His father, who had died an illiterate shortly before Newton was born, was a yeoman farmer. His mother re-married about three years later to Barnabas Smith, an elderly widower, and Isaac was left in the care of his maternal grandmother. According to Christianson, this devastated the young Newton "...who had never set eyes on his father, was suddenl

Manuel, Frank E. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1968.

White, Michael. The Last Sorcerer. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Regardless of the fact that Newton had to be urged to publish the Principia, as it is normally called, it is considered to be the greatest scientific book ever written. These results were applied to orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendula, and free-fall near Earth. Newton further demonstrated that the planets were attracted toward the Sun by a force varying according to the distance from the Sun, and in doing so, generalized that every piece of matter attracts every other piece of matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (Spielvogel, 583). Now that Newton had the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion, he could explain a wide range for hitherto disparate phenomena such as comet orbits, tides, Earth's axis, and the motion and orbit of the Moon. This one law which Newton had derived in less than a year reduced to order most of the known problems of astronomy and terrestrial physics and served as a firm physical base to the Copernican world picture.

Newton's first work as a Lucasian Professor was on optics. He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple, homogeneous entity. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed that white light was a basic single entity, but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise (White 170). When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism, he noted an oblong spectrum of colors. Newton then showed that the spectrum was too long to be explained by the accepted theory of the bending of light by dense media. Newton argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays, each of which is specific to a given spectral color. He then proved this theory by directing a blue band of light through a prism and showing that it was refracted at a different angle than if he allowed only the red band to pass through the prism. All the rays of that specific color were refracted at the same angle (White, 166). In addition, Newton tried to prove that light was composed of a stream of particles and not waves. This notion led to years of clashes with Robert Hooke, a fellow member of the Royal Society, who believed that light was a wave and not particles. In 1704, a year after Hooke's death, Newton published Opticks, a book explaining his theories of light and color (Ipsen, 28). As a result his theories about light particle and the scientific method he used to prove them were universally accepted.

Although Newton's theories on mathematics and optics were quite impressive, his greatest achievement by far was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. Even though Newton also began this research in the plague years, the story that he discovered universal gravitation in 1666 while watching an apple fall from a tree in his garden is a myth. By 1666, Newton had formulated early versions of his three Laws of Motion, another of his great discoveries. He had also conceived of the law defining the centrifugal force of a body moving uniformly in a circular path. Using Huygen's thought of circular motion as the result of a balance between two forces: one centrifugal, the other centripetal (toward the center), rather than as the result of one force, Newton created an experiment to calculate the force on an object due to the centrifugal force (White, 89). Newton's great insight of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth's gravity extended to the Moon, counterbalancing its centrifugal force. From his law of centrifugal force and Kelper's third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced that the centrifugal force of the Moon or of any planet must decrease as the inverse square of its dista

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