Sir Isaac Newton

1642-1727

Christmas night, 1642 Hannah Newton gave birth to a baby boy with a comet overhead. Isaac was named that after his father, Isaac Newton Senior. But Newton Senior had not been able to see Isaac because he had died in mid October.

Isaac was born way before expected. He was extremely weak as a baby. The nurses needed some medication for little Isaac. They needed it from the house on the top of the hill. The nurses were so doubtful that Isaac would still be alive that they even stopped to take a rest on the wall. But poor little Isaac did survive. He survived so well he turned out to be one of the Greatest Scientists Ever!

Little Isaac was so weak as a little baby that he needed a little pillow to support his little head still at the year of 1. So you could say he was off to a bad start as a little baby. But no one would know that he would have one of the greatest minds of his time. No one thought Isaac would stay alive for 84 seconds. But not only that, he would live to be 84 years old when he finally died of natural causes. To live to 84 is pretty long time to live, but 84 back then when they didn't live as long was really old. He would later grow to invent many wonderful things, such as a branch of mathematics called "calculus." He also proved that white light contained the colors of the rainbow. Last and defiantly not least he discovered a thing called gravity!

Copernicus was a Polish monk who studied astronomy, mathematics and medicine. A little while after he died there was a book published of his on the movement of the planets. He stated that the planets all circled the sun. But this theory went against the teachings of a Greek scholar from the 4th century B.C. by the name of Aristotle. He thought the universe was made up of hallow spheres arranged around the Earth. People had been thinking that for about 1,500 years. It took a lot of guts to challenge something like that because people had been thinking that for so long.

Isaac was a teacher at the fine college of Cambridge. Isaac was not very popular there, though. Most of the kids there thought Isaac was crazy. Isaac would sometimes teach to an empty classroom because of those reasons. Even some mocked him.

One of the people to mock him was the great Robert Hooke. He was considered very smart for his time because he was part of the royal society of mathematics & science. One time Hooke entered Newton's classroom and told him that it was a brilliant idea but the math was all wrong. Hooke and Isaac didn't really like each other all that much. One time Isaac tried to tell his gravity theory to the royal society but Hooke tried to copy Newton's ideas. And then Hooke had the nerve to accuse Newton of copying himself. There was a contest for the first person to explain it in a way it could be understood. Newton won.

Newton never wanted to publish his work. That is because he was worried that people like Hooke would make fun of his work. He said he would only publish his work when he was on his death bed. He published before that though. His young helper talked him into it and Newton finally did. The book was called Princapelia Mathamatica.

 

 

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