Sir Isaac Newton’s Life

Sir Isaac Newton, born December 25, 1642, Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. His Father died 3 months before his birth and his mother left him in the care of his grandmother whilst she went to live with her new husband. Newton attended school at King’s School, Grantham in Lincolnshire but later his mother pulled him out of school so he can become a farmer.

Soon after he was able to return to his studies and able to attend Trinity College, Cambridge England. He later developed the three laws of motion, the discovery of the color spectrum, also the discovery of calculus. When Isaac Newton was 23 he developed the theories of gravitation in 1666. He later presented the three laws of motion in the “Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis.” in 1686.

Newton speculated the idea of gravitation when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The first law of motion is “every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.” (NASA, Nancy Hall). This means that any object is not want to move unless there is an external force that will move it. This also goes the other way meaning that an object in motion wants to stay in motion. The second law of motion is “ The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.” (The Physics Classroom). This law means that the acceleration of an object depends on the force applied and the mass of the object. The equation the second law is F=ma or Force = Mass x Acceleration. And for Newton’s third law “For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.” What this law means is that if object A were to exert force on to object B, object B will exert the same amount of force on to object A but in the opposite direction. This is important because these laws of motions explain everything in our day to day life works like kicking a soccer ball or calculate where a ball is going to land.

In the 1660’s Newton began experimenting with color which lead to the discovery that blue, red and yellow are the primary colors of the color wheel. He used prisms that reflected sunlight to turn into every color in the spectrum. When studying at Cambridge Newton was sent home because of the plague. In his spare time he would work on what he would call The Method of Fluxions which is modern day calculus.