Legend has it that Isaac
Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple
fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even
upward.
“He showed that the force that
makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as
the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits,” said
Martin Rees, a former president of Britain’s Royal Society, the United
Kingdom’s national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself.
“His theory of gravity wouldn’t have got
us global positioning satellites,” said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian
at the Milton Keynes, U.K.-based Open University. “But it was enough to develop
space travel.”
Born two to three months prematurely on
January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny
baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. A
practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that
actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel.
Admitted to the University of Cambridge
on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student.
In 1665 the school temporarily closed
because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to
Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm
occurred, and he described his years on hiatus as “the prime of my age for
invention.”
Despite his apparent affinity for
private study, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and served as a mathematics
professor and in other capacities until 1696.
Following his apple insight, Newton
developed the three laws of motion, which are, in his own words:
·
Newton’s Law of Inertia: Every object persists in its state of rest or
uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state
by forces impressed upon it.
·
Newton’s Law of Acceleration: Force is equal to the change in momentum (mV)
per change in time. For a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration
[expressed in the famous equation F = ma].
·
Newton’s Law of Action and Reaction: For every action, there is an equal and opposite
reaction.
Newton published his findings in 1687 in a book called Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as the Principia.
“Newton’s Principia made him famous—few people read it, and even
fewer understood it, but everyone knew that it was a great work, rather like
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity over two hundred years later,” writes
mathematician Robert Wilson of the Open University in an article on a
university website.
In 1727, at 84, Sir Isaac Newton died in
his sleep and was buried with pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey in London.
Story source: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/isaac-newton-who-he-was-why-apples-are-falling/
Source: Isaac Newton Day – Scents of Science (myfusimotors.com)
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