17,394
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 12:
Line 12: + + + + + + + + + + +
add life
After his death and burial, Newton was exhumed so he could be buried in a more prominent location in [[Westminster Abbey]]. During this exhumation process, it was discovered that Newton had large amounts of [[mercury (element) | mercury]] in his body, probably as a direct result of his [[alchemy|alchemical]] experiments. Exposure to large amounts of mercury may explain Newton’s eccentricity in his latter years, as well as his cause of death.<ref>Newton Biography[http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html]</ref>
After his death and burial, Newton was exhumed so he could be buried in a more prominent location in [[Westminster Abbey]]. During this exhumation process, it was discovered that Newton had large amounts of [[mercury (element) | mercury]] in his body, probably as a direct result of his [[alchemy|alchemical]] experiments. Exposure to large amounts of mercury may explain Newton’s eccentricity in his latter years, as well as his cause of death.<ref>Newton Biography[http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html]</ref>
==Life==
Newton was born on Christmas day December 25, 1642--the year Galileo died--in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire; his father died before his birth.<ref> The father Isaac Newton (1606–1642) was illiterate but left extensive lands as well as goods worth £459, including a flock of 235 sheep and a herd of 46 cattle. The annual income was about £150.</ref> The Newtons were a well-to-do, upwardly mobile family of farmers, but never had a prominent member. When he was a little more than two years old, his mother Hannah (1610–1679), remarried, and his upbringing was taken over by his maternal grandmother. He began his schooling in neighboring villages, and, at ten, was sent to the grammar school at Grantham, the nearest town of any size. He boarded during terms at the house of an apothecary from whom he may have derived his lifelong interest in chemistry. The young Newton seems to have been a quiet, not particularly bookish, lad, but very ready with his hands; he made sun dials, model windmills, a water clock, a mechanical carriage, and flew kites with lanterns attached to their tails.
In 1656, Newton's mother, on the death of her second husband, returned to Woolsthorpe and took her son out of school with the idea of making him a farmer. He hated farming. His mother, after considerable persuasion by his teacher at Grantham, who had recognized his intellectual gifts, allowed him to prepare for entrance to [[Cambridge University]]. In June 1661, he was admitted to prestigious Trinity College as a lowly "sub-sizar" (a student required to do work-study). The main curriculum was the study of Aristotle, but early in 1664, as Newton's notebooks indicate, he began an intensive self-study of geometry, Copernican astronomy and optics. On his own he read Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Galileo, Robert Boyle, Thomas Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, Joseph Glanville, and Henry More. He was a loner with only one friend, but he was stimulated by the distinguished mathematician and theologian Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, who recognized Newton's genius and did all he could to foster it.
Newton took his bachelor's degree in January 1665 and was selected for a scholarship in 1664 and a fellowship in 1667. Upon taking his MA he became one of Trinity college's sixty fellows, with an income of £60, part of which came in the form of room and board. He had no duties at Trinity over the next 28 years; he did no teaching apart from a few lectures (to nearly empty halls) and tutoring an occasional student. At the urging of Isaac Barrow in 1669 he wrote out some of his findings, which circulated in manuscript. He invented the reflecting telescope, which caused a sensation in London in 1671 and his election to the Royal Society. Newton became Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1669 at £100 per annum. Added to his fellowship and family estate, Newton was well off. He spent most of his time with experiments in alchemy and speculations in Arian theology, which had no influence whatever at the time or later. Newton made enemies easily, with an almost paranoid style of disputation. Many scientists in the era were repeatedly charging each other with plagiarism, and sometimes hid their discoveries in code so that in future years they could decode the message and claim priority. In 1704 he published his great book on ''Opticks'', which had been mostly written three decades before.
==National affairs==
Publication in 1687 of the ''Principia'' made Newton one of the best known intellectual figures in Europe. At the same time Newton became a leader of the University against King James II, who was promoting Catholicism there. When James was overthrown, Newton's political reputation soared. In 1694 he suffered an emotional breakdown and his intellectual productivity ended. In 1696 he left Cambridge for London, where he became Warden of the Royal Mint. The appointment was intended as an honorary sinecure for England's most famous intellectual, but Newton characteristically threw himself into a successful effort to reform the nation's coinage and crack down on counterfeiters. He became Master of the Mint in 1699; in 27 years as Master he averaged an income of about £1650 a year, one of the highest salaries in London. We was president of the Royal Society from 1703 to his death, turning that honorific position into an operational one that upgraded the Society's usefulness. In 1705 he became the first scientist in European history to be knighted.
Newton never married, but he brought his niece to London as his hostess and lived in upper class style.
== Gravity ==
== Gravity ==