Sir Isaac Newton and His View of the Universe - Essay Example

Sir Isaac Newton acknowledged the pioneering work of the great thinkers before him which led to his discovery and formulation of the laws of physics, stating that “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

            Sir Isaac Newton is regarded as the greatest scientist to have ever lived and Keynes commented on him stating that, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magician.’ he was not only a physicist, astronomer, and mathematician but also an alchemist and theologian.  Sir Isaac Newton studied at Trinity College Cambridge where Aristotelian philosophy was the preferred mode of instruction, but Newton was more interested in the pioneering ideas of philosophers lying like Descartes, and the astronomer Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus.

            His landmark work ‘Principia” is a compendium on physics and contains the laws of motion that were to revolutionize physical theories.  In this pursuit of mechanics, i.e. gravity and its effect on the orbits of planets, he was guided by the work of Kepler’s third law, and his law of attraction was an elaboration of Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens's theory of centripetal acceleration of a body moving in a circle. He even consulted with his contemporaries like Edmund Halley on the problem of orbits suggesting an ellipse shape about which he wrote to the astronomer in “a curious treatise de motu.”(Westfall, Richard) Newton put the seal of justification on his concept of attraction, by acknowledging that the ancients had already known of the law of gravitation and for him, “they represented a deeper penetration into the Prisca Sapientia, possible only when the preliminary work has been accomplished through experience.” (J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’, pp. 137) Newton also gave an analytical account of the speed of sound in air which was based on Boyle’s law.

            Newton's three laws of motion represent a conscious diversion from Aristotle's physics, and are more universal in nature, capable of being applied to the motion of a planet as to the fall of a stone.  His theory of vortices moved away from that of Descartes’. (Ball 1908, p. 337)

The reflecting telescope built by Newton was a further exposition of the ideas of Scottish mathematician James Gregory, who in 1663 had proposed the design. Before this Hans Lippershey, a German lens - maker who lived in the early 17th century had already applied for a patent for an optical refracting telescope, while Galileo was looking at the heavens with his own telescope. Newton's device used one lens and one mirror which reduced the chromatic aberration. Newton's telescope was slightly different from Gregory's and could magnify objects up to 40 times.  Newton's experiments with light were built upon Aristotle and Kepler's theory that light and color were not directly related.  According to them, color was the result of white light getting stained with the color of the object.  Grimaldi, on the other hand, viewed light and color to be connected in some way and Newton performed his various experiments keeping these two theories as to the basis.  His work with prisms led to the theory, that white light is a mixture of different colors of light.

            Sir Isaac Newton's groundbreaking work in Math contained in the manuscript ‘De Analysis,’ showed his studies in calculus or what he called a “fluxional method.” the work which caused a controversy to break out between Leibniz and Newton when both claimed primary merit for the work, and later it was shown that Leibniz had created the work from its early stages to its final conclusion.

Sir Isaac Newton's fame rests primarily on his achievements in the field of mathematics and physics but his theological works were no less an achievement. Science and theology were combined in his work wherein he holds God directly responsible for gravity and these views of his are shaped by the Cambridge Platonist, like More and Cudworth, but he differed from them, in that he did not believe in an intermediary force. (J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’, pp. 11) Newton's work was inspired by the great thinkers and scientific minds which had lived before him but what cannot be denied is that he brought all this together into a cogent whole, and it is little wonder that Alexander Pope exclaimed “Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.”