Isaac newton

by Juan Diego de Alvear, Ángel Cercadillo and Víctor Osorio

Newton’s biography

Sir Isaac Newton 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726) was an physicist and mathematician who is recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time. His book Philosophiæ NaturalisPrincipia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687, explained the foundations for classical mechanics. Newton also made contributions to optical devices and shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.

By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary

motion from his mathematical

description of gravity, and then using the

same principles to account for the

trajectories of comets, the tides,

the precession of the equinoxes, and

other phenomena, Newton removed the

last doubts about the validity of

the heliocentric model of the cosmos

This work also demonstrated that

the motion of objects on Earth and

of celestial bodies could be described by

the same principles. His prediction that

the Earth should be shaped as anoblate

spheroid was later vindicated by the

measurements of Maupertuis, La

Condamine, and others, which helped

convince most Continental

European scientists of the superiority of

Newtonian mechanics over the earlier

system of Descartes.

Newton also built the first

practical reflecting telescope and

developed a theory of colour based on

the observation that

a prism decomposes white light into the

many colours of the visible spectrum.

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at theUniversity of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian and, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, perhaps because he privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of biblical chronology andalchemy, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. In his later life, Newton became president of the Royal Society. He also served the British government as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint.

Isaac Newton was born according to

the Julian calendar (in use in England at

the time) on Christmas Day, 25

December 1642 at Woolsthorpe

Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth,

a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire.

He was born three months after the

death of his father, a prosperous farmer

also named Isaac Newton.

Newton's work has been said "to distinctly

advance every branch of mathematics then

studied". His work on the subject usually

referred to as fluxions or calculus, seen in

a manuscript of October 1666, is now

published among Newton's mathematical

papers.

In 1666, Newton observed that the

spectrum of colours exiting a prism in

the position of minimum deviation is

oblong, even when the light ray entering

the prism is circular, which is to say, the

prism refracts different colours by

different angles. This led him to

conclude that colour is a property

intrinsic to light—a point which had been

debated in prior years.

In 1679, Newton returned to his work on mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. This followed stimulation by a brief exchange of letters in 1679–80 with Hooke, Personal coat of arms of Sir Isaac Newton

Newton never married. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said that he "was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments.

NEWTON’S LAWS

Isaac Newton (a 17th century scientist) put forth a variety of lawsthat explain why objects move (or don't move) as they do. Thesethree laws have become known as Newton's three laws of motion

Newton’s first law

Newton’s second law

Newton’s third law

Universal Gravity Theory

Newton’s first law

Newton's first law of motion states that an object atrest remains at rest and an object in motion remainsin motion with the same velocity unless acted uponby what we call an unbalanced force. An unbalancedforce is an external force that changes the motion ofan object. When an object is at rest or moving at aconstant velocity, all the forces acting on itare balanced.

Objects tend to "keep on doing what they're doing." In fact, it is the natural tendency of objects to resist changes in their state of motion. This tendency to resist changes in their state of motion is described as inertia.Inertia: tendency of an object to resist changes in its velocity.

The acceleration of an object as produced by a netforce is directly proportional to the magnitude of thenet force, in the same direction as the net force, andinversely proportional to the mass of the object.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

A force is a push or a pull that acts directly or at a distanceupon an object as a result of its interaction with anotherobject. Forces result from interactions.

Universal Gravitation theory

In his 1687 book Philosophiae NaturalisPrincipia Mathematica, regarded as one of the most important books ever published, Newton established many physical principles. The most innovative of them all was theory on how two bodies would pull from each other for unknown apparent reason. This "reason" turned out to be gravity, an essential force in understanding how the world, and the base of modern physics.

It's rumored that Newton came up with the idea while watching apples fall from the trees in his mother's garden. He observed how things would always fall towards the Earth's centre, not anywhere else. During that time, alchemy and science weren't different concepts, and a famous alchemical principle stated that two objects could exert a small force on each other, even in a vacuum. The young scientist decided to study this strange law, and through exhaustive observations & calculus, he defined a series of equations that measured its effects. These findings were the backbone of the "Universal Gravitation Theory", named after the Latin word for weight: gravitas.

In his own words: "Every point

mass attracts every single other point

mass by a force pointing along

the line intersecting both points. The

force is proportional to the product of the

two masses and inversely proportional

to the square of the distance between

them". This meant that any given objects

pulled from each other in a line, with a

force given by

In his own words: "Every point mass attracts every single other point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them". This meant that any given objects pulled from each other in a line, with a force given by

F= total force, G= gravitational constant, m1 = first mass, m2 = second mass, and r= distance

Gravity diagram

The Gravitational Constant is approximately 6.673×10-11 N·(m/kg)2, and it's the same all throughout the universe.

The theory was well received in the British Royal Society, and it was used to explain Johannes Kepler's study on how celestial objects revolved around the Sun. This was the official birth of astrophysics.