elogium for Newton[4] and in John Machin's appendix to the 1729 English translation of the Principia, raising questions about just how secure Newton's theory of gravity was, empirically.
Benjamin Smith, London and Dublin,1733.
The 1740s witnessed a major transformation in the standing of the science in the Principia.
In science, he would have been known only for the contributions he made to optics, which, while notable, were no more so than those made by Huygens and Grimaldi, neither of whom had much impact on philosophy; and in mathematics, his failure to publish would have relegated his work to not much more than a footnote to the achievements of Leibniz and his school.
Among the several problems Hooke proposed to Newton was the question of the trajectory of a body under an inverse-square central force:
It now remaines to know the proprietys of a curve Line (not circular nor concentricall) made by a centrall attractive power which makes the velocitys of Descent from the tangent Line or equall straight motion at all Distances in a Duplicate proportion to the Distances Reciprocally taken.Two years later Isaac went to boarding school in Grantham, returning full time to manage the farm, not very successfully, in 1659. Though the original plan for a radical restructuring had long been abandoned, the fact that virtually every page of the Principia received some modifications in the second edition shows how carefully Newton, often prodded by his editor Roger Cotes, reconsidered everything in it; and important parts were substantially rewritten not only in response to Continental criticisms, but also because of new data, including data from experiments on resistance forces carried out in London.
His immediate answer was, an ellipse; and when he was unable to produce the paper on which he had made this determination, he agreed to forward an account to Halley in London. And even in theology, there is Newton the anti-Trinitarian mild heretic who was not that much more radical in his departures from Roman and Anglican Christianity than many others at the time, and Newton, the wild religious zealot predicting the end of the Earth, who did not emerge to public view until quite recently.
There is surprisingly little cross-referencing of themes from one area of Newton's endeavors to another.
But they reveal the complexity of his mind—a mind that sought not just knowledge, but truth, even in the shadows of mysticism.
The Final Years and the Weight of Genius
In his later years, Newton became the patriarch of English science. It was more than a book. Hannah's brother, who had received an M.A. from Cambridge, and the headmaster of the Grantham school then persuaded his mother that Isaac should prepare for the university.