About
Newton
Newton was born in the United Kingdom, and lived from 1642 (the
year Galileo died) until 1727. He was considered both the first of the Age of Reason joining the likes of Laplace, and the last of the alchemists-astrologers
who bedazzled Europe’s royalty. He was a lonely figure, and a mystic. People of
that time still tried to avoid the plague and Newton certainly did. He was envied by many, especially Robert Hooke,
who tried to claim credit for much of what Newton did such as the monumental
proof presented here.
Newton’s
contributions
Isaac Newton was remarkable
for fundamental contributions in mathematics and statistics, optics, mechanics,
cosmology, and thermodynamics. In much of these contributions his work was a
continuation of the work of others before him, but because at that time
attribution of the work of others wasn’t common, it is sometimes unclear what
Newton added to a field that came uniquely from him.
Some examples:
•
Binomial expansions had been known dating back
to Euclid in the 4th century B.C. Newton’s contribution was to
generalize the exponent to any rational number.
•
Newton invented a reflecting telescope design
in 1666, but John Gregory conceived an alternative reflector design before
Newton in 1663.
•
Newton was first to understand that the rainbow
of colors from a prism was not made by the prism but were spectral components
of light. Others before him had seen the rainbow of colors from a prism, but
didn’t understand them. Unfortunately, Newton was so convinced that light
consisted only of particles that the wave nature of light was not considered
for some time. This is interesting because it is the wave nature of light which
accounts for its separation into colors by refraction in the prism.
•
Newton’s three laws of mechanics included the ideas
of Galileo, especially on inertia.
•
Liebniz is believed to have coinvented calculus
publishing his formulations in 1684 which preceded publication of Newton’s
papers on calculus by 27 years. Further it is Liebniz’s symbolic form of
calculus, such as those for integration and differentiation that are used
today.
•
In the journal Heat Transfer Engineering it is
mentioned that “Boyle gave a qualitative demonstration of the principle known
as Newton’s law of cooling in his book, Experiments Touching Cold in 1665”
which preceded Newton’s publication of the cooling law in 1701.
Newton’s
greatest contribution to humankind
In contrast to what is
accepted now as truth from valid experimental results or observations, science
in Newton’s day discounted these in favor of theory. So Kepler’s reduction of
Tycho Brahe’s observations of the daily celestial position of Mars, which established
its trajectory to be an ellipse having the sun as a focal point, was not
considered then as a fact. Instead Kepler’s findings were taken as only
describing the data, i.e. an explanation of the data. In the same way,
Copernicus's conclusion upon updating the Ptolemaic tables that a heliocentric
planetary model made sense was discounted as mere convenience. The church
insisted that planetary motion, based on the perfection of circular orbits, was
irrefutable unless such motion as suggested by Kepler could be proven using
secular logic beyond any doubt. Up to Newton’s time a proof fitting this
criteria was unknown for at least two reasons and one logical criticism. The
two reasons were (1) the mathematics of objects in motion didn’t exist, and (2)
gravitational force was not qualified.
Of course, the pull of gravity was known, and Galileo was exploring it,
but its role in determining a planet’s motion was not. The universally held
criticism was the incongruity that the Earth could be hurtling through space at
over 14 thousand m/s. At such a speed, it was reasoned, why wasn’t everything
blown away?
Others in this story
Hipparchus, Greek astronomer, around 100 B.C. duplicated his observations of planetary motion by proposing the idea that the planets were each frozen in a separate sphere which was contained in another separate larger sphere that revolved about a point near Earth. Matching his model to observation was accomplished by adjusting the speeds of rotation of the two spheres. He named the small sphere the epicycle and the large sphere the deferent.
Tycho Brahe called the best naked-eye astronomer made meticulous observations of planetary position in the late 16th century. He was a quarrelsome Danish nobleman who lost his nose in a dual over mathematics when he was nineteen. At the end of his life he passed on his observations to Kepler for making tables of planetary motion.
Johann Kepler, a German (1571-1630) mystic astrologer and astronomer, brilliant in mathematics and whose mother was tried as a witch, published Tycho's tables of planetary motion in 1609 in which he claimed Mars to follow an elliptical orbit having the Sun at a focal point.
Nicolas Copernicus
Nicholas Copernicus is famous for beginning the Scientific Revolution. As early as 1507, while working to revise the Ptolemaic tables of planetary motion, he concluded that a heliocentric model of the universe would explain the retrograde motion of Mars much easier than laborious contortions of epicycles and deferents. Eventually his theories were published, but the truth of them was not accepted by the church. See the excellent book on this story entitled "The Book Nobody Read", by the scientist-historian Owen Gingerich.
