Sir Isaac Newton
By: Addie Force
Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. He was small when he was born because he was born prematurely. Isaac was named after his father, Isaac Newton Sr. His father died three months before he was born. When Isaac was three years old, his mother, Hannah Ayscough, then remarried. Hannah and Barnabus Smith and had three more children; Benjamin Smith, Hannah Smith Pilkington, and Mary Smith. Isaac Newton was unhappy with his mother’s remarriage. Isaac went to The King’s School from 12-17 years old. Then he went to college at Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He got his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in August of 1665. Isaac died on March 31, 1727 (age 84). But he will always be remembered.
Isaac Newton achieved many great accomplishments during his lifetime. He is believed to be one of the most influential scientists of all time. He wrote a three volume set called Principia, constructed a famous prism experiment, formulated calculus, and came up with a different design for the telescope. Newton’s famous experiment with prisms shows that white light is really made up of the colors of the rainbow just overlapping. In the first volume of Principia, Newton proposed that a scientific law was useless if it could not be developed into a mathematical equation. He also wrote about the three laws of motion. The first law of motion is called Inertia. It means that an object in motion will remain in motion and an object at rest will remain at rest, unless either experiences an unbalanced outside force. . For example, if you kick a soccer ball, even if you kick it as hard as you can, it will eventually stop. When you think of Newton’s first law of motion, you wonder why it stopped because nothing was there to stop it. But there is something there to stop it and that is air resistance and surface friction.
Newton’s second law of motion is actually an equation. The equation is F=ma which means force equals mass times acceleration. So if you are driving in a car, you find the car’s mass and the car’s acceleration and you multiply them together in order to get the car’s force.
The third law of motion shows that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you have a bouncy ball and bounce it on the ground, the action is the ball hitting the floor, and the reaction is the floor pushing the ball back up.
In the second volume of Principia, Newton wrote about the motion of fluids which was originally the work of Blaise Pascal. And in the third volume, Isaac wrote about his universal law of gravitation. Scientists thought that an object falling to the ground was one physical process, and the planets moving in the sky was a completely different process. Isaac Newton proved them wrong with detailed experiments and observations in the third volume of Principia. This volume of Principia concluded that the geocentric view of the heavens was false.
Another thing that Isaac Newton did is formulate calculus. Calculus is the study of how things change. The two main types of calculus are differential calculus and integral calculus. Calculus is a part of modern mathematics education.
He also came up with an altogether different design for the telescope that we still use today. It consists of a concave primary mirror and a flat diagonal secondary mirror. Newton’s first reflecting telescope was completed in the year 1668. It is the earliest known functional reflecting telescope even though the idea didn’t belong to Isaac (the idea was invented originally by Galileo).
Isaac Newton was a Christian. The main reason he studied science was to learn more about God. He read the Bible daily and wrote about the Book of Daniel (his favorite book in the Bible). Newton actually wrote more about the bible than he did about math and science. He was born into an Anglican family and became a christian when he was about 30 years old.
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