It's fascinating to consider how certain individuals have managed to significantly alter the course of history (Sánchez Amador, 2020). A prominent example is Isaac Newton, a polymath who dedicated his life to physics, theology, research, alchemy, and mathematical calculus. While all humans are essential to society in one way or another, there are individuals who have transformed culture and the perception of the world. For a significant number of scientists, Isaac Newton's magnum opus is considered the most relevant scientific publication in history, which is a weighty assertion. Therefore, according to Sánchez Amador (2020), for any reader with a profound interest in scientific knowledge, approaching the figure of Isaac Newton and his contributions to the world of research is fundamental.
Biography
Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727) was born on January 4, 1643, in Grantham, a town located in Lincolnshire, East Midlands, England, where he spent his early years (Sánchez Amador, 2020). His entrance into the world was marked by adverse circumstances, as his father passed away three months before his birth, and his mother had a premature birth (Sánchez, 2019). Despite being born with very low weight and in a weak state of health, he managed to survive against all odds and was baptized with the name of his father, Isaac. His mother remarried a man named Barnabas Smith, who did not wish to take care of stepchildren, so he was sent to live with Smith's parents, whom he called "grandparents" although they were not really related. According to Sánchez (2019), his relationship with them was very unfortunate, and years later, he would include the desire to burn them alive on a list of his sins.
At the age of ten, after the death of his stepfather, he returned to live with his mother and two new step-siblings (Sánchez, 2019). At the age of twelve, he entered a local school where, apparently, he preferred to play with girls and make ingenious toys for them, a precursor to the skill he would later demonstrate in building devices as complex as a refracting telescope (Ordóñez, 2016). During those years, he learned Latin, mathematics, and delved into the study of the Bible (Sánchez, 2019). He was a weak and solitary child who did not excel in class, so he was often relegated to the back row. It is known that he had a stutter, probably throughout his life, and was also sickly. He did not interact much with his peers, and when he did, it was usually to play practical jokes on them or somehow aggress them. However, according to Sánchez (2019), after a fight with a classmate in which he managed to defeat and publicly humiliate him, he decided to become more studious.
He spent a lot of time locked in his room, where he began to build mechanical objects, models, and various devices (Sánchez, 2019). He showed great interest in all areas of knowledge and studied a lot. While still very young, he met Catherine Storer, the only woman he possibly had a romance with in his life. He made dollhouses for her as gifts. However, according to Sánchez (2019), the relationship did not transcend, and in fact, it is known that he died a virgin.
At the age of 18, he entered the University of Cambridge (Sánchez, 2019). His education took place during a period when the scientific revolution was in full swing across Europe, linked to authors such as Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Borelli, Hobbes, Gassendi, Hooke, and Boyle, whose works he studied carefully (Ordóñez, 2016). Although he was essentially self - taught, he also found several teachers who expanded his knowledge (Sánchez, 2019). He soon established correspondence with the Royal Society of Sciences, which showed interest in his discoveries and devices. According to Sánchez (2019), it was at this time that the first scientific debates arose, which Newton maintained throughout his life.
In 1665, during the productive years of the plague, the University of Cambridge closed due to the disease, and Newton had to return home (BBC News Mundo, 2015). This period turned out to be the most productive of his life. He had always believed that to attain true knowledge, it was necessary to observe more than to read books. For example, instead of relying on texts about optics, he experimented by inserting a blunt needle into his eye to see what effect it had. During this time, he laid the groundwork for his calculus theories and the laws of motion that would later make him famous. However, according to BBC News Mundo (2015), due to his reserved nature, he kept his ideas to himself.
In 1671, he continued experimenting in his laboratory, and that combination of theory and practice resulted in many types of discoveries (BBC News Mundo, 2015). His theory of optics led him to reconsider the design of the telescope, which until then was a large and cumbersome instrument. Using mirrors instead of lenses, he created a more powerful instrument that was 10 times smaller. When members of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Science learned about his telescope, they were impressed. This encouraged him to tell them about what he described as a "crucial experiment" on light and color (BBC News Mundo, 2015). According to Ordoñez (2016), in 1672, he joined the Royal Society, an institution founded in London in 1660 that brought together English scientists, and that same year he presented to its members a paper titled "New Theory of Light and Colors," in which he explained the relationship between sunlight and the colors of the rainbow.
Scholars like Descartes and Huygens argued that light itself was white light, composed of particles that spread out in waves (Ordóñez, 2016). They considered that colors were properties of the surfaces of the material on which the light fell. But through experiments with prisms, Newton concluded that colors were inherent properties of light itself, and that white light was the combination of rays of light of various colors. Therefore, light was not the result of the vibration of any material ether but a substance with properties. These ideas were not well received by Hooke, who had devoted himself to developing the theses of Descartes and Huygens. His criticism of Newton's paper unleashed a enmity that would last for decades. Newton, unforgiving towards Hooke, retreated to Cambridge and severed his relationships with the Royal Society. Ordóñez (2016) mentions that, resentful and relentless, he hastened to erase all traces of Hooke's work, including his portraits.
In 1687, at the request of a friend, Newton published the treatise "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" or "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (Sánchez Amador, 2020). The language in which it was written, Latin, indicated the audience it was aimed at: experts in mathematics and mechanics, astronomers, philosophers, and university scholars (Ordóñez, 2016). According to Sánchez Amador (3030), this work is undoubtedly one of the most important in the fields of science in general and physics throughout history.
In mid-1693, he suffered a mental breakdown when he suspected that his friends were conspiring against him (BBC News Mundo, 2015). After working for five consecutive nights, he experienced what could be described as a nervous crisis. Later, he apologized to John Locke and Samuel Pepys for wishing them dead. But despite his fragile mental health, his reputation remained intact and he was soon offered a crucial position. As Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, he found a new vocation. He wanted to make the British pound the most stable currency. In the 17th century, British finances were in crisis. It was found that one in ten coins was counterfeit, and often the value of the metal with which it was made exceeded what it represented. In his role as supervisor, he undertook a project to withdraw the currency in circulation and introduce a more reliable one. According to BBC News Mundo (2015), he kept a database of counterfeiters whom he punished.
In 1700, he was appointed Master of the Mint, a position he held for the rest of his life (BBC News Mundo, 2015). In 1703, he was elected president of the Royal Society, and his influence grew to the point of becoming a public figure (Ordóñez, 2016). He maintained control over what happened in Cambridge, and even in Oxford, and his mechanics began to be studied in these universities. His theories spread throughout Europe through books, such as those of his disciple Desaguliers or the Dutch Gravesande. In 1704, he published his Optics, written in English, which collected his corpuscular interpretation of light, a triumph over English Cartesians (Ordóñez, 2016). In 1712, Newton and Leibniz had been in disagreement for years over who had invented infinitesimal calculus (BBC News Mundo, 2015). However, according to BBC News Mundo (2015), Newton finally found a way to snatch victory from his intellectual enemy.
In 1713, the Royal Society formed a committee to decide once and for all who had invented it (BBC News Mundo, 2015). The conclusion was that Newton had preceded Leibniz by many years. However, the secret author of the Royal Society's report was none other than Newton himself. Leibniz refused to accept defeat, and the fight only ended when both men were already dead. Today, according to BBC News Mundo (2015), it is accepted that both arrived at calculus independently, so there was no plagiarism.
During the last 30 years of his life, he devoted himself to religious studies and occultism (Sánchez, 2019). He considered himself chosen by God to decipher secret messages from the Bible. He predicted that the end of the world would take place in the year 2060. He proclaimed that the Catholic Church was the beast of the Apocalypse and that Moses had been an alchemist. In his final years, he suffered multiple afflictions: moral, due to a heated debate with Leibniz, and physical, due to a serious kidney problem. Isaac left this world at the age of 84 (1727) after several kidney problems, due to a nephritic colic. Despite his strong rivalries, accusations of plagiarism, and evident jealousy with the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, he never lost the respect and devotion of both the general public and the scientific community. According to Sánchez Amador (20202), this recognition culminated in 1705 when he was knighted by Queen Anne.
Contributions to Science
The Law of Universal Gravitation
Bernard Cohen, a renowned historian and contemporary scientist of American origin, has highlighted that Isaac Newton's discovery of the law of universal gravitation represents the culmination of the Scientific Revolution (Sánchez Amador, 2020). This discovery transcends the simplicity of a formula to become the key to understanding most of the physical phenomena observable by the human eye. This law is one of the multiple physical formulations present in the book "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica," which describes the gravitational interaction between bodies with mass (Sánchez Amador, 2020). According to Ordóñez (2016), Newton demonstrated his ability to successfully apply mathematics to mechanical problems, especially regarding the motion of the planets in the solar system.
Since Nicolaus Copernicus, it was known that all planets, including Earth, revolve around the Sun, and since then, observations about celestial mechanics had accumulated (Ordóñez, 2016). However, there were still unexplained phenomena. One of them was the curvilinear motion of the planets around the Sun, or the more general problem of circular motion. The works of Kepler demonstrated that the planets revolved around the Sun describing not circular but elliptical orbits, and this with a constant areolar velocity, that is, always sweeping the same surface in the same unit of time. But how were they attracted by the Sun to be able to perform that trajectory? Descartes had hypothesized that the entire universe was filled with particles and that the Sun generated swirls of matter that dragged the planets and led them to describe those elliptical orbits. However, according to Ordónez (2016), it seemed difficult to demonstrate that intuitive image through mathematical calculation.
During his time at Cambridge, he found a solution to the problem: he imagined that a force united the Sun with each planet and that this force attracted them in such a way that they were forced to rotate describing orbits (Ordóñez, 2016). Although this might seem only an image, unlike Descartes' proposal, Newton provided a quantitative demonstration of the force in action. In fact, the law of gravity states that the force of attraction between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them (Ordóñez, 2016). In other words, the closer and more massive two bodies are, the more intensely they will attract each other (Sánchez Amador, 2020). In this way, through geometric calculations, he was able to demonstrate that the result of this action was an elliptical trajectory (Ordóñez, 2016). According to Sánchez Amador (2020), this establishes a proportional relationship between gravitational force and the mass of bodies.
Newton's Three Laws
The Law of Inertia states that an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by a force (Sánchez Amador, 2020). An object in motion will continue moving in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. The Law of Acceleration posits that an object will accelerate if a force is applied to it. Acceleration is the change in velocity of an object and will occur in the same direction as the force. This idea can also be expressed as force equals mass times acceleration, or F = ma. Finally, the Action and Reaction Law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Sánchez Amador (2020) mentions that, although these postulations may seem obvious today, they were the foundations of classical mechanics, which has allowed for everything from understanding and manufacturing machines to comprehending planetary motion, when combined with the law of universal gravitation.
Other Contributions
There are many other contributions to the world of science by this figure that the general population is not aware of (Sánchez Amador, 2020). For example, he is credited with the invention of infinitesimal calculus, an important branch of mathematics focused on the study of change and continuity. This invention is also attributed to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom Newton accused of plagiarism. Additionally, he is credited with the discovery of refractive dispersion, that is, the decomposition of white light into the different colors that compose it (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). Thus, he demonstrated that sunlight is composed of the sum of all colors. Sánchez Amador (2020) mentions that, although many more postulations and ideas have been left out, Newton's scientific work can be summarized in establishing the foundations of classical mechanics, various works on light and optics, and the development of infinitesimal calculus in the mathematical field.
References
BBC News Mundo. (2015, julio 19). El Lado Oscuro del Genio Isaac Newton. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2015/07/150707_isaac_newton_secretos_oscuros_finde_dv
National Geographic. (2023). Isaac Newton: Who he Was, Why Apples are Falling. National Geographic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/isaac-newton-who-he-was-why-apples-are-falling/
Ordóñez, J. (2016, marzo 31). Isaac Newton, científico y alquimista. National geographic. https://historia.nationalgeographic.com.es/a/isaac-newton-cientifico-y-alquimista_10246
Sánchez Amador, S. A. (2020, septiembre 22). Isaac Newton: Biografía y Aportaciones a la Ciencia de Este Investigador. Psicología y Mente. https://psicologiaymente.com/biografias/isaac-newton
Sánchez, E. (2019, julio 4). Isaac Newton, biografía de un hombre en claroscuro. La Mente es Maravillosa. https://lamenteesmaravillosa.com/isaac-newton-biografia-de-un-hombre-en-claroscuro/
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