A lthough the Principia was well received, its future was cast in doubt before it appeared. Here again Hooke was center stage, this time claiming not without justification that his letters of earned him a role in Newton's discovery. But to no effect. Newton was so furious with Hooke that he threatened to suppress Book III of the Principia altogether, finally denouncing science as 'an impertinently litigious lady.
But instead of acknowledging Hooke's contribution Newton systematically deleted every possible mention of Hooke's name. Newton's hatred for Hooke was consumptive. Indeed, Newton later withheld publication of his Opticks and virtually withdrew from the Royal Society until Hooke's death in A fter publishing the Principia , Newton became more involved in public affairs.
In he was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament, and during his stay in London he became acquainted with John Locke, the famous philosopher, and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a brilliant young mathematician who became an intimate friend.
In , however, Newton suffered a severe nervous disorder, not unlike his breakdown of The cause is open to interpretation: overwork; the stress of controversy; the unexplained loss of friendship with Fatio; or perhaps chronic mercury poisoning, the result of nearly three decades of alchemical research.
Each factor may have played a role. We only know Locke and Samuel Pepys received strange and seemingly deranged letters that prompted concern for Newton's 'discomposure in head, or mind, or both. His new position proved 'most proper,' and he left Cambridge for London without regret. D uring his London years Newton enjoyed power and worldly success. His position at the Mint assured a comfortable social and economic status, and he was an active and able administrator. After the death of Hooke in , Newton was elected president of the Royal Society and was annually reelected until his death.
In he published his second major work, the Opticks , based largely on work completed decades before. He was knighted in A lthough his creative years had passed, Newton continued to exercise a profound influence on the development of science. In effect, the Royal Society was Newton's instrument, and he played it to his personal advantage. His tenure as president has been described as tyrannical and autocratic, and his control over the lives and careers of younger disciples was all but absolute.
Newton could not abide contradiction or controversy - his quarrels with Hooke provide singular examples. But in later disputes, as president of the Royal Society, Newton marshaled all the forces at his command. For example, he published Flamsteed's astronomical observations - the labor of a lifetime - without the author's permission; and in his priority dispute with Leibniz concerning the calculus, Newton enlisted younger men to fight his war of words, while behind the lines he secretly directed charge and countercharge.
In the end, the actions of the Society were little more than extensions of Newton's will, and until his death he dominated the landscape of science without rival. Scientific Achievements Mathematics - The origin of Newton's interest in mathematics can be traced to his undergraduate days at Cambridge. But between and his return to Cambridge after the plague, Newton made fundamental contributions to analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. Specifically, he discovered the binomial theorem, new methods for expansion of infinite series, and his 'direct and inverse method of fluxions.
Hence, a 'fluxion' represents the rate of change of a 'fluent'--a continuously changing or flowing quantity, such as distance, area, or length. In essence, fluxions were the first words in a new language of physics.
N ewton's creative years in mathematics extended from to roughly the spring of Although his predecessors had anticipated various elements of the calculus, Newton generalized and integrated these insights while developing new and more rigorous methods.
The essential elements of his thought were presented in three tracts, the first appearing in a privately circulated treatise, De analysi On Analysis ,which went unpublished until In , Newton developed a more complete account of his method of infinitesimals, which appeared nine years after his death as Methodus fluxionum et serierum infinitarum The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series , In addition to these works, Newton wrote four smaller tracts, two of which were appended to his Opticks of Newton and Leibniz.
N ext to its brilliance, the most characteristic feature of Newton's mathematical career was delayed publication. Newton's priority dispute with Leibniz is a celebrated but unhappy example. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton's most capable adversary, began publishing papers on calculus in , almost 20 years after Newton's discoveries commenced.
The result of this temporal discrepancy was a bitter dispute that raged for nearly two decades. The ordeal began with rumors that Leibniz had borrowed ideas from Newton and rushed them into print. It ended with charges of dishonesty and outright plagiarism. The Newton-Leibniz priority dispute--which eventually extended into philosophical areas concerning the nature of God and the universe--ultimately turned on the ambiguity of priority.
It is now generally agreed that Newton and Leibniz each developed the calculus independently, and hence they are considered co-discoverers. But while Newton was the first to conceive and develop his method of fluxions, Leibniz was the first to publish his independent results.
N ewton's optical research, like his mathematical investigations, began during his undergraduate years at Cambridge. But unlike his mathematical work, Newton's studies in optics quickly became public. Shortly after his election to the Royal Society in , Newton published his first paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
This paper, and others that followed, drew on his undergraduate researches as well as his Lucasian lectures at Cambridge. After further schooling at Grantham, he entered Trinity College in , 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 , King Charles was beheaded in , Oliver Cromwell ruled as lord protector from until he died in , followed by his son Richard from to , leading to the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 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 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 , Newton had begun reaching beyond the standard curriculum, reading, for example, the Latin edition of Descartes's Opera philosophica , which included the Meditations , Discourse on Method , the Dioptrics , and the Principles of Philosophy.
Newton spent all but three months from the summer of until the spring of 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 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 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 On the basis of this tract Isaac Barrow recommended Newton as his replacement as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position he assumed in October , 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 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 s 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 to concerned optics, with a large range of experiments presented in detail. Newton went public with his work in optics in early , 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.
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 , 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 , 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:. 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 , 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. 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 until early , Newton concentrated on lines of research that expanded the short ten-proposition tract into the page Principia , with its 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 , and the manuscripts for Books 2 and 3, in March and April , respectively.
The roughly three hundred copies of the Principia came off the press in the summer of , 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 were marked by his increasing disenchantment with his situation in Cambridge. In January , following the Glorious Revolution at the end of , he was elected to represent Cambridge University in the Convention Parliament, which he did until January During this time he formed friendships with John Locke and Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and in the summer of 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 s 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 , 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 , a position he held until he became Master of the Mint at the end of He again represented Cambridge University in Parliament for 16 months, beginning in , the year in which he resigned his Fellowship at Trinity College and the Lucasian Professorship.
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 , 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 , and they finally came to a head in 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 , demanded redress from the Society.
The Society's published response was anything but redress. After Newton's stepfather died, his mother returned to Woolsthorpe, and she pulled him out of school to help run the family farm.
He preferred reading to working, though, and it became apparent that farming was not his destiny. At the age of nineteen he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, England. After receiving his bachelor's degree in , Newton stayed on for his master's, but an outbreak of the plague a highly infectious and deadly disease often carried by rats Isaac Newton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe for eighteen months, from to , during which time he performed the basic experiments and did the thinking for his later work on gravitation the attraction the mass of the Earth has for bodies near its surface and optics the study of light and the changes it experiences and produces.
The story that a falling apple suggested the idea of gravitation to him seems to be true. Newton also developed his own system of calculus a form of mathematics used to solve problems in physics. Returning to Cambridge in , Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then began a period of expanding on the work he had started at Woolsthorpe.
His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability. When Barrow resigned to take another job in , he recommended that Newton take his place. Newton became a professor of mathematics at age twenty-seven and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for twenty-seven years. Newton's main interest at the time was optics, and for several years his lectures were devoted to the subject. His experiments in this area had grown out of his interest in improving the effectiveness of telescopes instruments that enable the user to view distant objects through the bending of light rays through a lens.
His discoveries about the nature and properties of light had led him to turn to suggestions for a reflecting telescope rather than current ones based on the refractive bending principle. Newton built several reflecting models in which the image was viewed in a concave rounded like the inside of a bowl mirror through an eyepiece in the side of the tube.
In he sent one of these to the Royal Society Great Britain's oldest organization of scientists. Newton was honored when the members of the Royal Society were impressed by his reflecting telescope and when they elected him to their membership. But when he decided to send the society a paper describing his experiments on light and the conclusions he had drawn from them, the results almost changed history for the worst.
The paper was published in the society's Philosophical Transactions. Many scientists refused to accept the findings, and others were strongly opposed to conclusions that seemed to show that popular theories of light were false. At first Newton patiently answered his critics with further explanations, but when these produced more criticism, he became angry.
He vowed he would never publish again, even threatening to give up science altogether. Several years later, at the urging of the astronomer Edmund Halley c. Newton's greatest work, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, was completed in eighteen months. It was first published in Latin in , when Newton was forty-five. Its appearance established him as the leading scientist of his time, not only in England but in the entire Western world.
In the Principia Newton, with the law of universal gravitation, gave mathematical solutions to most of the problems relating to motion with which earlier scientists had struggled.
In the years after Newton's election to the Royal Society, the thinking of his peers and of scholars had been slowly developing along lines similar to those which his had taken, and they were more open to his explanations of the behavior of bodies moving according to the laws of motion than they had been to his theories about the nature of light.
Yet the Principia 's mathematical form made it difficult for even the sharpest minds to follow. Those who did understand it saw that it needed to be made easier to read. As a result, in the years from to Newton's death, the Principia was the subject of many books and articles attempting to better explain Newton's ideas.
In , following 18 months of intense and effectively nonstop work, Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy , most often known as Principia. Principia is said to be the single most influential book on physics and possibly all of science.
Its publication immediately raised Newton to international prominence. Principia offers an exact quantitative description of bodies in motion, with three basic but important laws of motion:. Force is equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion i. In Newton's account, gravity kept the universe balanced, made it work, and brought heaven and Earth together in one great equation. Among the dissenters was Robert Hooke , one of the original members of the Royal Academy and a scientist who was accomplished in a number of areas, including mechanics and optics.
While Newton theorized that light was composed of particles, Hooke believed it was composed of waves. Hooke quickly condemned Newton's paper in condescending terms, and attacked Newton's methodology and conclusions. Hooke was not the only one to question Newton's work in optics. But because of Hooke's association with the Royal Society and his own work in optics, his criticism stung Newton the worst.
Unable to handle the critique, he went into a rage—a reaction to criticism that was to continue throughout his life. Newton denied Hooke's charge that his theories had any shortcomings and argued the importance of his discoveries to all of science.
In the ensuing months, the exchange between the two men grew more acrimonious, and soon Newton threatened to quit the Royal Society altogether. He remained only when several other members assured him that the Fellows held him in high esteem. The rivalry between Newton and Hooke would continue for several years thereafter. Then, in , Newton suffered a complete nervous breakdown and the correspondence abruptly ended.
The death of his mother the following year caused him to become even more isolated, and for six years he withdrew from intellectual exchange except when others initiated correspondence, which he always kept short. During his hiatus from public life, Newton returned to his study of gravitation and its effects on the orbits of planets. Ironically, the impetus that put Newton on the right direction in this study came from Robert Hooke. In a letter of general correspondence to Royal Society members for contributions, Hooke wrote to Newton and brought up the question of planetary motion, suggesting that a formula involving the inverse squares might explain the attraction between planets and the shape of their orbits.
Subsequent exchanges transpired before Newton quickly broke off the correspondence once again. But Hooke's idea was soon incorporated into Newton's work on planetary motion, and from his notes it appears he had quickly drawn his own conclusions by , though he kept his discoveries to himself. In early , in a conversation with fellow Royal Society members Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, Hooke made his case on the proof for planetary motion. Both Wren and Halley thought he was on to something, but pointed out that a mathematical demonstration was needed.
In August , Halley traveled to Cambridge to visit with Newton, who was coming out of his seclusion. Halley idly asked him what shape the orbit of a planet would take if its attraction to the sun followed the inverse square of the distance between them Hooke's theory.
Newton knew the answer, due to his concentrated work for the past six years, and replied, "An ellipse. Upon the publication of the first edition of Principia in , Robert Hooke immediately accused Newton of plagiarism, claiming that he had discovered the theory of inverse squares and that Newton had stolen his work. The charge was unfounded, as most scientists knew, for Hooke had only theorized on the idea and had never brought it to any level of proof.
Newton, however, was furious and strongly defended his discoveries. He withdrew all references to Hooke in his notes and threatened to withdraw from publishing the subsequent edition of Principia altogether. Halley, who had invested much of himself in Newton's work, tried to make peace between the two men.
While Newton begrudgingly agreed to insert a joint acknowledgment of Hooke's work shared with Wren and Halley in his discussion of the law of inverse squares, it did nothing to placate Hooke. As the years went on, Hooke's life began to unravel. His beloved niece and companion died the same year that Principia was published, in As Newton's reputation and fame grew, Hooke's declined, causing him to become even more bitter and loathsome toward his rival.
To the very end, Hooke took every opportunity he could to offend Newton.
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