The scientific revolution that began Nicolaus Copernicus in the Renaissance, it continued with Galileo Galilei and later with Kepler. Finally, the culmination of the work was the British scientist known as Isaac Newton. He was born in 1642 and is one of the greatest geniuses in the history of science. He made contributions to various sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, and optics. However, his most influential contribution is to physics.
In this article we are going to talk about the biography and the exploits of Isaac Newton so that you can get to know one of the greats of science in depth.
Major feats
In order to discover new things and revolutionize science, he first had to understand the studies already published on motion by Galileo and Kepler's laws that described the orbits of the planets. In this way, Newton was able to establish the fundamental laws that we know of dynamics in physics. These laws are the laws of inertia, the proportionality of force, the law of acceleration, and the principle of action and reaction. Thanks to this knowledge, he increasingly delved deeper into the mysteries of physics until he was able to establish the law of universal gravitation. This law, related to the concept of gravity, revolutionized the understanding of movement.
The entire scientific community was stunned by the discoveries that Isaac Newton was unraveling. The relationship between force and motion could explain and predict the trajectory of the orbit of the Red planet, while also being able to unify all the mechanics that existed between Earth and outer space, thus achieving a significant advance.
Aristotelianism was perpetual and maintaining its empire for almost 2.000 years. Thanks to the system that Newton created with the laws of motion, he was able to end the knowledge of Aristotle and create a new paradigm that has been maintained until the beginning of the XNUMXth century, when another genius named Albert Einstein made the formula for the theory of relativity.
Biography
Newton's childhood was not easy. He was born on December 25, 1642 in a village known as Woolsthorpe. His father had just died on a mission as a landowner. At age 3, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, leaving Newton in the care of his maternal grandmother. After 12 years, his mother was widowed again and returned to the village with the inheritance from her second husband. When his mother died in 1679, he received the inheritance.
His character was characterized by being sober, silent, and meditative. He didn't tend to play with other boys, but preferred to build artifacts and tools for girls to play with. During his science-influenced childhood, Newton developed an interest in exploring natural phenomena.
In June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, and enrolled as a servant. This means that you were earning your support in exchange for some household services. It is there where he began his studies on the method of fluxions, the theory of colors and the first ideas that he was conceiving about gravitational attraction. This gravitational attraction had it centered with the orbit that the moon had around the Earth. He himself was in charge of propagating his own achievements in science. One of his most characteristic achievements was to think about gravity by casually observing an apple falling from a tree in the gardenThat's where he started thinking about why the apple fell to the ground and everything related to gravity.
It was Voltaire who was responsible for disseminating the entire history of Newton in print. He was a teacher for several years, and it does not appear that these teaching loads prevented him from continuing his studies on the optics and light, which was also a fundamental theme in his scientific development.
Important findings
Around this time, Isaac Newton wrote his first systematic expositions of infinitesimal calculus. They were published years later when he discovered the famous formula for expanding the power of a binomial with any exponent, whether integer or fractional.
He had discoveries not only in mathematics, but also in the world of optics. The chapter of science that he chose to cover in his classes was optics. He had this special attention on this subject since 1666 and wanted to lead it to discovery. In 1672 he had already had the first communication on the subject thanks to the fact that the society of scientists elected him as one of its members. This is because he built the Newton's prismNewton's ability to provide experimental evidence for his discoveries was indisputable. He was able to show that white light was a mixture of rays of different colors, each characterized by a different refrangibility when passed through an optical prism, such as the one described in .
In 1679, he was absent from Cambridge for several months because of the death of his mother. Upon his return, he received a letter from Robert hooke, the secretary of the Royal Society, in which he tried to convince him to reestablish contact with the institution and suggested the possibility that he could comment Hooke's own theories that dealt with the motion of the planets in their orbits. In addition, he delved into the topic of orbit of the planets, an essential aspect in his analysis of motion and gravity.
Years later, Edmond Halley, who by then had already observed the Halley comet, he visited Newton asking him what the orbit of a planet would be if gravity decreased with the square of the distance. Newton's response was immediate: an ellipse.
Last years
His work, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, became quite famous although its reading was quite complex. He was chosen by the university as the representative of King James II in parliament. He was in good health from childhood to the last years of life. At the beginning of 1722, kidney disease caused severe kidney colic. During these last years, he was suffering more from this disease. Finally, he died at dawn on March 20, 1727 after having refused to receive final aid from the Church.
As you can see, Isaac Newton was a true revolutionary of science and his contribution is still remembered today as one of the best physicists in the world.
