Sir Isaac Newton
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Sir Isaac Newton
Born in 1642, Isaac Newton was the founder of many brilliant discoveries and formulas. Among them:
* Sunlight can be split into a spectrum.
* Discovery of why planets orbit the sun.
* The three laws of motion.
* The formula for gravity.
* The motion of the tides.
His discoveries helped future scientists figure out the movement of every object in the Universe and detect unknown stars and planets.
Isaac Newton struggled with math at first and almost gave up. Eventually, he fell in love with it, and developed his own theories as he learned. He studied math, astronomy, optics, light and color. The latter was the basis for his first nervous breakdown in 1678 when he got into an arguement about it with the English Jesuits in Liege. As a result, he became almost a hermit for a number of years. When he came out of seclusion, he was again in a scientific frenzy of work, producing more than a man twice his age. This all came to an abrupt stop with his second nervous breakdown in 1693. Theories abound as to the causes of his breakdowns. Everything from personal problems to poisoning from experiments have been mentioned. Today, scientists believe it was undiagnosed depression. Newton took a position at the Royal Mint in 1696, becoming Master in a year. In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society and was re-elected each year until his death. During his days as President he became involved in a heated controversy between himself and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz as to which one had invented calculus. Because he was President of the Society, Newton arranged for an “impartial” committee to put an end to the debate.
“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.”
-Isaac Newton