Isaac Newton:

"The More I Learn, The More I Realize How Much I Don't Know."

– Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 – 20 March 20, 1727) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher.

Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed.

His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, achieved the first great unification in physics and established classical mechanics.

Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz.

He contributed to and refined the scientific method, and his work is considered the most influential in bringing forth modern science.

In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity.

He used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity.

Newton solved the two-body problem, and introduced the three-body problem.

He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles.

Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, thereby convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems.

He also built the first reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum.

Newton's work on light was collected in his influential book Opticks, published in 1704.

He formulated an empirical law of cooling, which was the first heat transfer formulation and serves as the formal basis of convective heat transfer, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notions of a Newtonian fluid and a black body.

Furthermore, Newton made early investigations into electricity, with an idea from his book Opticks arguably the beginning of the field theory of the electric force.

In addition to his creation of calculus, as a mathematician, he generalized the binomial theorem to any real number, contributed to the study of power series, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, classified most of the cubic plane curves, and also originated the Newton-Cotes formulas for numerical integration.

He further devised an early form of regression analysis.

Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

He was appointed at the age of 26.

Newton also was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.

He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day.

Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death.

Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689–1690 and 1701–1702.

He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, in which he increased the accuracy and security of British coinage, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727).

Early Life

Isaac Newton was born, according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time, on Christmas Day, December 25, 1642 at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire.

His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before.

Born prematurely, Newton was a small child.

His mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug.

When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe).

Newton disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19:

"Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them."

Newton's mother had three children from her second marriage: Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah.

The King's School

From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School in Grantham, which taught Latin and Ancient Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics.

He was removed from school by his mother and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October 1659.

His mother, widowed for the second time, attempted to make him a farmer, an occupation he hated.

Henry Stokes, master at The King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school.

Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student, distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.

University of Cambridge

In June 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

His uncle the Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university.

At Cambridge, Newton started as a subsizar, paying his way by performing valet duties until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, which covered his university costs for four more years until the completion of his MA.

At the time, Cambridge's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton read along with then more modern philosophers, including Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Thomas Street.

He set down in his notebook a series of "Quaestiones" about mechanical philosophy as he found it.

In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus.

Soon after Newton obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague.

Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, his private studies and the years following his bachelor's degree have been described as "the richest and most productive ever experienced by a scientist".

The next two years alone saw the development of theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation, at his home in Woolsthorpe.

In April 1667, Newton returned to the University of Cambridge, and in October he was elected as a fellow of Trinity.

Fellows were required to take holy orders and be ordained as Anglican priests, although this was not enforced in the Restoration years, and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient.

He made the commitment:

"I will either set Theology as the object of my studies and will take holy orders when the time prescribed by these statutes [7 years] arrives, or I will resign from the college."

Up until this point he had not thought much about religion and had twice signed his agreement to the Thirty-nine Articles, the basis of Church of England doctrine.

By 1675 the issue could not be avoided, and by then his unconventional views stood in the way.

His academic work impressed the Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow, who was anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential - he became master of Trinity College two years later.

In 1669, Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA.

Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and King Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument.

Thus, a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.

He was appointed at the age of 26.

The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge position included the responsibility of instructing geography.

In 1672, and again in 1681, Newton published a revised, corrected, and amended edition of the Geographia Generalis, a geography textbook first published in 1650 by the then-deceased Bernhardus Varenius.

Some of the figures added by Isaac Newton in his 1672 and 1681 editions of the Geographia Generalis.

In the Geographia Generalis, Varenius attempted to create a theoretical foundation linking scientific principles to classical concepts in geography, and considered geography to be a mix between science and pure mathematics applied to quantifying features of the Earth.

While it is unclear if Newton ever lectured in geography, the 1733 Dugdale and Shaw English translation of the book stated Newton published the book to be read by students while he lectured on the subject.

The Geographia Generalis is viewed by some as the dividing line between ancient and modern traditions in the history of geography, and Newton's involvement in the subsequent editions is thought to be a large part of the reason for this enduring legacy.

Newton is depicted as a "Divine Geometer" - William Blake (1795)

Religious Views

Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity, with historian Stephen Snobelen labelling him a heretic.

By 1672, he had started to record his theological researches in notebooks, which he showed to no one and which have only been available for public examination since 1972.

Over half of what Newton wrote concerned theology and alchemy, and most has never been printed.

His writings demonstrate an extensive knowledge of early Church writings and show that in the conflict between Athanasius and Arius which defined the Creed, he took the side of Arius, the loser, who rejected the conventional view of the Trinity.

Newton "recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him."

He was especially interested in prophecy, but for him, "the great apostasy was trinitarianism."

Newton tried unsuccessfully to obtain one of the two fellowships that exempted the holder from the ordination requirement.

At the last moment in 1675 he received a dispensation from the government that excused him and all future holders of the Lucasian chair.

Worshipping Jesus Christ as God was, in Newton's eyes, idolatry, an act he believed to be the fundamental sin.

In 1999, Snobelen wrote:

"Isaac Newton was a heretic.

But ... he never made a public declaration of his private faith — which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical.

He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unraveling his personal beliefs."

Snobelen concludes that Newton was at least a Socinian sympathiser - he owned and had thoroughly read at least eight Socinian books - possibly an Arian and almost certainly an anti-trinitarian.

Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock.

He said:

"So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the Divine Power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun".

Along with his scientific fame, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy.

Newton wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John.

He placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at April 3, AD 33, which agrees with one traditionally accepted date.

Newton believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza.

The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason.

In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia:

"I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity."

He saw evidence of design in the system of the world:

"Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice."

But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities.

For this, Leibniz lampooned him:

"God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move.

He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion."

Newton's position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence.

A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace's work Celestial Mechanics had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits do not require periodic divine intervention.

The contrast between Laplace's mechanistic worldview and Newton's one is the most strident considering the famous answer which the French scientist gave Napoleon, who had criticised him for the absence of the Creator in the Mécanique céleste:

"Sire, j'ai pu me passer de cette hypothèse" - "Sir, I didn't need this hypothesis."

Scholars long debated whether Newton disputed the doctrine of the Trinity.

His first biographer, David Brewster, who compiled his manuscripts, interpreted Newton as questioning the veracity of some passages used to support the Trinity, but never denying the doctrine of the Trinity as such.

In the twentieth century, encrypted manuscripts written by Newton and bought by John Maynard Keynes (among others) were deciphered and it became known that Newton did indeed reject Trinitarianism.

Religious Thought

Newton and Robert Boyle's approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians.

The clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a "Natural Religion".

The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment "magical thinking", and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the universe.

Newton gave Boyle's ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them.

Personality

Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, Newton never married.

The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said:

"He was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments.”

There exists a widespread belief that Newton died a virgin, and writers as diverse as mathematician Charles Hutton, economist John Maynard Keynes, and physicist Carl Sagan have commented on it.

He had a close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, whom he met in London around 1689. Some of their correspondence has survived.

Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (February 16, 1664 – May 10, 1753) was a mathematician, natural philosopher, astronomer, inventor, and religious campaigner. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Fatio mostly grew up in the then-independent Republic of Geneva, of which he was a citizen, before spending much of his adult life in England and Holland.

Their relationship came to an abrupt and unexplained end in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown, which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke.

His note to the latter included the charge that Locke had endeavoured to "embroil" him with "woemen & by other means".

Newton appeared to be relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a later memoir:

"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 sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Nonetheless, he could be fiercely competitive and did on occasion hold grudges against his intellectual rivals, not abstaining from personal attacks when it suited him—a common trait found in many of his contemporaries.

In a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, for instance, he confessed:

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Some historians argued that this, written at a time when Newton and Hooke were disputing over optical discoveries, was an oblique attack on Hooke who was presumably short and hunchbacked, rather than (or in addition to) a statement of modesty.

On the other hand, the widely known proverb about standing on the shoulders of giants, found in 17th century poet George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum (1651) among others, had as its main point that "a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two", and so in effect place Newton himself rather than Hooke as the 'dwarf' who saw farther.

Death

Newton died in his sleep in London on March 20, 1727.

He was given a ceremonial funeral, attended by nobles, scientists, and philosophers, and was buried in Westminster Abbey among kings and queens.

Newton was the first scientist to be buried in the abbey.

Voltaire may have been present at his funeral.

A bachelor, he had divested much of his estate to relatives during his last years, and died intestate.

His papers went to John Conduitt and Catherine Barton.

Shortly after his death, a plaster death mask was moulded of Newton. It was used by Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack in making a sculpture of Newton.

It is now held by the Royal Society, who created a 3D scan of it in 2012.

Newton's hair was posthumously examined and found to contain mercury, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits.

Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life.

Death mask of Newton - Photographed in 1906.