sir isaac newton short biography

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Isaac Newton

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 16, 2023 | Original: March 10, 2015

Isaac Newton is best know for his theory about the law of gravity, but his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) with its three laws of motion greatly influenced the Enlightenment in Europe. Born in 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England, Sir Isaac Newton began developing his theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics while on break from Cambridge University. 

Years of research culminated with the 1687 publication of “Principia,” a landmark work that established the universal laws of motion and gravity. Newton’s second major book, “Opticks,” detailed his experiments to determine the properties of light. Also a student of Biblical history and alchemy, the famed scientist served as president of the Royal Society of London and master of England’s Royal Mint until his death in 1727.

Isaac Newton: Early Life and Education

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. The son of a farmer who died three months before he was born, Newton spent most of his early years with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. His education was interrupted by a failed attempt to turn him into a farmer, and he attended the King’s School in Grantham before enrolling at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661.

Newton studied a classical curriculum at Cambridge, but he became fascinated by the works of modern philosophers such as René Descartes, even devoting a set of notes to his outside readings he titled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (“Certain Philosophical Questions”). When the Great Plague shuttered Cambridge in 1665, Newton returned home and began formulating his theories on calculus, light and color, his farm the setting for the supposed falling apple that inspired his work on gravity.

Isaac Newton’s Telescope and Studies on Light

Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow. He constructed the first reflecting telescope in 1668, and the following year he received his Master of Arts degree and took over as Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Asked to give a demonstration of his telescope to the Royal Society of London in 1671, he was elected to the Royal Society the following year and published his notes on optics for his peers.

Through his experiments with refraction, Newton determined that white light was a composite of all the colors on the spectrum, and he asserted that light was composed of particles instead of waves. His methods drew sharp rebuke from established Society member Robert Hooke, who was unsparing again with Newton’s follow-up paper in 1675. 

Known for his temperamental defense of his work, Newton engaged in heated correspondence with Hooke before suffering a nervous breakdown and withdrawing from the public eye in 1678. In the following years, he returned to his earlier studies on the forces governing gravity and dabbled in alchemy.

Isaac Newton and the Law of Gravity

In 1684, English astronomer Edmund Halley paid a visit to the secluded Newton. Upon learning that Newton had mathematically worked out the elliptical paths of celestial bodies, Halley urged him to organize his notes. 

The result was the 1687 publication of “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which established the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity. Newton’s three laws of motion state that (1) Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it; (2) Force equals mass times acceleration: F=MA and (3) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

“Principia” propelled Newton to stardom in intellectual circles, eventually earning universal acclaim as one of the most important works of modern science. His work was a foundational part of the European Enlightenment .

With his newfound influence, Newton opposed the attempts of King James II to reinstitute Catholic teachings at English Universities. King James II was replaced by his protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and Newton was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament in 1689. 

Newton moved to London permanently after being named warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, earning a promotion to master of the Mint three years later. Determined to prove his position wasn’t merely symbolic, Newton moved the pound sterling from the silver to the gold standard and sought to punish counterfeiters.

The death of Hooke in 1703 allowed Newton to take over as president of the Royal Society, and the following year he published his second major work, “Opticks.” Composed largely from his earlier notes on the subject, the book detailed Newton’s painstaking experiments with refraction and the color spectrum, closing with his ruminations on such matters as energy and electricity. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England.

Isaac Newton: Founder of Calculus?

Around this time, the debate over Newton’s claims to originating the field of calculus exploded into a nasty dispute. Newton had developed his concept of “fluxions” (differentials) in the mid 1660s to account for celestial orbits, though there was no public record of his work. 

In the meantime, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz formulated his own mathematical theories and published them in 1684. As president of the Royal Society, Newton oversaw an investigation that ruled his work to be the founding basis of the field, but the debate continued even after Leibniz’s death in 1716. Researchers later concluded that both men likely arrived at their conclusions independent of one another.

Death of Isaac Newton

Newton was also an ardent student of history and religious doctrines, and his writings on those subjects were compiled into multiple books that were published posthumously. Having never married, Newton spent his later years living with his niece at Cranbury Park near Winchester, England. He died in his sleep on March 31, 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey .

A giant even among the brilliant minds that drove the Scientific Revolution, Newton is remembered as a transformative scholar, inventor and writer. He eradicated any doubts about the heliocentric model of the universe by establishing celestial mechanics, his precise methodology giving birth to what is known as the scientific method. Although his theories of space-time and gravity eventually gave way to those of Albert Einstein , his work remains the bedrock on which modern physics was built.

Isaac Newton Quotes

• “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
• “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
• “What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
• “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”
• “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”

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Who was Isaac Newton? (Short biography)

Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (he was born on January 4, 1643 and died on March 31, 1727 at age 84) known mainly for :

–  Laying the foundations of classical mechanics through his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation .

– Developing the integral and differential calculus (simultaneously and independently of Gottfried Leibniz).

– Discovering that white light is made up of the set of all colors .

2. ISAAC NEWTON BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Newton was born prematurely on January 4, 1643 to a peasant family in Woolsthorpe Manor, a small village in the county of Lincolnshire, England.

Newton had a complicated childhood. Three months before his birth his father died and at three years old his mother left him with his grandparents when her new husband refused to raise a stepchild. Newton would not return to his native village until the death of his stepfather in 1653.

During his childhood and youth he was an introvert. He had few friendships and little interest in his studies, although he did not lack intelligence, curiosity and imagination. At the age of 12, he began studying elementary studies at Grantham Elementary School. In 1661, at 18 years of age, he entered Trinity College at the University of Cambridge to study mathematics under Isaac Barrow.

After graduation, Newton devoted himself to study mathematics and philosophy. He later had momentous discoveries in the field of calculation (with the development of integral and differential calculus, and describing the motion of macroscopic bodies) and optics (with his theory of colors).

Newton highlights his studies and discoveries in “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), published in 1687. Within this work he laid the foundations of modern physics and engineering through his laws of motion and the theory of gravity. This marks a before and after in the history of science. Nowadays, it is still widely considered as the most influential work in the history of physics.

Finally, after a long life devoted to the development of science and the understanding of the universe, Newton died on March 31, 1727 (84 years) in London. He died from kidney failure in his sleep. Eight days later, on April 8, 1727, he received the honor of being the first scientist buried in Westminster Abbey.

3. DOCUMENTARY ISAAC NEWTON

4. MORE INFORMATION AND REFERENCES

• Saber es práctico (2018). ¿Quién fue Isaac Newton? ¿Qué hizo? (Resumen) . Text in Spanish. Avaliable [ HERE ].
• Sterling Documentaries – Youtube.com (2015).  Secret Life of Isaac Newton – Full Documentary . Youtube.
• Wikipedia.org (2018).  Isaac Newton . Text in Spanish. Avaliable [ HERE ].
• Wikipedia.org (2018).  Isaac Newton . Avaliable [ HERE ].
• Gottfried Kniller (1689).  Isaac Newton Portrait . Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. Avaliable [ HERE ].

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Biography Online

Biography Sir Isaac Newton

Early Life of Newton

Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, in 1643, to a relatively poor farming family. His father died three months before he was born. His mother later remarried, but her second husband did not get on with Isaac; leading to friction between Isaac and his parents. The young Isaac attended school at King’s School, Grantham in Lincolnshire (where his signature is still inscribed on the walls.) Isaac was one of the top students, but before completing his studies his mother withdrew him from school, so Isaac could work as a farmer. It was only through the intervention of the headmaster that Isaac was able to return to finish his studies; he passed his final exams with very good results and was able to go to Trinity College, Cambridge.

Newton at Cambridge

Sir Isaac Newton, has been referred to as one of the greatest geniuses of history. His mathematical and scientific achievements give credence to such a view. His many accomplishments in the field of science include:

Developing a theory of calculus . Unfortunately, at the same time as Newton, calculus was being developed by Leibniz.  When Leibniz published his results, there was a bitter feud between the two men, with Newton claiming plagiarism. This bitter feud lasted until Leibniz death in 1713, it also extended between British mathematicians and the continent.

Mathematical achievements of Newton

• Generalized binomial theorem
• Newton’s identities,
• Newton’s method,
• Classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables),
• Substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences,
• Use of fractional indices
• Used geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations.
• Used power series with confidence and to revert power series.
• Discovered a new formula for pi.

Scientific Achievements of Newton

• Optics – Newton made great advancements in the study of optics. In particular, he developed the spectrum by splitting white light through a prism.
• Telescope – Made significant improvements to the development of the telescope. However, when his ideas were criticised by Hooke, Newton withdrew from the public debate. He developed an antagonistic and hostile attitude to Hooke, throughout his life.
• Mechanics and Gravitation . In his famous book Principia Mathematica . (1687) Newton explained the three laws of motion that laid the framework for modern physics. This involved explaining planetary movements.

Newton hit on the head with an Apple

The most popular anecdote about Sir Isaac Newton is the story of how the theory of gravitation came to him, after being hit on the head with a falling apple. In reality, Newton and his friends may have exaggerated this story. Nevertheless, it is quite likely that seeing apples fall from trees may have influenced his theories of gravity.

Newton’s Religious Beliefs

As well as being a scientist, Newton actually spent more time investigating religious issues. He read the Bible daily, believing it to be the word of God. Nevertheless, he was not satisfied with the Christian interpretations of the Bible. For example, he rejected the philosophy of the Holy Trinity; his beliefs were closer to the Christian beliefs in Arianism (basically there was a difference between Jesus Christ and God)

Newton – Bible Code

Newton was fascinated with the early Church and also the last chapter of the Bible Revelations. He spent many hours poring over the Bible, trying to find the secret Bible Code. He was rumoured to be a Rosicrucian. The religious beliefs that Newton held could have caused serious embarrassment at the time. Because of this, he kept his views hidden, almost to the point of obsession. This desire for secrecy seemed to be part of his nature. It was only on his death that his papers were opened up. The bishop who first opened Newton’s box, actually found them too shocking for public release, therefore, they were kept closed for many more years.

Newton and Alchemy

Newton was also interested in alchemy. He experimented on many objects, using a lot of Mercury. Very high levels of mercury in his bloodstream may have contributed to his early death and irregularities in later life.

Newton was made a member of the Royal Society in 1703. He was also given the job of Master of Mint in 1717. He took this job seriously and unofficially was responsible for moving England from the silver standard to the gold standard.

Newton was an extraordinary polymath; the universe simply fascinated him. He sought to discover the hidden and outer mysteries of life. With his sharp intellect and powers of concentration, he was able to contribute to tremendous developments in many areas of science. He was a unique individual. John Maynard Keynes , a twentieth-century genius, said of Newton:

“I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.” [1]

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Sir Isaac Newton”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net , 18th May. 2009. Last updated 28 Feb 2018.

Further reading: Interesting facts about Isaac Newton

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Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World at Amazon

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[1] Keynes on Newton the Man

Biography of Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist

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Sir Isaac Newton (Jan. 4, 1643–March 31, 1727) was a superstar of physics, math, and astronomy even in his own time. He occupied the chair of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England, the same role later filled, centuries later, by Stephen Hawking . Newton conceived of several laws of motion , influential mathematical principals which, to this day, scientists use to explain how the universe works.

Fast Facts: Sir Isaac Newton

• Known For : Developed laws that explain how the universe works
• Born : Jan. 4, 1643 in Lincolnshire, England
• Parents : Isaac Newton, Hannah Ayscough
• Died : March 20, 1727 in Middlesex, England
• Education : Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1665)
• Published Works : De Analysi per Aequationes Numero Terminorum Infinitas (1669, published 1711), Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Opticks (1704)
• Awards and Honors : Fellowship of the Royal Society (1672), Knight Bachelor (1705)
• Notable Quote : "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

Early Years and Influences

Newton was born in 1642 in a manor house in Lincolnshire, England. His father had died two months before his birth. When Newton was 3 his mother remarried and he remained with his grandmother. He was not interested in the family farm, so he was sent to Cambridge University to study.

Newton was born just a short time after the death of  Galileo , one of the greatest scientists of all time. Galileo had proved that the planets revolve around the sun, not the earth as people thought at the time. Newton was very interested in the discoveries of Galileo and others. Newton thought the universe worked like a machine and that a few simple laws governed it. Like Galileo, he realized that mathematics was the way to explain and prove those laws.

Laws of Motion

Newton formulated laws of motion and gravitation. These laws are math formulas that explain how objects move when a force acts on them. Newton published his most famous book, "Principia," in 1687 while he was a mathematics professor at Trinity College in Cambridge. In "Principia," Newton explained three basic laws that govern the way objects move. He also described his theory of gravity, the force that causes things to fall down. Newton then used his laws to show that the planets revolve around the suns in orbits that are oval, not round.

The three laws are often called Newton’s Laws. The first law states that an object that is not being pushed or pulled by some force will stay still or will keep moving in a straight line at a steady speed. For example, if someone is riding a bike and jumps off before the bike is stopped, what happens? The bike continues on until it falls over. The tendency of an object to remain still or keep moving in a straight line at a steady speed is called inertia.

The second law explains how a force acts on an object. An object accelerates in the direction the force is moving it. If someone gets on a bike and pushes the pedals forward, the bike will begin to move. If someone gives the bike a push from behind, the bike will speed up. If the rider pushes back on the pedals, the bike will slow down. If the rider turns the handlebars, the bike will change direction.

The third law states that if an object is pushed or pulled, it will push or pull equally in the opposite direction. If someone lifts a heavy box, they use force to push it up. The box is heavy because it is producing an equal force downward on the lifter’s arms. The weight is transferred through the lifter’s legs to the floor. The floor also presses upward with an equal force. If the floor pushed back with less force, the person lifting the box would fall through the floor. If it pushed back with more force, the lifter would fly up in the air.

Importance of Gravity

When most people think of Newton, they think of him sitting under an apple tree observing an apple fall to the ground. When he saw the apple fall, Newton began to think about a specific kind of motion called gravity. Newton understood that gravity was a force of attraction between two objects. He also understood that an object with more matter or mass exerted the greater force or pulled smaller objects toward it. That meant that the large mass of the Earth pulled objects toward it. That is why the apple fell down instead of up and why people don’t float in the air.

He also thought that maybe gravity was not just limited to the Earth and the objects on the earth. What if gravity extended to the Moon and beyond? Newton calculated the force needed to keep the Moon moving around the earth. Then he compared it with the force that made the apple fall downward. After allowing for the fact that the Moon is much farther from the Earth and has a much greater mass, he discovered that the forces were the same and that the Moon is also held in orbit around Earth by the pull of earth’s gravity.

Disputes in Later Years and Death

Newton moved to London in 1696 to accept the position of warden of the Royal Mint. For many years afterward, he argued with Robert Hooke over who had actually discovered the connection between elliptical orbits and the inverse square law, a dispute that ended only with Hooke's death in 1703.

In 1705, Queen Anne bestowed a knighthood upon Newton, and thereafter he was known as Sir Isaac Newton. He continued his work, particularly in mathematics. This led to another dispute in 1709, this time with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. They both quarreled over which of them had invented calculus.

One reason for Newton's disputes with other scientists was his overwhelming fear of criticism, which led him to write, but then postpone publication of, his brilliant articles until after another scientist created similar work. Besides his earlier writings, "De Analysi" (which didn't see publication until 1711) and "Principia" (published in 1687), Newton's publications included "Optics" (published in 1704), "The Universal Arithmetic" (published in 1707), the "Lectiones Opticae" (published in 1729), the "Method of Fluxions" (published in 1736), and the "Geometrica Analytica" (printed in 1779).

On March 20, 1727, Newton died near London. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to receive this honor. 

Newton’s calculations changed the way people understood the universe. Prior to Newton, no one had been able to explain why the planets stayed in their orbits. What held them in place? People had thought that the planets were held in place by an invisible shield. Newton proved that they were held in place by the sun’s gravity and that the force of gravity was affected by distance and mass. While he was not the first person to understand that the orbit of a planet was elongated like an oval, he was the first to explain how it worked.

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Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is best known for having invented the calculus in the mid to late 1660s (most of a decade before Leibniz did so independently, and ultimately more influentially) and for having formulated the theory of universal gravity — the latter in his Principia , the single most important work in the transformation of early modern natural philosophy into modern physical science. Yet he also made major discoveries in optics beginning in the mid-1660s and reaching across four decades; and during the course of his 60 years of intense intellectual activity he put no less effort into chemical and alchemical research and into theology and biblical studies than he put into mathematics and physics. He became a dominant figure in Britain almost immediately following publication of his Principia in 1687, with the consequence that “Newtonianism” of one form or another had become firmly rooted there within the first decade of the eighteenth century. His influence on the continent, however, was delayed by the strong opposition to his theory of gravity expressed by such leading figures as Christiaan Huygens and Leibniz, both of whom saw the theory as invoking an occult power of action at a distance in the absence of Newton's having proposed a contact mechanism by means of which forces of gravity could act. As the promise of the theory of gravity became increasingly substantiated, starting in the late 1730s but especially during the 1740s and 1750s, Newton became an equally dominant figure on the continent, and “Newtonianism,” though perhaps in more guarded forms, flourished there as well. What physics textbooks now refer to as “Newtonian mechanics” and “Newtonian science” consists mostly of results achieved on the continent between 1740 and 1800.

1.1 Newton's Early Years

1.2 newton's years at cambridge prior to principia, 1.3 newton's final years at cambridge, 1.4 newton's years in london and his final years, 2. newton's work and influence, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. newton's life.

Newton's life naturally divides into four parts: the years before he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661; his years in Cambridge before the Principia was published in 1687; a period of almost a decade immediately following this publication, marked by the renown it brought him and his increasing disenchantment with Cambridge; and his final three decades in London, for most of which he was Master of the Mint. While he remained intellectually active during his years in London, his legendary advances date almost entirely from his years in Cambridge. Nevertheless, save for his optical papers of the early 1670s and the first edition of the Principia , all his works published before he died fell within his years in London. [ 1 ]

Newton was born into a Puritan family in Woolsthorpe, a small village in Linconshire near Grantham, on 25 December 1642 (old calendar), a few days short of one year after Galileo died. Isaac's father, a farmer, died two months before Isaac was born. When his mother Hannah married the 63 year old Barnabas Smith three years later and moved to her new husband's residence, Isaac was left behind with his maternal grandparents. (Isaac learned to read and write from his maternal grandmother and mother, both of whom, unlike his father, were literate.) Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe with three new children in 1653, after Smith died. Two years later Isaac went to boarding school in Grantham, returning full time to manage the farm, not very successfully, in 1659. Hannah's brother, who had received an M.A. from Cambridge, and the headmaster of the Grantham school then persuaded his mother that Isaac should prepare for the university. After further schooling at Grantham, he entered Trinity College in 1661, somewhat older than most of his classmates.

These years of Newton's youth were the most turbulent in the history of England. The English Civil War had begun in 1642, King Charles was beheaded in 1649, Oliver Cromwell ruled as lord protector from 1653 until he died in 1658, followed by his son Richard from 1658 to 1659, leading to the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660. How much the political turmoil of these years affected Newton and his family is unclear, but the effect on Cambridge and other universities was substantial, if only through unshackling them for a period from the control of the Anglican Catholic Church. The return of this control with the restoration was a key factor inducing such figures as Robert Boyle to turn to Charles II for support for what in 1660 emerged as the Royal Society of London. The intellectual world of England at the time Newton matriculated to Cambridge was thus very different from what it was when he was born.

Newton's initial education at Cambridge was classical, focusing (primarily through secondary sources) on Aristotlean rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics. By 1664, Newton had begun reaching beyond the standard curriculum, reading, for example, the 1656 Latin edition of Descartes's Opera philosophica , which included the Meditations , Discourse on Method , the Dioptrics , and the Principles of Philosophy . By early 1664 he had also begun teaching himself mathematics, taking notes on works by Oughtred, Viète, Wallis, and Descartes — the latter via van Schooten's Latin translation, with commentary, of the Géométrie . Newton spent all but three months from the summer of 1665 until the spring of 1667 at home in Woolsthorpe when the university was closed because of the plague. This period was his so-called annus mirabilis . During it, he made his initial experimental discoveries in optics and developed (independently of Huygens's treatment of 1659) the mathematical theory of uniform circular motion, in the process noting the relationship between the inverse-square and Kepler's rule relating the square of the planetary periods to the cube of their mean distance from the Sun. Even more impressively, by late 1666 he had become de facto the leading mathematician in the world, having extended his earlier examination of cutting-edge problems into the discovery of the calculus, as presented in his tract of October 1666. He returned to Trinity as a Fellow in 1667, where he continued his research in optics, constructing his first reflecting telescope in 1669, and wrote a more extended tract on the calculus “De Analysi per Æquations Numero Terminorum Infinitas” incorporating new work on infinite series. On the basis of this tract Isaac Barrow recommended Newton as his replacement as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position he assumed in October 1669, four and a half years after he had received his Bachelor of Arts.

Over the course of the next fifteen years as Lucasian Professor Newton presented his lectures and carried on research in a variety of areas. By 1671 he had completed most of a treatise length account of the calculus, [ 2 ] which he then found no one would publish. This failure appears to have diverted his interest in mathematics away from the calculus for some time, for the mathematical lectures he registered during this period mostly concern algebra. (During the early 1680s he undertook a critical review of classical texts in geometry, a review that reduced his view of the importance of symbolic mathematics.) His lectures from 1670 to 1672 concerned optics, with a large range of experiments presented in detail. Newton went public with his work in optics in early 1672, submitting material that was read before the Royal Society and then published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . This led to four years of exchanges with various figures who challenged his claims, including both Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens — exchanges that at times exasperated Newton to the point that he chose to withdraw from further public exchanges in natural philosophy. Before he largely isolated himself in the late 1670s, however, he had also engaged in a series of sometimes long exchanges in the mid 1670s, most notably with John Collins (who had a copy of “De Analysi”) and Leibniz, concerning his work on the calculus. So, though they remained unpublished, Newton's advances in mathematics scarcely remained a secret.

This period as Lucasian Professor also marked the beginning of his more private researches in alchemy and theology. Newton purchased chemical apparatus and treatises in alchemy in 1669, with experiments in chemistry extending across this entire period. The issue of the vows Newton might have to take in conjunction with the Lucasian Professorship also appears to have precipitated his study of the doctrine of the Trinity, which opened the way to his questioning the validity of a good deal more doctrine central to the Roman and Anglican Churches.

Newton showed little interest in orbital astronomy during this period until Hooke initiated a brief correspondence with him in an effort to solicit material for the Royal Society at the end of November 1679, shortly after Newton had returned to Cambridge following the death of his mother. Among the several problems Hooke proposed to Newton was the question of the trajectory of a body under an inverse-square central force:

It now remaines to know the proprietys of a curve Line (not circular nor concentricall) made by a centrall attractive power which makes the velocitys of Descent from the tangent Line or equall straight motion at all Distances in a Duplicate proportion to the Distances Reciprocally taken. I doubt not but that by your excellent method you will easily find out what the Curve must be, and it proprietys, and suggest a physicall Reason of this proportion. [ 3 ]

Newton apparently discovered the systematic relationship between conic-section trajectories and inverse-square central forces at the time, but did not communicate it to anyone, and for reasons that remain unclear did not follow up this discovery until Halley, during a visit in the summer of 1684, put the same question to him. His immediate answer was, an ellipse; and when he was unable to produce the paper on which he had made this determination, he agreed to forward an account to Halley in London. Newton fulfilled this commitment in November by sending Halley a nine-folio-page manuscript, “De Motu Corporum in Gyrum” (“On the Motion of Bodies in Orbit”), which was entered into the Register of the Royal Society in early December 1684. The body of this tract consists of ten deduced propositions — three theorems and seven problems — all of which, along with their corollaries, recur in important propositions in the Principia .

Save for a few weeks away from Cambridge, from late 1684 until early 1687, Newton concentrated on lines of research that expanded the short ten-proposition tract into the 500 page Principia , with its 192 derived propositions. Initially the work was to have a two book structure, but Newton subsequently shifted to three books, and replaced the original version of the final book with one more mathematically demanding. The manuscript for Book 1 was sent to London in the spring of 1686, and the manuscripts for Books 2 and 3, in March and April 1687, respectively. The roughly three hundred copies of the Principia came off the press in the summer of 1687, thrusting the 44 year old Newton into the forefront of natural philosophy and forever ending his life of comparative isolation.

The years between the publication of the Principia and Newton's permanent move to London in 1696 were marked by his increasing disenchantment with his situation in Cambridge. In January 1689, following the Glorious Revolution at the end of 1688, he was elected to represent Cambridge University in the Convention Parliament, which he did until January 1690. During this time he formed friendships with John Locke and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and in the summer of 1689 he finally met Christiaan Huygens face to face for two extended discussions. Perhaps because of disappointment with Huygens not being convinced by the argument for universal gravity, in the early 1690s Newton initiated a radical rewriting of the Principia . During these same years he wrote (but withheld) his principal treatise in alchemy, Praxis ; he corresponded with Richard Bentley on religion and allowed Locke to read some of his writings on the subject; he once again entered into an effort to put his work on the calculus in a form suitable for publication; and he carried out experiments on diffraction with the intent of completing his Opticks , only to withhold the manuscript from publication because of dissatisfaction with its treatment of diffraction. The radical revision of the Principia became abandoned by 1693, during the middle of which Newton suffered, by his own testimony, what in more recent times would be called a nervous breakdown. In the two years following his recovery that autumn, he continued his experiments in chymistry and he put substantial effort into trying to refine and extend the gravity-based theory of the lunar orbit in the Principia , but with less success than he had hoped.

Throughout these years Newton showed interest in a position of significance in London, but again with less success than he had hoped until he accepted the relatively minor position of Warden of the Mint in early 1696, a position he held until he became Master of the Mint at the end of 1699. He again represented Cambridge University in Parliament for 16 months, beginning in 1701, the year in which he resigned his Fellowship at Trinity College and the Lucasian Professorship. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703 and was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

Newton thus became a figure of imminent authority in London over the rest of his life, in face-to-face contact with individuals of power and importance in ways that he had not known in his Cambridge years. His everyday home life changed no less dramatically when his extraordinarily vivacious teenage niece, Catherine Barton, the daughter of his half-sister Hannah, moved in with him shortly after he moved to London, staying until she married John Conduitt in 1717, and after that remaining in close contact. (It was through her and her husband that Newton's papers came down to posterity.) Catherine was socially prominent among the powerful and celebrated among the literati for the years before she married, and her husband was among the wealthiest men of London.

The London years saw Newton embroiled in some nasty disputes, probably made the worse by the ways in which he took advantage of his position of authority in the Royal Society. In the first years of his Presidency he became involved in a dispute with John Flamsteed in which he and Halley, long ill-disposed toward the Flamsteed, violated the trust of the Royal Astronomer, turning him into a permanent enemy. Ill feelings between Newton and Leibniz had been developing below the surface from even before Huygens had died in 1695, and they finally came to a head in 1710 when John Keill accused Leibniz in the Philosophical Transactions of having plagiarized the calculus from Newton and Leibniz, a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1673, demanded redress from the Society. The Society's 1712 published response was anything but redress. Newton not only was a dominant figure in this response, but then published an outspoken anonymous review of it in 1715 in the Philosophical Transactions . Leibniz and his colleagues on the Continent had never been comfortable with the Principia and its implication of action at a distance. With the priority dispute this attitude turned into one of open hostility toward Newton's theory of gravity — a hostility that was matched in its blindness by the fervor of acceptance of the theory in England. The public elements of the priority dispute had the effect of expanding a schism between Newton and Leibniz into a schism between the English associated with the Royal Society and the group who had been working with Leibniz on the calculus since the 1690s, including most notably Johann Bernoulli, and this schism in turn transformed into one between the conduct of science and mathematics in England versus the Continent that persisted long after Leibniz died in 1716.

Although Newton obviously had far less time available to devote to solitary research during his London years than he had had in Cambridge, he did not entirely cease to be productive. The first (English) edition of his Opticks finally appeared in 1704, appended to which were two mathematical treatises, his first work on the calculus to appear in print. This edition was followed by a Latin edition in 1706 and a second English edition in 1717, each containing important Queries on key topics in natural philosophy beyond those in its predecessor. Other earlier work in mathematics began to appear in print, including a work on algebra, Arithmetica Universalis , in 1707 and “De Analysi” and a tract on finite differences, “Methodis differentialis” in 1711. The second edition of the Principia , on which Newton had begun work at the age of 66 in 1709, was published in 1713, with a third edition in 1726. Though the original plan for a radical restructuring had long been abandoned, the fact that virtually every page of the Principia received some modifications in the second edition shows how carefully Newton, often prodded by his editor Roger Cotes, reconsidered everything in it; and important parts were substantially rewritten not only in response to Continental criticisms, but also because of new data, including data from experiments on resistance forces carried out in London. Focused effort on the third edition began in 1723, when Newton was 80 years old, and while the revisions are far less extensive than in the second edition, it does contain substantive additions and modfications, and it surely has claim to being the edition that represents his most considered views.

Newton died on 20 March 1727 at the age of 84. His contemporaries' conception of him nevertheless continued to expand as a consequence of various posthumous publications, including The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728); the work originally intended to be the last book of the Principia , The System of the World (1728, in both English and Latin); Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733); A Treatise of the Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series (1737); A Dissertation upon the Sacred Cubit of the Jews (1737), and Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley concerning Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity (1756). Even then, however, the works that had been published represented only a limited fraction of the total body of papers that had been left in the hands of Catherine and John Conduitt. The five volume collection of Newton's works edited by Samuel Horsley (1779–85) did not alter this situation. Through the marriage of the Conduitts' daughter Catherine and subsequent inheritance, this body of papers came into the possession of Lord Portsmouth, who agreed in 1872 to allow it to be reviewed by scholars at Cambridge University (John Couch Adams, George Stokes, H. R. Luard, and G. D. Liveing). They issued a catalogue in 1888, and the university then retained all the papers of a scientific character. With the notable exception of W. W. Rouse Ball, little work was done on the scientific papers before World War II. The remaining papers were returned to Lord Portsmouth, and then ultimately sold at auction in 1936 to various parties. Serious scholarly work on them did not get underway until the 1970s, and much remains to be done on them.

Three factors stand in the way of giving an account of Newton's work and influence. First is the contrast between the public Newton, consisting of publications in his lifetime and in the decade or two following his death, and the private Newton, consisting of his unpublished work in math and physics, his efforts in chymistry — that is, the 17th century blend of alchemy and chemistry — and his writings in radical theology — material that has become public mostly since World War II. Only the public Newton influenced the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet any account of Newton himself confined to this material can at best be only fragmentary. Second is the contrast, often shocking, between the actual content of Newton's public writings and the positions attributed to him by others, including most importantly his popularizers. The term “Newtonian” refers to several different intellectual strands unfolding in the eighteenth century, some of them tied more closely to Voltaire, Pemberton, and Maclaurin — or for that matter to those who saw themselves as extending his work, such as Clairaut, Euler, d'Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace — than to Newton himself. Third is the contrast between the enormous range of subjects to which Newton devoted his full concentration at one time or another during the 60 years of his intellectual career — mathematics, optics, mechanics, astronomy, experimental chemistry, alchemy, and theology — and the remarkably little information we have about what drove him or his sense of himself. Biographers and analysts who try to piece together a unified picture of Newton and his intellectual endeavors often end up telling us almost as much about themselves as about Newton.

Compounding the diversity of the subjects to which Newton devoted time are sharp contrasts in his work within each subject. Optics and orbital mechanics both fall under what we now call physics, and even then they were seen as tied to one another, as indicated by Descartes' first work on the subject, Le Monde, ou Traité de la lumierè . Nevertheless, two very different “Newtonian” traditions in physics arose from Newton's Opticks and Principia : from his Opticks a tradition centered on meticulous experimentation and from his Principia a tradition centered on mathematical theory. The most important element common to these two was Newton's deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory. Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses – putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them. Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena. This stance is perhaps best summarized in his fourth Rule of Reasoning, added in the third edition of the Principia , but adopted as early as his Optical Lectures of the 1670s:

In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be taken to be either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses.

Such a commitment to empirically driven science was a hallmark of the Royal Society from its very beginnings, and one can find it in the research of Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, and in the experimental efforts of the Royal Academy of Paris. Newton, however, carried this commitment further first by eschewing the method of hypotheses and second by displaying in his Principia and Opticks how rich a set of theoretical results can be secured through well-designed experiments and mathematical theory designed to allow inferences from phenomena. The success of those after him in building on these theoretical results completed the process of transforming natural philosophy into modern empirical science.

Newton's commitment to having phenomena decide the elements of theory required questions to be left open when no available phenomena could decide them. Newton contrasted himself most strongly with Leibniz in this regard at the end of his anonymous review of the Royal Society's report on the priority dispute over the calculus:

It must be allowed that these two Gentlemen differ very much in Philosophy. The one proceeds upon the Evidence arising from Experiments and Phenomena, and stops where such Evidence is wanting; the other is taken up with Hypotheses, and propounds them, not to be examined by Experiments, but to be believed without Examination. The one for want of Experiments to decide the Question, doth not affirm whether the Cause of Gravity be Mechanical or not Mechanical; the other that it is a perpetual Miracle if it be not Mechanical.

Newton could have said much the same about the question of what light consists of, waves or particles, for while he felt that the latter was far more probable, he saw it still not decided by any experiment or phenomenon in his lifetime. Leaving questions about the ultimate cause of gravity and the constitution of light open was the other factor in his work driving a wedge between natural philosophy and empirical science.

The many other areas of Newton's intellectual endeavors made less of a difference to eighteenth century philosophy and science. In mathematics, Newton was the first to develop a full range of algorithms for symbolically determining what we now call integrals and derivatives, but he subsequently became fundamentally opposed to the idea, championed by Leibniz, of transforming mathematics into a discipline grounded in symbol manipulation. Newton thought the only way of rendering limits rigorous lay in extending geometry to incorporate them, a view that went entirely against the tide in the development of mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth ceturies. In chemistry Newton conducted a vast array of experiments, but the experimental tradition coming out of his Opticks , and not his experiments in chemistry, lay behind Lavoisier calling himself a Newtonian; indeed, one must wonder whether Lavoisier would even have associated his new form of chemistry with Newton had he been aware of Newton's fascination with writings in the alchemical tradition. And even in theology, there is Newton the anti-Trinitarian mild heretic who was not that much more radical in his departures from Roman and Anglican Christianity than many others at the time, and Newton, the wild religious zealot predicting the end of the Earth, who did not emerge to public view until quite recently.

There is surprisingly little cross-referencing of themes from one area of Newton's endeavors to another. The common element across almost all of them is that of a problem-solver extraordinaire , taking on one problem at a time and staying with it until he had found, usually rather promptly, a solution. All of his technical writings display this, but so too does his unpublished manuscript reconstructing Solomon's Temple from the biblical account of it and his posthumously published Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms in which he attempted to infer from astronomical phenomena the dating of major events in the Old Testament. The Newton one encounters in his writings seems to compartmentalize his interests at any given moment. Whether he had a unified conception of what he was up to in all his intellectual efforts, and if so what this conception might be, has been a continuing source of controversy among Newton scholars.

Of course, were it not for the Principia , there would be no entry at all for Newton in an Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In science, he would have been known only for the contributions he made to optics, which, while notable, were no more so than those made by Huygens and Grimaldi, neither of whom had much impact on philosophy; and in mathematics, his failure to publish would have relegated his work to not much more than a footnote to the achievements of Leibniz and his school. Regardless of which aspect of Newton's endeavors “Newtonian” might be applied to, the word gained its aura from the Principia . But this adds still a further complication, for the Principia itself was substantially different things to different people. The press-run of the first edition (estimated to be around 300) was too small for it to have been read by all that many individuals. The second edition also appeared in two pirated Amsterdam editions, and hence was much more widely available, as was the third edition and its English (and later French) translation. The Principia , however, is not an easy book to read, so one must still ask, even of those who had access to it, whether they read all or only portions of the book and to what extent they grasped the full complexity of what they read. The detailed commentary provided in the three volume Jesuit edition (1739–42) made the work less daunting. But even then the vast majority of those invoking the word “Newtonian” were unlikely to have been much more conversant with the Principia itself than those in the first half of the 20th century who invoked ‘relativity’ were likely to have read Einstein's two special relativity papers of 1905 or his general relativity paper of 1916. An important question to ask of any philosophers commenting on Newton is, what primary sources had they read?

The 1740s witnessed a major transformation in the standing of the science in the Principia . The Principia itself had left a number of loose-ends, most of them detectable by only highly discerning readers. By 1730, however, some of these loose-ends had been cited in Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's elogium for Newton [ 4 ] and in John Machin's appendix to the 1729 English translation of the Principia , raising questions about just how secure Newton's theory of gravity was, empirically. The shift on the continent began in the 1730s when Maupertuis convinced the Royal Academy to conduct expeditions to Lapland and Peru to determine whether Newton's claims about the non-spherical shape of the Earth and the variation of surface gravity with latitude are correct. Several of the loose-ends were successfully resolved during the 1740's through such notable advances beyond the Principia as Clairaut's Théorie de la Figure de la Terre ; the return of the expedition from Peru; d'Alembert's 1749 rigid-body solution for the wobble of the Earth that produces the precession of the equinoxes; Clairaut's 1749 resolution of the factor of 2 discrepancy between theory and observation in the mean motion of the lunar apogee, glossed over by Newton but emphasized by Machin; and the prize-winning first ever successful description of the motion of the Moon by Tobias Mayer in 1753, based on a theory of this motion derived from gravity by Euler in the early 1750s taking advantage of Clairaut's solution for the mean motion of the apogee.

Euler was the central figure in turning the three laws of motion put forward by Newton in the Principia into Newtonian mechanics. These three laws, as Newton formulated them, apply to “point-masses,” a term Euler had put forward in his Mechanica of 1736. Most of the effort of eighteenth century mechanics was devoted to solving problems of the motion of rigid bodies, elastic strings and bodies, and fluids, all of which require principles beyond Newton's three laws. From the 1740s on this led to alternative approaches to formulating a general mechanics, employing such different principles as the conservation of vis viva , the principle of least action, and d'Alembert's principle. The “Newtonian” formulation of a general mechanics sprang from Euler's proposal in 1750 that Newton's second law, in an F=ma formulation that appears nowhere in the Principia , could be applied locally within bodies and fluids to yield differential equations for the motions of bodies, elastic and rigid, and fluids. During the 1750s Euler developed his equations for the motion of fluids, and in the 1760s, his equations of rigid-body motion. What we call Newtonian mechanics was accordingly something for which Euler was more responsible than Newton.

Although some loose-ends continued to defy resolution until much later in the eighteenth century, by the early 1750s Newton's theory of gravity had become the accepted basis for ongoing research among almost everyone working in orbital astronomy. Clairaut's successful prediction of the month of return of Halley's comet at the end of this decade made a larger segment of the educated public aware of the extent to which empirical grounds for doubting Newton's theory of gravity had largely disappeared. Even so, one must still ask of anyone outside active research in gravitational astronomy just how aware they were of the developments from ongoing efforts when they made their various pronouncements about the standing of the science of the Principia among the community of researchers. The naivety of these pronouncements cuts both ways: on the one hand, they often reflected a bloated view of how secure Newton's theory was at the time, and, on the other, they often underestimated how strong the evidence favoring it had become. The upshot is a need to be attentive to the question of what anyone, even including Newton himself, had in mind when they spoke of the science of the Principia .

To view the seventy years of research after Newton died as merely tying up the loose-ends of the Principia or as simply compiling more evidence for his theory of gravity is to miss the whole point. Research predicated on Newton's theory had answered a huge number of questions about the world dating from long before it. The motion of the Moon and the trajectories of comets were two early examples, both of which answered such questions as how one comet differs from another and what details make the Moon's motion so much more complicated than that of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. In the 1770s Laplace had developed a proper theory of the tides, reaching far beyond the suggestions Newton had made in the Principia by including the effects of the Earth's rotation and the non-radial components of the gravitational forces of the Sun and Moon, components that dominate the radial component that Newton had singled out. In 1786 Laplace identified a large 900 year fluctuation in the motions of Jupiter and Saturn arising from quite subtle features of their respective orbits. With this discovery, calculation of the motion of the planets from the theory of gravity became the basis for predicting planet positions, with observation serving primarily to identify further forces not yet taken into consideration in the calculation. These advances in our understanding of planetary motion led Laplace to produce the four principal volumes of his Traité de mécanique céleste from 1799 to 1805, a work collecting in one place all the theoretical and empirical results of the research predicated on Newton's Principia . From that time forward, Newtonian science sprang from Laplace's work, not Newton's.

The success of the research in celestial mechanics predicated on the Principia was unprecedented. Nothing of comparable scope and accuracy had ever occurred before in empirical research of any kind. That led to a new philosophical question: what was it about the science of the Principia that enabled it to achieve what it did? Philosophers like Locke and Berkeley began asking this question while Newton was still alive, but it gained increasing force as successes piled on one another over the decades after he died. This question had a practical side, as those working in other fields like chemistry pursued comparable success, and others like Hume and Adam Smith aimed for a science of human affairs. It had, of course, a philosophical side, giving rise to the subdiscipline of philosophy of science, starting with Kant and continuing throughout the nineteenth century as other areas of physical science began showing similar signs of success. The Einsteinian revolution in the beginning of the twentieth century, in which Newtonian theory was shown to hold only as a limiting case of the special and general theories of relativity, added a further twist to the question, for now all the successes of Newtonian science, which still remain in place, have to be seen as predicated on a theory that holds only to high approximation in parochial circumstances.

The extraordinary character of the Principia gave rise to a still continuing tendency to place great weight on everything Newton said. This, however, was, and still is, easy to carry to excess. One need look no further than Book 2 of the Principia to see that Newton had no more claim to being somehow in tune with nature and the truth than any number of his contemporaries. Newton's manuscripts do reveal an exceptional level of attention to detail of phrasing, from which we can rightly conclude that his pronouncements, especially in print, were generally backed by careful, self-critical reflection. But this conclusion does not automatically extend to every statement he ever made. We must constantly be mindful of the possibility of too much weight being placed, then or now, on any pronouncement that stands in relative isolation over his 60 year career; and, to counter the tendency to excess, we should be even more vigilant than usual in not losing sight of the context, circumstantial as well as historical and textual, of both Newton's statements and the eighteenth century reaction to them.

• Westfall, Richard S., 1980, Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hall, A. Rupert, 1992 , Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Feingold, Mordechai, 2004 , The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Iliffe, Rob, 2007, Newton: A Very Short Introduction Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, I. B. and Smith, G. E., 2002, The Cambridge Companion to Newton , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cohen, I. B. and Westfall, R. S., 1995, Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, and Commentaries , A Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
• The Newton Project
• The Newton Project-Canada
• The Chymistry of Isaac Newton , Digital Library at Indiana

Copernicus, Nicolaus | Descartes, René | Kant, Immanuel | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Newton, Isaac: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica | scientific revolutions | trinity | Whewell, William

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Sir Isaac Newton biography: Inventions, laws and quotes

A short history of Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematician and physicist that helped invent and explain some of the most fundamental laws of science.

Isaac Newton's early life

• Laws of motion

Isaac Newton's apple

• Inventions and discoveries

Additional resources

Bibliography.

Sir Isaac Newton contributed significantly to the field of science over his lifetime. He invented calculus and provided a clear understanding of optics. But his most significant work had to do with forces, and specifically with the development of a universal law of gravitation and his laws of motion . 

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day to a poor farming family in Woolsthorpe, England, in 1642. At the time of Newton's birth England used the Julian calendar, however, when England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, his birthday became 4th January 1643. 

Isaac Newton arrived in the world only a few months after his father, Isaac Newton Sr, had died. "The boy expected to live managing the farm in the place of the father he had never known," wrote James Gleick in "Isaac Newton" ( Vintage, 2004 ). 

However, when it became clear a farming life was not for him, Newton attended Trinity College in Cambridge, England. "He did not know what he wanted to be or do, but it was not tend sheep or follow the plough and the dung cart," wrote Gleick. While there, he took an interest in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy . 

After his graduation, he began to teach at the college and was appointed as the second Lucasian Chair there. Today, the chair is considered the most renowned academic chair in the world, held by the likes of Charles Babbage and Stephen Hawking .

In 1689, Newton was elected as a member of parliament for the university. In 1703, he was elected as president of the Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists that still exists today. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. He never married.

What are Isaac Newton's laws of motion?

Newton's most famous work came with the publication of his " Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica " ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), generally called Principia. In it, he determined the three laws of motion for the universe .

Newton's first law describes how objects move at the same velocity unless an outside force acts upon them. (A force is something that causes or changes motion.) Thus, an object sitting on a table remains on the table until a force — the push of a hand, or gravity — acts upon it. Similarly, an object travels at the same speed unless it interacts with another force, such as friction.

His second law of motion provided a calculation for how forces interact. The law states that a force is equal to the change in the momentum (mass multiplied by velocity) per change in time. Therefore, when more force is applied to an object, its acceleration also increases, but when the mass of the object increases and the force remains constant, its acceleration decreases.

Newton's third law states that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If one body applies a force on a second, then the second body exerts a force of the same strength on the first, in the opposite direction. 

From all of this, Newton calculated the universal law of gravitation. He found that as two bodies move farther away from one another, the gravitational attraction between them decreases by the inverse of the square of the distance. Thus, if the objects are twice as far apart, the gravitational force is only a fourth as strong; if they are three times as far apart, it is only a ninth of its previous power.

These laws helped scientists understand more about the motions of planets in the solar system , and of the moon around Earth.

Related: What makes Newton's laws work? Here's the simple trick.

A popular myth tells of an apple falling from a tree in Newton's garden, which brought Newton to an understanding of forces, particularly gravity. Whether the incident actually happened is unknown, but historians doubt the event — if it occurred — was the driving force in Newton's thought process.

The myth tells of Isaac Newton having returned to his family farm in Woolsthorpe, escaping Cambridge for a short time as it was dealing with a plague outbreak. As he sat in the farm's orchard, an apple fell from one of the trees (in some tellings it hit Newton on the head). Watching this happen, Newton began to consider the forces that meant the apple always fell directly towards the ground, beginning his examination of gravity.

One of the reasons that this story gained a foothold in popular understanding is that it is an anecdote Newton himself seems to have shared. "Toward the end of his life, Newton told the apple anecdote around four times, although it only became well known in the nineteenth century," wrote Patricia Fara, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, in a chapter of " Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science " (Harvard University Press, 2020).

However, it would be at least 20 years before Newton published his theories on gravity. It seems more likely that Newton used the story as a means of connecting the concept of gravity's impact on objects on Earth with its impact on objects in space for his contemporary audience.

The apple tree in question — known as the "Flower of Kent" — still blooms in the orchard of Woolsthorpe Manor, and is now a popular tourist attraction.  

Isaac Newton's inventions and discoveries

— Famous astronomers: How these scientists shaped astronomy  

— What is Astrophysics?

— Physicists crack unsolvable three-body problem using drunkard's walk  

While a student, Newton was forced to take a two-year hiatus when plague closed Trinity College. At home, he continued to work with optics, using a prism to separate white light, and became the first person to argue that white light was a mixture of many types of rays, rather than a single entity. He continued working with light and color over the next few years and published his findings in " Opticks " in 1704.

Disturbed by the problems with telescopes at the time, he invented the reflecting telescope, grinding the mirror and building the tube himself. Relying on a mirror rather than lenses, the telescope presented a sharper image than refracting telescopes at the time. Modern techniques have reduced the problems caused by lenses, but large telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope use mirrors. 

As a student, Newton studied the most advanced mathematical texts of his time. While on hiatus, he continued to study mathematics, laying the ground for differential and integral calculus. He united many techniques that had previously been considered separately, such as finding areas, tangents, and the lengths of curves. He wrote De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum in 1671 but was unable to find a publisher.

Newton also established a cohesive scientific method, to be used across disciplines. Previous explorations of science varied depending on the field. Newton established a set format for experimentation still used today.

However, not all of Newton's ideas were quite as revolutionary. In P rincipia, Newton describes how rarefied vapor from comet tails is pulled into Earth's gravitational grasp and enables the movements of the planet's fluids along with the "most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us." 

Isaac Newton quotes

"Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica verita."

(Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.)

—Written in the margin of a notebook while a student at Cambridge. In Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 89.

"Genius is patience."

—The Homiletic Review, Vol. 83-84 (1922), Vol. 84, 290.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

—Letter to Robert Hooke (5 Feb 1675-6).In H. W. Turnbull (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 1, 1661-1675 (1959), Vol. 1, 416.

"I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy."

—Letter to Henry Oldenburg (18 Nov 1676). In H. W. Turnbull (ed.), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 1676-1687 (1960), Vol. 2, 182.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

—First reported in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations and Characters, of Books and Men (1820), Vol. 1 of 1966 edn, sect. 1259, p. 462

"To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction."

— The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)

"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

—'Fragments from a Treatise on Revelation". In Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974), 120.

How did Sir Isaac Newton die?

Newton died in 1727 during his sleep at the age of 84. Although the cause of death is unknown, a 1979 study published by Newton's own Royal Society suggests mercury poisoning may have contributed to the decline of his physical and mental health. During the exhumation of his body, large amounts of mercury were found in the scientist's system, likely due to his work with alchemy. Newton conducted several experiments to convert base metals, such as mercury and copper into precious metals, such as gold and silver. 

"In 1693 Newton suffered from insomnia and poor digestion; and he also wrote irrational letters to friends. Although most scholars have attributed Newton's breakdown to psychological factors, it is possible that mercury poisoning may have been the principal cause," wrote L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht " Mercury Poisoning: A probable cause of Isaac Newton's physical and mental ills: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 34. No. 1. " .

After his death, his body was moved to a more prominent place in Westminster Abbey. His white and grey marble monument stands in the nave of the Abbey's choir screen and boasts sculptures of Newton lounging surrounded by children using the many instruments, such as telescopes, associated with Newton's work. The inscription on the monument — originally written in Latin — reads: 

" Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726. " The date of his death on his monument is given in the Julian calendar. 

If you want to learn more about the impact of this celebrated scientist, then you should read about how Isaac Newton Changed the World . If you're wondering whether Newton's second law of motion works in space then an Astronaut has tested the theory out.

"Isaac Newton" by James Gleick (Vintage, 2004 )

" Mercury Poisoning: A probable cause of Isaac Newton's physical and mental ills: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Vol. 34. No. 1. " by L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht (July 1979)

" The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy " by Isaac Newton (Flame Tree Collections, 2020)

" Newton's Apple and Other Myths about Science " edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (Harvard University Press, 2020)

" Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career " by Patricia Fara (Oxford University Press, 2021)

"Isaac Newton" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007)

"Isaac Newton" University of St Andrews (2000)

"Sir Isaac Newton" Westminster Abbey (2023)

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Biographies for Kids

Isaac newton.

• Occupation: Scientist, mathematician, and astronomer
• Born: January 4, 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England
• Best known for: Defining the three laws of motion and universal gravitation

• Gravity - Newton is probably most famous for discovering gravity. Outlined in the Principia, his theory about gravity helped to explain the movements of the planets and the Sun. This theory is known today as Newton's law of universal gravitation.
• Laws of Motion - Newton's laws of motion were three fundamental laws of physics that laid the foundation for classical mechanics.
• Calculus - Newton invented a whole new type of mathematics which he called "fluxions." Today we call this math calculus and it is an important type of math used in advanced engineering and science.
• Reflecting Telescope - In 1668 Newton invented the reflecting telescope . This type of telescope uses mirrors to reflect light and form an image. Nearly all of the major telescopes used in astronomy today are reflecting telescopes.
• He studied many classic philosophers and astronomers such as Aristotle, Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, and Galileo.
• Legend has it that Newton got his inspiration for gravity when he saw an apple fall from a tree on his farm.
• He wrote his thoughts down in the Principia at the urging of his friend (and famous astronomer) Edmond Halley. Halley even paid for the book's publication.
• He once said of his own work "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

• Scientific Methods
• Famous Physicists
• Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Apart from discovering the cause of the fall of an apple from a tree, that is, the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the most brilliant and greatest physicists of all time. He shaped dramatic and surprising discoveries in the laws of physics that we believe our universe obeys, and hence it changed the way we appreciate and relate to the world around us.

Table of Contents

About sir isaac newton, sir isaac newton’s education, awards and achievements, some achievements of isaac newton in brief.

• Universal Law of Gravitation

Optics and Light

Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in a small village of England called Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. He was an English physicist and mathematician, and one of the important thinkers in the Scientific Revolution.

He discovered the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further laid the foundation of modern physical optics. His famous three laws of Motion in mechanics and the formulation of the laws of gravitation completely changed the track of physics across the globe. He was the originator of calculus in mathematics. A scientist like him is considered an excellent gift by nature to the world of physics.

Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem. He was bestowed with his B.A. degree in the same year.

Isaac Newton held numerous positions throughout his life. In 1671, he was invited to join the Royal Society of London after developing a new and enhanced version of the reflecting telescope.

He was later elected President of the Royal Society (1703). Sir Isaac Newton ran for a seat in Parliament in 1689. He won the election and became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He was also appointed as a Warden of the Mint in 1969. Due to his exemplary work and dedication to the mint, he was chosen Master of the Mint in 1700. After being knighted in 1705, he was known as “Sir Isaac Newton.”

His mind was ablaze with original ideas. He made significant progress in three distinct fields – with some of the most profound discoveries in:

• Calculus, the mathematics of change, which is vital to our understanding of the world around us
• Optics and the behaviour of light
• He also built the first working reflecting telescope
• He showed that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are exceptional cases of Newton’s universal gravitation.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Contribution in Calculus

Sir Isaac Newton was the first individual to develop calculus. Modern physics and physical chemistry are almost impossible without calculus, as it is the mathematics of change.

The idea of differentiating calculus into differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equations came from Newton’s fertile mind. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.

Law of Universal Gravitation

The famous apple that he saw falling from a tree led him to discover the force of gravitation and its laws. Ultimately, he realised that the pressure causing the apple’s fall is responsible for the moon to orbit the earth, as well as comets and other planets to revolve around the sun. The force can be felt throughout the universe. Hence, Newton called it the Universal Law of Gravitation .

Newton discovered the equation that allows us to compute the force of gravity between two objects.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

• First law of Motion
• Second Law of Motion
• Third law of Motion

Watch the video and learn about the history of the concept of Gravitation

Sir Isaac Newton also accomplished himself in experimental methods and working with equipment. He built the world’s first reflecting telescope . This telescope focuses all the light from a curved mirror. Here are some advantages of reflecting telescopes from optics and light –

• They are inexpensive to make.
• They are easier to make in large sizes, gathering lighter, allowing advanced magnification.
• They don’t suffer focusing issues linked with lenses called chromatic aberration.

Isaac Newton also proved that white light is not a simple phenomenon with the help of a glass prism. He confirmed that it is made up of all of the colours of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.

Watch the video and solve complete NCERT exercise questions in the chapter Gravitation

Frequently Asked Questions

How did newton discover gravity.

Seeing an apple fall from the tree made him think about the forces of nature.

What is Calculus in Mathematics?

Calculus is the study of differentiation and integration. Calculus explains the changes in values, on a small and large scale, related to any function.

Define Reflecting Telescope.

It’s a telescope invented by Newton that uses mirrors to collect and focus the light towards the eyepiece.

Name all the Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.

Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are:

• The Law of Ellipses
• The Law of Equal Areas
• The Law of Harmonies

Who discovered Gravity?

Watch the full summary of the chapter gravitation class 9.

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Newton was born in England, spent many of his years living there, and also eventually died in the country. But during his living years, Newton accomplished so much. He contributed so much to science that some historians say that he significantly progressed ever field that he ever studied. Now that is some compliment.

Sir Isaac Newton is believed to have developed the the study of Calculus.

In short, of all the famous math people the world has ever known, Sir Isaac Netwon might be most influential mathematician.

Return from Sir Isaac Newton to other Famous Math People .

7 Fascinating Facts about Sir Isaac Newton

Today we celebrate Newton’s birthday as January 4th. Originally, according to the “old” Julien calendar, he was born on Christmas Day in 1642. No matter what the case, Newton lived an amazing life. Here are a few interesting tidbits about this important figure in the scientific revolution:

Newton’s life got off to a rough start

He never knew his father Isaac, who had died months before he was born. Newton’s own chances of survival seemed slim at the beginning. He was a premature and sickly infant that some thought would not live long. Newton was dealt another difficult blow when he was only three years old. His mother, Hannah, remarried, and his new stepfather, Reverend Barnabas Smith, wanted nothing to do with Isaac. The child was raised by his maternal grandmother for many years. The loss of his mother left Newton with a lingering insecurity that followed him the rest of life.

Newton was deeply religious from a young age

He felt compelled to jot down a list of his sins in one of his notebooks. Already a student at Trinity College at Cambridge University at the time, he divided these sins into acts that happened before and after Whitsunday 1662, or the seventh Sunday after Easter. Newton took even small lapses quite seriously, such as having unclean thoughts or using the Lord’s name. The list also showed a darker side of Newton, including him making threats to burn his mother and stepfather in their home.

Newton got a career boost from the Great Plague of 1665

He completed his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College in 1665 and wanted to continue his studies, but an epidemic of the bubonic plague soon altered his plans. The university closed its doors not long after the disease had begun its deadly sweep through London. During the first seven months of the outbreak, roughly 100,000 London residents had died.

Back at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton actually began working on some of his most important theories. It was here that he explored ideas of planetary motion and made progress on his understanding of light and color. Newton may have also made advances in his theory about gravity by observing an apple fall from a tree in his garden.

Long before his breakthrough work was published, Newton was considered one of England’s leading thinkers

He was named the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, taking over the post from his mentor Isaac Barrow. Later geniuses to hold this position included Charles Babbage (also known as “the father of computing”), Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking .

Newton got into several conflicts with other scientists and mathematicians

He and Robert Hooke , a scientist perhaps best known for his microscopic experiments, had a long-lasting grudge match. Hooke thought Newton’s theory of light was wrong and denounced the physicist’s work. The pair later clashed over planetary motion with Hooke claiming that Newton had taken some of his work and included it in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica .

Newton also argued with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz over who discovered infinitesimal calculus first. Leibniz claimed that Newton had stolen his ideas. The Royal Society launched an investigation into the matter in 1712. With Newton as the president of the society since 1703, it was no surprise that the organization favored Newton in its findings. It was later determined that the two mathematicians had probably made their discoveries independent of each other.

In his later life, Newton enjoyed a political career

He was elected to Parliament as a representative for Cambridge in 1689 and returned to Parliament from 1701 to 1702. Newton was also active in the economic life of his country. In 1696, he was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint. Newton became the master of the mint three years later and actually changed the English pound from a sterling to gold standard.

Newton was given a send-off fit for a king

He was a famous and wealthy man at the time of his death in 1727, and he was mourned by the nation. His body lay in state in Westminister Abbey, and the Lord Chancellor was one of his pallbearers. Newton was laid to rest in the famed abbey, which also hosts the remains of such monarchs as Elizabeth I and Charles II . His elaborate tomb stands in the abbey’s nave and features a sculpture of reclining Newton with an arm resting on a stack of his great printed works. Other scientists, such as Charles Darwin , were later buried near Newton. The Latin inscription on the tomb praises him for possessing “a strength of mind almost, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own,” according to the official Westminister Abbey website.

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A Short Biography of the Scientist Sir Isaac Newton (30 Minute Book Series) Paperback – June 10, 2015

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 10, 2015)
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Science » Lives of Scientists

The best books on isaac newton, recommended by william newman.

Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire" by William Newman

John Maynard Keynes famously cast Isaac Newton not as the first scientist of the age of reason, but the last of the magicians. How should we interpret the million words he wrote, in secret, on alchemy? What should we make of Newton's heretical religious views? William Newman talks us through the best books for a better understanding of the complex man who was one of the greatest physicists of all time.

Interview by Benedict King

Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton by Richard S. Westfall

A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank E. Manuel

Newton and the Origins of Civilization by Jed Z. Buchwald & Mordechai Feingold

Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton by Rob Iliffe

Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy by Niccolò Guicciardini

1 Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton by Richard S. Westfall

2 a portrait of isaac newton by frank e. manuel, 3 newton and the origins of civilization by jed z. buchwald & mordechai feingold, 4 priest of nature: the religious worlds of isaac newton by rob iliffe, 5 isaac newton and natural philosophy by niccolò guicciardini.

B efore we talk about the books, it might be helpful if you could briefly put Isaac Newton into the context of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.  What was Newton’s contribution?

The first of the books about Isaac Newton you’ve chosen is a biography, Never at Rest by Richard Westfall. Is this the  biography of Newton to read?

It’s a magisterial book. It’s the only treatment of Newton that really tries to give a detailed study of the totality of his science alongside his religion and his work on alchemy, which covered more than 30 years. It is a magnificent product. It’s somewhat dated now, because it appeared in 1980 and Newton scholarship has recently experienced a remarkable change. Some of the other books that I recommended represent attempts to come to terms with sections of Newton’s work in a deeper way than Westfall was able to do in 1980.

Part of the reason for that is because we now have digital sites like the Newton Project in the UK, which has been editing Newton’s theological and religious writings—his prophetic writings more generally—and then the Chymistry of Isaac Newton site that I am the general editor of at Indiana University, that’s been editing the alchemical papers, Newton’s work on chemistry. Westfall didn’t have access to all of that in 1980. So there’s a lot of material that Westfall wasn’t able to take account of, yet all the same, his work is a magnificent synthesis.

You mentioned Newton’s alchemical papers. His work on alchemy is your area of expertise and the subject of your latest book: Newton the Alchemist. Can his alchemical work be seen as foundational for modern science or was it a dead end?

There is currently a widespread ‘master narrative’ of Newton’s alchemy, though one with which I disagree. The major scholars of the subject at that time, especially Westfall, argued that the impact of alchemy on Newton’s more mainstream science lay in his emphasis on invisible forces that could act over a considerable space, such as gravitational attraction. The reason why a lodestone attracted iron at a distance was because of a hidden sympathy between the two, like the occult sympathies governing magical phenomena. Couldn’t this sort of explanation have stimulated Newton to think of gravity in terms of an immaterial attraction? And wasn’t alchemy based on the idea that some materials react with others because of a similar principle of affinity? Thus the idea that Newton’s involvement with alchemy was part of a quest to understand gravitational attraction was born. Contemporary sources ranging from popular outlets such as Wikipedia to serious scholarly monographs echo this theme.

The next book is A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel, which is also a biography. It starts with his childhood in Lincolnshire and has chapters on his time at Cambridge and then in public life in London. What does it add to the story that Westfall doesn’t?

Manuel’s book was published in 1968, so it’s considerably earlier than Westfall’s. Manuel was a brilliant historian and perhaps an even more brilliant writer. I personally think that, of all the books written on Newton, his is stylistically the most engaging. It’s just a terrific read.

The book attempts to provide a kind of Freudian psychoanalytic study of Newton’s character. He tries to explain Newton’s psychology in terms of his childhood lack of a father. One thing that’s interesting about Manuel—and for that matter Westfall and almost everybody else who has come later—is that all these folks were influenced to some degree, perhaps without even realizing it, by John Maynard Keynes .

There was a famous Sotheby’s auction of Newton manuscripts by his heirs in 1936 and Keynes managed to acquire about half of them. Most of them he subsequently gave to King’s College Cambridge, where they remain, but he wrote an extraordinary article called “ Newton the Man” which was published posthumously in 1947. In it, he argues famously that Newton was not the first scientist of the age of reason, but rather the last of the magicians. He tries to debunk the 18th-century view of Newton as a supreme rationalist and even possibly a deist. [Deists, in the 18th century, were people who believed in a supreme benevolent being who had set the universe in motion, but rejected the notion of an interventionist Christian God]

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This focus on Newton’s non-scientific side leads us neatly to the next of the books you’ve selected, Newton and the Origins of Civilization by Buchwald and Feingold. This is the latest word on Newton’s biblical-chronological studies.

Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold point out that in the 17th century there was a widespread view among alchemists that the totality of ancient mythology was just encoded alchemy. There are many examples one could give, but I’ll stick with one that comes up in Newton’s “Index Chemicus”, a very long concordance of the alchemical writings that he read. He talks about Osiris, the Egyptian god, as being a sort of salt. He’s relying there on a 17th-century alchemist named Michael Maier, who interpreted Egyptian mythology as encoded alchemy. Maier argued that these stories about the Egyptian gods and goddesses and so forth were actually recipes that were dressed up as though the Egyptians were talking about actual divinities. That was the view of Maier and Newton interprets Maier in his own work on alchemy.

But in other writings on chronology Newton interprets Osiris literally as a god, though in a certain, restricted sense. Newton in his chronological writings worked with Euhemerus’s interpretation of mythology, in which the gods and goddesses of the ancients were originally human beings who were then treated as heroes and catasterised, so to speak, into the heavens as divinities. In other words, his chronological theory based on Egyptian mythology runs directly at odds with the alchemical theory of ancient mythology that he’s taking from Michael Maier. These are very distinct ways of looking at mythology. They are in fact contradictory and mutually exclusive.

I would argue that Newton did not himself believe that the ancients were encoding alchemy in their mythology. Instead, I suspect he thought people like Michael Maier were using mythology as a way of writing alchemical riddles that then had to be decoded if one was going to carry their alchemy into practice.

Part of the book is about the attacks on Newton in England and France and the demise of the science of chronology. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Newton was trying to build his chronology of the ancient world through studying the Bible and using what he knew about mythology. He really thought that you could extract actual dates out of biblical and mythological literature, with the help of astronomy and other scientific tools that he had at his disposal. For example, he tries to date Jason and the Argonauts’ adventures according to what he knew about the precession of the equinoxes. There’s a precession of one degree every 72 years, so he was able to work backwards from what he knew about the position of the equinoctial colures in the 1680s and 1690s and later.

So he’s incorporating astronomical material as a way of pinpointing the dates that he gets from ancient literature. That fell out of style after Newton’s death and by the 19th century it was considered rather ridiculous.

Another key feature of the book is the fact that Feingold and Buchwald have a very different view of Newton’s anti-trinitarianism than the one you get in other writers like Westfall.

So Newton didn’t believe in the Trinity, which was a highly controversial and dangerous position at at that time. In what way do Feingold and Buchwald offer a different view?

Again we need to go back to Keynes. Keynes thought that Newton was a heretic, that he is an anti-trinitarian from the early 1670s, if not earlier. That position has been picked up by other people, for example Westfall. The evidence for it is primarily the fact that Newton refused to take holy orders in 1675. Entering holy orders was a condition of his fellowship at Trinity College. He managed to get a special dispensation and, according to Westfall, Keynes, and various others, the reason why he refused to take holy orders was because he was effectively a crypto-heretic and would not agree to swear that the Trinity—in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same ‘substance’—was a legitimate way of interpreting Christianity.

How does that fit with the next book, Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature, because he talks at some length about Newton’s heterodox anti-trinitarianism?

Iliffe takes a noncommittal position in Priest of Nature . There’s no question, of course, that Newton was a heretic. The problem is when did he commit to that idea? Most of his papers on his theological views date from, at the earliest, the 1680s. So there really isn’t much evidence from the 1670s. Iliffe spends a lot of time in his book arguing that Newton came out of a Puritan background and that he was intensely religious from day one. He argues that Newton was heavily influenced by an apothecary named Clark with whom he lived in Grantham when he was a student there at the King’s School, and that the origins of his later heretical views are an outgrowth of this early and intense religiosity.

Newton then entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661. Among his papers is a list of his sins that he wrote out in 1662, some of which seem quite trivial, like stealing cherry cobs from a friend in Grantham. He also repents of having wanted to burn down the house of his mother and his stepfather, a guy named Barnabas Smith. To Iliffe these admissions provide evidence of a highly Puritanical young Newton, whereas Feingold and Buchwald regard them as aberrations and point to the relative absence of religious themes in Newton’s surviving student notebooks.

In terms of sins, threatening to burn down his stepfather’s house sounds like quite a serious one.

What happened was that Newton’s father died directly before  he was born in 1642. His mother remarried the rector of a nearby town named Barnabas Smith, but Barnabas Smith was not interested in having the infant Newton in his house. So, although the house was only a couple of miles away, Newton was raised by his grandmother rather than his mother. She lived with Barnabas Smith for seven years and then he died too. Newton was eleven when Barnabas Smith died and his mother came back to live with him.

This is the basis for Manuel’s psychoanalysis. He claims that Newton was essentially angry throughout his entire life because his mother had been snatched away from him by Barnabas Smith.

Can you tell us about his broader heresy: he wasn’t just anti-trinitarian, was he? He thought the church fathers were fraudulent as well. And he was a strong believer that religious pluralism was a good thing. Is that a fair characterization?

Yes, but it’s more complicated. On the one hand, Newton wanted to claim that in order to be a good Christian all you had to do was profess that Jesus was the Son of God, the Father, and that love was the guiding principle, so basic tenets of Christianity. On the other hand, he was vehemently anti-Catholic and this comes out very clearly in his manuscripts. He claims the Nicene Creed, where the Trinity becomes an official part of Christianity, was a “great Apostasy,” and that behind it was a diabolical influence that converted Christianity essentially into a kind of paganism.

So he was vehemently opposed to the Trinity and to the early upholders of the Trinity like the Church father, Athanasius. And he writes that monks are perverts and goes on like this time and time again throughout his manuscripts. So on the one hand he’s very open to a simple view of Christianity, on the other he thinks Catholicism is evil.

And is his objection to the Trinity that it has no biblical warrant?

The final book you’ve chosen is by Niccolo Guicciardini and it’s called Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy . It’s a much more recent publication. What does this book add to the picture?

Guicciardini’s is the first synthetic book that really tries to incorporate what you could call the new Newton scholarship. He has read and analysed Newton and the Origin of Civilization , Buchwald and  Feingold’s work. He’s also quite familiar with Iliffe’s work. He knows some of my work on Newton’s alchemy and he really does try to come to a new synthesis. You get a picture of Newton not so much as a kind of psychopath—that you get in Manuel and to some degree Westfall—but rather Newton as a kind of ‘Caltech geek,’ as Mordechai Feingold has put it. He is somebody who’s on the spectrum, but is not outright crazy.

To what extent did Newton’s achievements in natural philosophy lead him or others to dismiss the views he held on biblical literalism and chronology?

I would say that Newton’s influence in natural philosophy ultimately led away from the very things that he was trying to push not just in chronology, but also in religion more generally. For example, the second edition of the Principia , his major work on gravitation and so forth, includes something called the “General Scholium”, which is an attempt to argue for the necessity of God as the being that orders the universe. That’s absent from the first edition of the Principia . Newton was clearly worried that his natural philosophical work was going to lead, if not directly to atheism, then to a kind of disregard for religion. So you see him inserting these attempts to link his natural philosophical ideas to the necessity of religion in various different works of his.

Another example would be in the 1717 edition of the Optics . The Optics contains so-called “queries” that are hypothetical and Newton frames them in the form of questions. The last query makes a strong argument against Descartes’s idea that there is a fixed amount of motion in the universe, that motion is just getting transferred from one microscopic corpuscle to another, and so that motion could go on forever. Newton argues directly against that and for the necessity of what he calls “active principles”, which ultimately clearly go back to God. He thinks there’s an active principle behind gravity, that there’s an active principle behind magnetism and that there’s an active principle behind electricity. Clearly he’s trying to link these natural phenomena back to the necessity for the existence of a divinity.

So he was very worried about this and he was right to be so. Ultimately the Newtonian world picture did make it unnecessary to invoke direct divine causation. This is one of the reasons why Newton doesn’t like Descartes, because he felt that Cartesianism would lead to atheism. But ultimately the same thing could be said of his own natural philosophy.

Did he address that directly?

In the “General Scholium” he argues very clearly not only that there is a God, but that God is the Lord, the ruler of all. He has a very Old Testament view of God, which is obviously related to his unitarianism. He thinks that Jesus was the son of God, but Jesus nonetheless is not part of God in the way that the trinitarians believe.

There’s another issue that is worth mentioning and that is the issue of compartmentalization of Newton’s thought, a topic that Iliffe discusses. Newton was essentially brilliant at everything that he undertook seriously. Obviously, he was particularly successful in the realm of natural philosophy, what we would call physics, but the same can be said of his religious writings. They really are highly original and extremely ingenious, even if you don’t believe them. The same can be said of his alchemical writing. He was making compounds that people may or may not have discovered even today.

This leads to a different question, which is, how did all of these different pursuits integrate or did they? I hinted at this earlier with the issue of chronology and alchemy and the interpretation of mythology, and how it seems that Isaac Newton was keeping the alchemical and the historical interpretations of mythology quite distinct.

The issue of compartmentalization has really come to the fore as a result of more and more rigorous scholarship on these different aspects of Newton’s thought. These works that I’ve recommended to you, in particular Buchwald and Feingold and Iliffe, are carrying out research on particular aspects of Isaac Newton’s thought in more and more detail. And so the question of how to deal with all of these different sides of Newton has become really very problematic. Guicciardini deals with this I think rather successfully, but nonetheless questions remain as to how you approach this extreme compartmentalization. Is there a relationship between Newton’s ideas on physics and his ideas on alchemy, for example, and if so, what is its precise character?

Even if Newton hadn’t found the unifying factor amongst all these things, Newton must have thought there must be some coherence between them.

I’m not sure that’s right. I don’t know. The problem is you have this guy who is clearly an out-of-control genius. Isaac Newton gets interested in something and he pursues it to the nth degree. He almost can’t control himself. It’s like he can’t turn his brain off. So he just happens to be incredibly good at almost anything he does. Let me give you a parallel example from personal experience. I had a colleague years ago, at Indiana University, who was a brilliant philosopher of science. He was also an Epicurean cook and he also was so good at playing the French horn that he was able to play it in an orchestra in a major city. Did he think all those things were connected? I’m not so sure.

If someone believes in a God who’s the author of the universe, then it implies there must be a coherence between all areas of knowledge. I suppose that’s why I thought he must he must have felt there was some sort of coherence between all these things—some underlying laws.

I think that’s true, but at such an abstract and general level that it might not even touch Isaac Newton’s actual work. For instance, Newton’s view of Christianity ultimately boiled down to very general precepts such as ‘Love thy neighbour,’ ‘Profess the reality of Jesus Christ as the Son of the Father,’ and that kind of thing. So all of the incredibly detailed work that he did in interpreting prophecy, for example, or in writing against the Trinity, may not really have interacted with those very general precepts in any significant way. Isaac Newton was a virtuoso at practically everything he undertook, and virtuosity in multiple areas of endeavour need not imply their interconnectedness.

The problem of assuming an underlying unity to Isaac Newton’s thought also emerges from an examination of his alchemy. The issue with alchemy is problematic because alchemical writings are often filled with references to God. And the reason for that I think is because alchemists themselves were constantly under threat of being accused of counterfeiting and so forth. So they tried to build up the picture of themselves as extremely religious people. I really think that’s the case. When [the Newton historian] Betty Jo Dobbs interpreted that material in his manuscripts she came to the conclusion that, ‘Yes, of course, this is really all about Isaac Newton’s religion.’ Yet there’s actually very little evidence to support Dobbs’s view, because if you look at the work Isaac Newton wrote on theology, there are practically no references to alchemy. In reality it appears that he kept these topics in fairly watertight compartments. So as historians we have to be very, very careful not to make assumptions. Typically we want to say all of these things are related, but maybe not. They may simply reflect virtuoso performances in a variety of unrelated or only loosely related areas rather than manifestations of a single underlying quest for unity.

August 5, 2019

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William Newman

William Newman is Distinguished Professor and Ruth N. Halls Professor in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington.

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