Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them January 8, 1955 Issue

Sir Issac Newton, 1642-1727

[Mentioned in Miscellaneous Writings, p. 23]

Isaac Newton , when asked about his discoveries, said, "I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light." So when he observed the apple fall in his garden at Woolsthorpe, England, he was not content merely to attribute it to the earth's gravity. Instead, he reasoned that the same force of gravity which caused the apple to fall must extend to the moon and even to the planets. He concluded that the pulling force of the earth must diminish as the body it pulls is farther away. He was right and proved his claims through mathematical calculations.

Newton was the greatest genius among those men who first used the experimental method in science. His discoveries regarding light started with a simple experiment. Darkening his room, making a hole in the window shutter, and placing a prism on the opposite wall, he admitted a ray of sunlight. What he saw was the solar, or prismatic, spectrum, consisting of seven different colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The discovery of the compound nature of white light meant attributing the color of an object to the light, not to the object itself.

News of a small reflecting telescope which he had made reached the Royal Society, and they asked to see it. He immediately made another and sent it to London. This telescope is the prototype of the 200-inch reflector at Mt. Palomar Observatory in California.

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Sir Issac Newton, 1642-1727

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