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.

Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a student and later professor of mathematics, was the background of most of his work. While there he published the Principia, which set forth the fundamental laws of mechanics, the fundamentals of universal gravitation, and the method of fluxions, or integral calculus, a method of computation that he invented. Unlike the Principia, written in Latin, his great work on Optics was published in English. Newton served as both Warden and Master of the Mint in his later life, and he also wrote on the prophecies of Daniel and on the Apocalypse of St. John.

An insight into his modest nature may be gained from these words which he wrote toward the end of his career: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, .... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

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