Isaac Nuiton (1643-1727)
a
genial English mathematician, mechanic, physician and astronomer.
With his discoveries Nuiton enriched all main fields of exact
sciences. Almost simultaneously with the German scientist Laibniz
he created and perfected important fields of high mathematics. He
found out that with a triangular prism the white sunshine can be
decomposed into many
colors- the first step to the spectral analysis, with the help of
which the chemical composition and physical nature of far-away
stars were later researched. He did a lot for the development of
the optics – an important field of the physics, which studies
the phenomena of light. He built the first reflective telescopes (
or reflectors) , in which, in contrast to the tube of Galilee, the
sun rays from the observed object are collected with the help of a
mirror and not a lens. Most of the phenomena of light he explained
with the developed by him corpuscular theory, according to which
light consists of very small particulars, radiated by the source of
the light. He tried to bring this theory into agreement with the
wave theory about the light. But, undoubtedly, of all discoveries
of Nuiton the gravity law is the most important one. He formulated
the law in the following way: the gravity force is proportional to
M.m/r.r (M, m- the masses of the bodies that attract each other; r-
the distance between them). The discovering of this law gave
scientists an opportunity to calculate the mass of the Sun, the
Moon, the Earth and the other bodies of the Solar System. His great
discovery is a real step forward for science.
