Sir Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642 - March 20, 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician and astronomer. He played a vital role in the scientific revolution and established a legacy that would dominate the sciences for the next three centuries. In fact, the term “Newtonian” would be used by future generations to describe bodies of knowledge that owed their existence to his theories.
As a result of his extensive contributions, Sir Isaac Newton is regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. But what exactly did he discover?
For starters, his magnum opus – Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), which was first published in 1687, laid the foundations for classical mechanics. In it, he formulated his Three Laws of Motion, which were derived from Johann Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion and his own mathematical description of gravity. This paper became the basis for modern engineering and revolutionized scientific thinking.
The first law, known as the “law of inertia”, states that: “An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” The second law states that acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass – ergo, the greater the mass of the object, the greater the force required to accelerate it. The third and final law states that “for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction”.
He also formulated his law of Universal Gravitation in the Principia, which states that every point mass attracts every single other point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both point. According to his calculations, this force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The formula for this theory can be expressed as:
Newton would go on to use these principles to account for the trajectories of comets, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and other astrophysical phenomena. This effectively removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of the cosmos which argued that the Sun (not the Earth) was at the center of the planetary system. His work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles.
In terms of mathematics, he contributed to the study of power series, generalized the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed Newton’s method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves. He also shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.
These discoveries represented a huge leap forward for the fields of math, physics, and astronomy, allowing for calculations that more accurately modeled the behavior of the universe than ever before.
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