Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 O.S. 25 December 1642 – 31 March 1727 O.S. 20 March 1726) was an English polymath who worked as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, historian and inventor. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed.

His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, achieved the first great unification in physics and established classical mechanics. In it, Newton described the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which were the main scientific ideas for centuries until they were replaced by the theory of relativity. His laws still work well for objects moving at low speeds (much less than the speed of light) and in weak gravitational fields. He used his description of gravity to explain Kepler's laws of planetary motion, tides, the paths of comets, and other things, which removed doubt about the Solar System's sun-centred design. Newton also made important discoveries about light. He built the first reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the way a prism splits white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. He shared credit with the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for creating infinitesimal calculus, although he developed calculus years before Leibniz. His work on light was collected in his book Opticks, published in 1704.

Newton contributed to and refined the scientific method, and his work is considered one of the most influential in bringing forth modern science. Beyond science and mathematics, he spent much of his time studying alchemy and biblical chronology, though most of this work was not published until long after his death.

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a position he was given at the age of 26. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day. Newton was connected to the Whigs and served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. He spent the last three decades of his life in London, where he served as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint, improving the accuracy and security of British coinage. He was also president of the Royal Society. He was the first scientist to be buried at Westminster Abbey.

Early life

Main article: Early life of Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642 in the Julian calendar used in England at the time, which is 4 January 1643 in the NS calendar. He was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a small village in Lincolnshire. His father had died three months earlier. Newton was born early and was very small. When he was three, his mother, Hannah Ayscough, remarried and left him in the care of his grandmother. From about the age of twelve, he attended The King's School in Grantham, where he learned Latin and Ancient Greek. He became the top student there, and he was known for building sundials and models of windmills.

In 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was not outstanding as a student, but his private studies in the years after he earned his degree in 1665 were very productive. He developed ideas about calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation. In 1669, he succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor, and he was appointed at the age of 26. Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1672. In 1672 and again in 1681, he published a revised edition of the textbook Geographia Generalis, which had first been published in 1650 by Bernhardus Varenius.

Scientific studies

Isaac Newton made major advances in mathematics. He developed a system of calculus that joined two key ideas, and he worked out much of it on his own. He and the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both developed calculus, but Newton is known to have done so much earlier. Leibniz's mathematical notations became the more widely used. In optics, Newton showed that white light is made of many colours, and he built the first known working reflecting telescope. His book Opticks explained his ideas about light. He also studied heat, sound, and the motion of fluids.

Newton's most famous work was the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement from Edmond Halley. In it, Newton stated the three universal laws of motion, which form the foundation of classical mechanics. He also described the law of universal gravitation, which explains how objects pull on each other. This work achieved the first great unification in physics. Newton also shared ideas about how science should be done, including four rules that help scientists explain natural things using scientific method and careful testing.

Later life

Main article: Later life of Isaac Newton

In the 1690s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts about how to read the Bible. In 1696, during the reign of King William III, he moved to London to become Warden of the Mint. He got the job with help from Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax. He took charge of England's great recoining and worked hard to catch people making fake coins. He estimated that 20 per cent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit, and making fake coins was high treason. He became Master of the Mint in 1699 and held that job for the rest of his life. He also improved how coins were made and checked, and the Mint produced much more coin each week. In 1703, he was made president of the Royal Society.

In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton. He was an investor at times and lost a large sum of money in the South Sea Company when it collapsed around 1720. Even so, he was already rich, so he still died rich. Newton died in his sleep in London on 20 March 1727 (NS 31 March 1727), aged 84. He was given a state funeral, the first in England for someone known mainly for intellectual achievement. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and he was the first scientist to be buried there.

Personality

Newton was a very driven and disciplined man who gave his life to his work, often putting it ahead of his own health. He kept strict control over his eating and drinking. Contemporary accounts report that he refused to eat rabbits because they were strangled, and he avoided black pudding because it was made from blood. According to Catherine Conduitt, these choices came from ethical concerns rather than personal taste. He had wide interests, from a possible phonetic alphabet and universal language to money matters as Master of the Mint, where he worked against counterfeiting. His library held 1,752 identifiable books. Most were about theology, followed by alchemy, mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and books about his famous science work made up slightly less than 12% of it.

Newton never married, although it was once claimed he was engaged. Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, wrote that Newton was never ruled by strong feelings. His close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier ended abruptly in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown and sent angry letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke. Newton seemed modest, writing that he felt "only like a boy playing on the sea-shore" compared with the great ocean of truth. Yet he could be competitive and held grudges against rivals. In a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke, he wrote "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Some historians think this was also a dig at Hooke, since the saying comes from the poet George Herbert, where a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther.

Theology and chronology

Although Newton was born into an Anglican family, by his thirties he had developed unorthodox beliefs. Historian Stephen Snobelen called him a heretic, yet in his time Newton was seen as a knowledgeable and insightful theologian. Thomas Tenison, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, told him, "You know more divinity than all of us put together," and the philosopher John Locke praised his knowledge of Scripture. By 1680 his reputation in Bible study was well established. John Mill asked for his advice on a New Testament edition, and the two discussed the early chapters of Genesis. Thomas Burnet consulted him on drafts of a book, and with Henry More he discussed the Apocalypse. William Stukeley wrote that no one in England read the Bible more carefully. From 1672 Newton recorded his religious research in notebooks that he showed to no one. Most of what he wrote about theology and alchemy has never been printed. His writings show that he knew early Church texts well and sided with Arius, who rejected the usual view of the Trinity and lost his conflict with Athanasius over the Creed. Newton believed that "the great apostasy was trinitarianism." In 1675 he received a government dispensation that excused him and future holders of the Lucasian chair from ordination. For Newton, worshipping Jesus Christ as God was idolatry, which he saw as the basic sin. Snobelen concluded that Newton was at least a Socinian sympathiser, possibly an Arian, and almost certainly an anti-trinitarian.

Newton is best known for his laws of motion and gravity, but he warned against seeing the Universe as a mere machine, like a great clock. Alongside his science, his studies of the Bible and the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. He wrote on textual criticism, including An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. He believed in a rationally immanent world, rejecting the hylozoism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. His follower Samuel Clarke defended Newton's views in a famous correspondence. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace gave a natural explanation for planetary orbits in Celestial Mechanics, and when Napoleon criticised him for leaving out the Creator, Laplace replied that he could do without that idea. Scholars long debated whether Newton questioned the Trinity, and his first biographer, David Brewster, did not think so. In the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes and others studied Newton's hidden manuscripts, and it became clear that he did reject Trinitarianism. Newton also supported the future restoration of the Jews to the Land of Israel as part of biblical prophecy, a view shared by figures connected to the Royal Society and by Daniel Whitby. In religious thought, Robert Boyle and Newton's approach to mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist writers as an alternative to pantheism and enthusiasm. It was accepted cautiously by both orthodox and latitudinarians preachers. Science's clarity was seen as a way to fight metaphysical excess, superstitious belief, and atheism, while English deists used his discoveries to argue for a "Natural Religion". Boyle's ideas helped attack pre-Enlightenment "magical thinking" and the mystical elements of Christianity, and Newton completed them with mathematical proofs. Over his last four decades, he also studied ancient history and chronology, linking the history of religion with the early civilizations of the Greek and Egyptian peoples. He tried to match biblical accounts with other ancient records, working backward from well-known events. His final work, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, was published after his death in 1728 and drew both attention and controversy.

Alchemy

Of an estimated ten million words in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy. Many of his alchemy writings are copies of other manuscripts, with his own notes added. Alchemy texts mixed practical craft knowledge with philosophical ideas, often hidden behind wordplay, stories, and pictures to protect secrets. Some of what Newton wrote could have been seen as heretical by the church.

In 1888, after sixteen years of cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth. In 1936, a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's, and the collection was sold for about £9,000 in total. John Maynard Keynes was one of about three dozen bidders who bought part of it, and he later gathered about half of the alchemy papers again before giving his collection to Cambridge University in 1946. Today, all of Newton's known alchemy writings are being put online by Indiana University in a project called "The Chymistry of Isaac Newton," and the project has been summarised in a book. In June 2020, two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on a book about plague by Jan Baptist van Helmont were being auctioned by Bonhams. Newton wrote these notes in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's 1665–66 epidemic of the bubonic plague, and Bonhams describes them as the most substantial written statement about the plague that Newton is known to have made.

Legacy

See also: Isaac Newton in popular culture

Many people have praised Newton's genius. The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange said Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived. The English poet Alexander Pope wrote a famous epitaph about him, which says that God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light. Science writer John G. Simmons ranked Newton first in his list of scientists, and New Scientist called him "the supreme genius" in the history of science. The philosopher David Hume and the writer Voltaire also praised him. Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and President of the United States, kept a portrait of Newton in his home at Monticello. Mathematicians have ranked him among the greatest ever, including alongside Archimedes and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Newton's work is considered one of the most important in bringing forth science, and he is often linked with the Scientific Revolution. In 1999, Time magazine named him the Person of the Century for the 17th century. In 2003, he was voted the greatest Briton in a BBC World poll.

Newton often told the story that he was inspired to think about gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree. The story was passed on to Voltaire and became well known. The tree that Newton described is believed to be the one at Woolsthorpe Manor, which is cared for by the National Trust. Newton's monument can be seen in Westminster Abbey. The newton, the SI derived unit of force, is named in his honour. The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge is also named after him, and the Institute of Physics gives its highest award, the Isaac Newton Medal, in his name. Newton also appeared on £1 notes issued by the Bank of England from 1978 until 1988.

The Enlightenment

European philosophers and historians of the Enlightenment hold that Newton's publication of the Principia was a turning point in the Scientific Revolution and started the Enlightenment. His view of the universe, based on natural laws that people could understand through reason, became one of the seeds of Enlightenment ideas.

John Locke and Voltaire used ideas about natural law to support political systems that promoted basic rights. The physiocrats and Adam Smith used natural ideas about psychology and self-interest in economic systems. Sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into natural models of progress. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo and Samuel Clarke at first resisted parts of Newton's work, but later adjusted it to fit their strong religious views of nature.

Works

Isaac Newton wrote many works. Some were published during his lifetime, including De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas (1669, published 1711), De motu corporum in gyrum (1684), Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Scala graduum Caloris. Calorum Descriptiones & signa (1701), Opticks (1704), and Arithmetica Universalis (1707). He also wrote reports as Master of the Mint from 1701 to 1725. Some of his writings were never published, such as Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation.

Other works were published after his death. These include The System of the World and Optical Lectures (both 1728), The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), and Observations on Daniel and The Apocalypse of St. John (1733). Method of Fluxions was written in 1671 and published in 1736. The last one listed is An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754).