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Mrs Newton died on Christmas Day 1642 in the well known town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.. We owe an eternal debt to her for staying on long enough to give birth to a tiny premature lump of flesh called Isaac. Isaac knew little of his father, who died when he was three, leaving him in the hands of his grandparents.
At school he was a strange boy, interested in constructing mechanical devices of his own design, such as kites, sundials, waterclocks and so on. He was curious about the world around him but showed no signs of unusual brightness. He seemed rather slow in his studies until well into his teens and apparently began to stretch himself only to beat the class bully who happened, strangely enough, to be first in studies as well.
In the late 1650's he was taken out of school to help on his mother's farm, where he was clealy the world's worst farmer. His uncle, a member of Trinity College detected the scholar in the young man (how come so much talent gets recognised only through personal contacts? Imagine how much talent in this world is lost!!) and urged that he be sent to Cambridge. So at the perfectly normal age of 18, Isaac became a freshman and a equally perfectly normal graduate five years later.
The plague hit London and he retired to his mum's farm to remain out of danger. There is little record of whether he tried to become a farmer again, but who cares - he had already worked out the binomial theorem and was also developing glimpses of what was later to become the calculus.
At his mother's farm, something greater happened. Whether it happened in reality or in some writer's (possibly Newton himself) imagination is open to question, but it is said that he saw an apple fall and, after deciding it was too good a fruit to waste, gobbled it up and forgot about it. But he didn't forget about the question he asked himself while his gastronomic juices engulfed the most famous apple in history: "Why did the damned thing fall? It could have hit me!"
So, just as you and I wonder how many computer systems will actually crash on January 1 2000, he began to wonder if the same force that pulled the apple downward could also bring the moon down to earth. That was certainly something worth thinking about. Kepler's thoughts had now, after fifty years, come to be accepted and Newton used them in his thoughts about the moon.
He began (for the simple reason that he was terrified) by calculating the speed the moon needed to remain in its orbit; he was 12% out for reasons which have never been explained satisfactorily to this day. (My reason: he didn't own a calculator) and temporarily abandoned this work. He worked on optics instead and his first published work was a brilliant summary of a series of brilliant experiments. His childhood fancy for making things had paid off! It won him considerable fame and he returned to Cambridge to become a maths lecturer, becoming a professor when the incumbent Dr Barrow magnanimously resigned in his favour. (I believe such selfless admiration still exists in maths depts today, especially when dealing with absolutely unique individuals like Paul Erdos and John Conway.)
The good thing about being a highly vaunted prof is that you don't have to give any lectures - Newton operated on the higly taxing schedule of eight mundane ones a year. He spent the rest of the year eating, sleeping, chatting with friends, watching soccer on the telly (sorry, ignore that), researching stuff and thinking in general.
He was elected to the Royal Society in 1672 - which is surprisingly late given what he had done by then - and promptly delivered a paper on his optical experiments. He thus incurred the jealous wrath of Robert Hooke and started a lifelong feud and laying the foundation for the truth of the saying "Friends come and go, enemies accumulate". Newton wasn't exactly a very mature guy and was petty and childish in his reaction to others, especially criticism. In 1673 he tried to quit the Royal Society because of Hooke's carping (he failed). He never married either - I'm not sure if that was because he didn't want to or because no woman was insane enough to live with him.
Newton and the German diplomat Liebnitz developed the calculus (glimpsed by Archimedes oh so many years ago) independently and at about the same time. It was an idea that was in the idea and certainly no-one stole it from the other. Newtno developed it because he needed it to prove his Theory of Universal Gravitation, to which he had now returned after 15 long years. In 1687, after 18 months of being urged on by Halley? , he published his "Principles of natural philosophy". In it he laid out the calculus as an exercise in axiomatics in the classic Greek style and followed on immediately with his famous three laws of motion and the law of universal (then) gravitation. Though his notation was clumsy and was later replaced by that of Leibnitz, this book is undoubtedly the greatest single scientific work of all time. Not that I care, it's all Greek to me.
Newton also developed a new form of telescope, spent endless hours on (unsuccessful) alchemy in an effort to produce genuine artificial gold and speculated in over half a million words in print on some of the more abstract passages in the Bible, becoming a convinced Unitarian in the process.
In 1687, he defended the rights of Cambridge University against the unpopular James II, quietly but effectively, and as a result was elected to parliament in 1689 after James had been bumped off the throne. Here is a modified verbatim transcript of the only speech he gave in parliament.
He stood.
The entire house fell silent.
The great man was about to speak.
He opened his mouth.
Everyone opened theirs in expectation.
"Excuse me, you lot, but would someone mind closing the window? There's a bit of a draft this side and my wig may fall off."
He sat down.
There is no record of what the general reaction was, or whether anyone actually closed the said window.
He suffered a mental breakdown in 1692 and was never quite the same, though he was still worth ten ordinary men (That's a dubious statement if there ever was one).
In 1699 he was appointedd Master of the Royal Mint, a job he threw himself into with considerable improvement to the country and hardship to counterfeiters. He still had energy when he came back home though - he once returned to find the problem of the brachistochrone waiting - he had supper, solved it, slept, sent it off the next morning and went to work.
In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society (after Hooke's death) and was elected each year thereafter until he kicked the bucket 24 years later.
Newton was respected in his lifetime as almost no other scientist before or after. He was buried in Westminster Abbey with the country's heroes, and the inscription on his tomb reads "Mortals! Rejoice at so great an ornament to the human race!"
Of Newton's words, the best known are the two quotes:
"If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants..." This is often taken to be an expression of his humility. Not so! This was in an open letter to Hooke, and the unsaid implication was "...and you my dear Hooke, have not."
And
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a little boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smooth pebble (does the fact that the Latin word for pebble is "calculi" have anything to do with this - or vice versa?), and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."
Alexander Pope's eulogy for him said:
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night
God said "Let Newton be!"
And all was light.
But is Newton as important as he once was? Yes, I think so. But his theories have been extended/damaged by Einstein, prompting someone to say
"But the devil shouting "Ho!'
Said "Let Einstein be!"
And restored the status quo."
