Sir Isaac Newton: Taking a Step Forward

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Recommended: Contribution of Isaac Newton to science

The day Galileo had slipped from our world Sir Isaac Newton had life breathed into him. Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, at Woolsthorpe. Before he was born his father died, so he was brought up with the scent and presence of his mother, Hannah. Despite this at the age of three his mother married someone else and abandoned him in the care of his grandmother, devastating him and rocking his foundation. He received the basic local education, or elementary, until he was twelve, then he proceeded to attend the King's School in Grantham. In 1661, at the age of nineteen, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and worked to obtain his Bachelors degree. He then decided to go work for his masters degree, the plague hit Europe in 1666 the University closed. The next eighteen months he spent learning in solitude at his manor. When the College reopens he quickly obtains his Masters. He later becomes a professor for this college for 27 years. During these times he brought to light optics, his discovery of calculus and gravitation. Having learned all this he contributed to the Enlightenment with his discoveries as well as influencing thinkers of the future.
An impressive feat Sir Isaac Newton accomplished was the evolution of optics. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed light to be a simple entity, but Newton thought otherwise through his studies and building telescopes. It was thought that, “The idea that visual perception involves a medium somehow relating the beheld to the beholder is as old as ancient Greece,” (Darrigol 117). Isaac Newton challenged old ideas after an experiment with a prism and how it refracted light, as he saw this happen in a telescope where he saw the rings of colors distorting the image. This lea...

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...one’s experiment. Even so, Newton grasped what many could not in his time, making him a great thinker and a revolutionary in the field of science.

Works Cited

Darrigol, Olivier. "The Analogy Between Light And Sound In The History Of Optics From The
Ancient Greeks To Isaac Newton. Part 1." Centaurus 52.2 (2010): 117-155. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 11 Apr. 2014.
Newton, Isaac, Andrew Motte, Florian Cajori, and R. T. Crawford. Sir Isaac Newton's
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World. Berkeley:
University of California, 1975. Print.
"Newton's Three Laws of Motion." Newton's Three Laws of Motion. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Apr.
2014.
Berlinski, David. Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World. New
York: Free, 2000. Print.
Edgar, Robert R. Civilizations past & Present. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2008. Print.

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