Hao Huang

Professor Gifford
English 114B
27 April 2014
Sir Isaac Newton
From the planes that carry people from London to Tokyo, to the space shuttles that
launches from Cape Canaveral, there is a lot of science that revolve around it. Scientist has put in
a lot of in order to ensure the safety of the passengers and take humanities to its limits. Science
has evolved a lot since the scientific revolution when scientists were just trying to challenge the
ideas of the Church. Through this era emerged Sir Isaac Newton and his many theories and laws.
Sir Isaac Newton, an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, enlightened
the minds of mankind with his many theories and books. This pioneer of science has a vital role
in the creation of the world that we live in today through his contribution to the subjects of
mathematics and physics.
Born on Christmas day in 1642, Isaac Newton was premature. The Fatherless infant was
raised up in the care of his grandmother after his mother remarried when he was three. His
mother returned later after 8 years. When she returned, Newton was removed from school in
order to fulfill his birthright as a farmer. However after he failed this calling, he returned to
Kings school in order to get into Trinity College, which he failed to get in to. But his life takes a
turn in 1661 when he left from Cambridge University. During his undergraduate school, he
learned about Aristotle and other classical authors, but Newton mastered the works of many
major figures of the scientific revolution. After receiving his bachelors degree at Cambridge, the
school was close due to the plague. This cause Newton to return back to Woolsthorpe. During his
stay in Woolsthorpe, he made many discoveries, for he states, All this was in the two plague
years of the 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded
mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since. (Hatch) This was his foundation to his
publication of his book Principal. After returning to Cambridge in 1667, Newton was elected a
minor fellow at Trinity College, in which he received his Master of Arts degree. Later in 1672 he
was elected into the Royal Society, where he locked horns with some of the societys members.
In 1679, Newtons mother passed away and Newtons response to this was to lock himself away
from the outside world to further his study in alchemical research. During his time in solitary
confinement, he came up with many theories that he later published in Principia in 1687. After
publishing this book, he fell away from Math and Science and got into public affairs, which later
lead to his Knightship in 1705. Although Newton was at his prime, he dominated the field of
science without rival until his death on March 20, 1727. Newtons lifetime of labor was not set to
waste, because as technology advanced, his theories were later turned into laws and his
inventions impacted other discoveries as well.
It is well known that Newton is considered to be the most influential scientist during the
scientific revolution. His explain of gravity was simple, what goes up must come down.
Although that is a very simple explanation, at first when Newton presented the idea, he had no
idea of how to explain why this phenomenon. He then came up with a universal law of
gravitation. Which he states F = G Mm/R^2; that is, that all matter is mutually attracted with a
force (F) proportional to the product of their masses (Mm) and inversely proportional to the
square of distance (R^2) between them. G is a constant whose value depends on the units used
for mass and distance.(Hatch) To put in simpler terms, this means that everything in the
universe attracts one another. Backing up his theory, Newton explain that gravitation can be
deduced from observations of bodies on or near the earth in relation to the earth itself, the moon
in relation to the earth, the sea in relation to the moon, the planets in relation to each other, and
comets in relation to the sun. (Miller 1057). This meaning that all objects relate to one another
with an attraction force. The bigger the mass of an object, the stronger the gravitational attraction
force, but since gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between
the two objects, further the distance means weaker gravitational force. With the Universal Law
of Gravitation, Newton earned his place in the Gravity Hall of Fame.
It is known throughout history that no man can stare at the sun with glazing away because
the sunlight is just too strong. In the mid-1660, Newton became so fascinated by the nature of
light, he was willing to blind himself by staring at the sun. He also poked the sides of his eyeball
with a small knife in order to see how such activities would affect his vision. With these
experiments and numerous others, he formulated revolutionary theories about the nature of the
spectrum and the refraction of light. His most famous and main discovery in optics was that light
itself is a Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays. After publishing his work in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, his was backlashed even though is conducted
experiments to prove the discovery of a light spectrum. In the Crucial Experiment, Newton
allowed sunlight to pass through a prism and onto a white screen in a dark chamber. Through this,
he found on the screen a band of seven colors, of which consisted the same colors that made up
the rainbow. Through this he conferred that the phenomena of a rainbow is produced when the
rain droplets acts as a prism which split the sunlight.