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When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets and published Principia, a milestone in the history of science, which set forth his famous laws of motion and universal gravitation. Newton’s long-time research on calculus, finally made public in 1704, triggered a heated controversy as European scientists accused him of plagiarizing the work of the German scientist Gottfried Leibniz.
In this third volume in the acclaimed Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series, bestselling author Peter Ackroyd provides an engaging portrait of Isaac Newton, illuminating what we think we know about him and describing his seminal contributions to science and mathematics.
A man of wide and eclectic interests, Newton blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his determination to interpret a modern universe as a mathematical universe.
By brining vividly to life a somewhat puritanical man whose desire to experiment and explore bordered on the obsessive, Peter Ackroyd demonstrates the unique brilliance of Newton’s perceptions, which changed our understanding of the world.
Sir Isaac Newton is one of the few scientists, I think, who has an afterlife in the public imagination. Even schoolchildren have a mental image of him sitting under an apple tree about to be bonked. The secretive Newton will never have a warm haze around him like that of playful, wispy-haired Einstein sticking out his tongue, but just as people can trot out Einstein's E=mc2, so they pull out Newton's laws -- e.g., "to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."
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Ray Carnell
reviewed Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives on March 20, 2013
Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives
Sir Isaac Newton died on this day in 1727. He was born on Christmas day 1642, the posthumous child of an illiterate yeoman farmer. His mother remarried and left him to be raised by his grandmother. At a local school, he distinguished himself by his inventiveness at creating toys and gadgets; it quickly became apparent he had no aptitude for farming. At his teacher's urging, he was sent to Cambridge, where he so excelled in math that he was appointed a professor at the age of 26. His full genius bloomed during an involuntary vacation forced by the Great Plague of 1665. He experimented with prisms to uncover the nature of light; he worked up the essentials of calculus; and he laid the foundations for a theory of gravitation. Upon his return to the academic world, he began to publish some of what he had learned. Ackroyd points out that Newton took his time to make his mark; indeed, he maintained a secretiveness regarding his work for much of his life. He researched and speculated on alchemy and theology, which thoughts he was probably just as wise not to commit to publication. (In fact, had his religious convictions become known, he would undoubtedly have had to resign his academic post.) He was contentious regarding his scientific opinions resulting in a number of professional feuds, with Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed and Gottfried Leibnitz in particular, that are perhaps the most regrettable blemish on his reputation. Peter Ackroyd provides the historical context to clearly delineate Newton's salient character traits and make his greatest accomplishments clear to the modern reader. This is a good introduction to Newton in a compact biography of the great English scientist, the third in Ackroyd's Brief Lives series.
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Add Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives, When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets a, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives, When Newton was not yet twenty-five years old, he formulated calculus, hit upon the idea of gravity, and discovered that white light was made up of all the colors of the spectrum. By 1678, Newton designed a telescope to study the movement of the planets a, Newton: Ackroyd's Brief Lives to your collection on WonderClub |
