Isaac Newton is probably the greatest scientist who has ever lived. He was born prematurely in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and was not expected to live. His father died before he was born and at the age of three his mother remarried, leaving Newton with his grandmother. At the age of twelve he studied at King's School, Grantham, but returned to Woolsthorpe when his mother was again widowed. She hoped to make Newton into a farmer, but Newton's uncle felt that his talents would be wasted in this occupation and sent him back to school.
Newton entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. In the year that he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts (1665) the college had to be temporarily closed due to plague. It was during this period of closure (1665-1666) that Newton had his most productive and creative period, later calling it his annus mirabilis. During these two years, he began his first investigations into optics, when he passed sunlight through a prism, observing a spectrum of colours. By using a second prism, Newton recombined the spectrum of colours to produce white light, thus suggesting that the colours produced were a property of light and not of the prisms. Newton also suggested that this effect meant that chromatic aberration of a glass lens could not be corrected, leading him to develop a reflecting telescope (1668) using a mirror in which chromatic aberration would not occur. Although this was incorrect, the telescope he designed can be classed as the forerunner of all of the reflecting telescopes used in today's astronomical exploration.
Newton's discoveries concerning light, including the interference of light in thin films and the phenomenon of Newton's rings, were the subject of his book Optiks, a late work, replete with notes and comments, that was not published until 1704, possibly because Newton was reluctant to publish on this subject while Huygens was alive. In contrast to Huygens, Newton proposed that light rays were corpuscular (though it would be too simplistic to say that he thought of light as a stream of bullet-like particles). His view was accepted by many, perhaps partly due to his authority, and had wide influence until the late eighteenth century.
Newton's greatest work was his Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1687) which was published with financial backing from Edmund Halley. In it he describes his three laws of motion, along with his law of gravitation which he was inspired to develop after seeing the apple fall from the tree, a story that Newton himself says is true. This law states that the force of gravity between two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
After publication of the Principia, he became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University (1689 and 1701) and became the Master of the London Mint in 1699. These positions he took very seriously and because of this he began to neglect his scientific work. In 1703 he became the President of the Royal Society where he had considerable influence. He remained there until his death and greatly improved the Society's reputation. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1706.
Newton tended to work on his own for most of his life, although he was permanently in touch with the scientific community through the Royal Society and through letters. He did not take criticism well and had many bitter arguments with other scientists concerning the originality of his own and their work. His long argument with Leibniz as to who first developed calculus was eventually 'settled' when taken to the Royal Society where Newton used his considerable influence to sway the judgement of the jury panel, and was deemed to have invented calculus. However, it is Leibniz's notation that is used in modern calculus and it is probably an argument that will never end. He devoted much of his time to alchemy, astrology and theology, attempting to produce a biblical chronology. He was buried in Westminster Abbey after a state funeral.
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