Issac Newton(Scientist) - Essay Example

When he was sixteen, his mother, who had become widowed once again, pulled her son from school in the hopes of turning him into a farmer. Newton detested farming, preferring to spend his time in the confines of his books. Fortunately, the master at the school that Newton attended convinced his mother to allow Newton to finish his education. He became the top-ranked student of his year, and in June 1661, he was admitted to Trinity College in Cambridge, where he studied advanced philosophy and the works of many renowned astronomers (Dolnick 18).

The courses that he took influenced not only the rest of his educational years, but his future career as well, making many contributions to mathematics and space sciences. In regard to his contributions to mathematics, Newton discovered the binomial theorem, as well as began to form a mathematical theory that would eventually become what it now known as infinitesimal calculus. Not too long after these discoveries and developments, the school that Newton attended closed down in an attempt to protect teachers and students from the Great Plague.

The private studies that he tended to at home showed more development than they had while Newton was physically attending school. During his independent studies, Newton further developed his calculus theories, as well as theories of optics and the law of gravitation. Newton published many books about his mathematical theories, but then decided to focus more on mathematics in regard to space. After his education, Newton lectured on optics, focusing primarily on the refraction of light, “demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light (Ball 324).

” It was also during this that Newton discovered that colored light does not change its properties, regardless of whether or not it was scattered or reflected, which became known as Newton’s theory of color. Wanting to test his theory, Newton built the first refracting telescope to physically display his theory of color. When Newton had penned out and taught all that he could about color and light, and after many successes with publishing and being acknowledged for his works, Newton turned back to his work on celestial mechanics.

He focused more specifically on the effect of gravity on the orbits of planets, referring to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Newton became even more involved in his work with space sciences at the appearance of a comet, which he used to prove his theory of universal gravitation. This law of universal gravitation reveals that “every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses (Brackenridge 36).” Between the universal gravitational law and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton was able to prove that the Moon has a gravitational attraction to the Earth, which he was then able to apply to the orbits of comets and other celestial objects.

Newton also made an impression in the ongoing argument of whether or not the universe was heliocentric (everything orbits around the Sun) or geocentric (the belief that everything orbits around the Earth). This argument had been one that was religiously heated, especially from within the Catholic Church, so a lot of the information in regard to the arguments were based