Isaac Newton

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(1642–1727)

An English physicist and mathematician; one of the greatest scientists of all time. His major work on gravitation, mechanics, optics, and the calculus, was accomplished within a few years in the mid-1660s (see Newton's law of gravity and Newton's laws of motion) but was not published formally until 1687 in the Principia and 1704 in Optiks. Newton was the first to differentiate clearly between spherical aberration and chromatic aberration. Curiously, he held the view that all substances possessed the same dispersive power and that it was therefore impossible to eliminate or suppress chromatic aberration in any optical system consisting of lenses. While this conclusion no doubt delayed the invention of the achromatic lens, it had the compensatory effect of encouraging the development of the reflecting telescope, since mirrors were known to be inherently free of chromatic aberration. Newton himself was among the first to devise successful methods for casting mirrors and polishing them to the correct form. He produced his first reflector in 1668—barely more than a toy, 16 cm (6 in.) long, with a mirror only 3.1 cm (just over an inch) in diameter.

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Isaac Newton

Library of Congress

[b. Woolsthorpe, England, December 25, 1642 (January 4, 1643, by Gregorian calendar), d. London, March 20, 1727]

Newton entered Cambridge University in 1661, but in 1665, Cambridge closed because of plague and Newton returned to the family farm for a year and a half. During this period in the country Newton first developed new methods in mathematics, starting with the binomial theorem, which deals with fractional powers of an algebraic expression, and continuing with a useful method for approximating solutions. By the end of 1665, he had developed the methods for finding slopes of curves that we call differential calculus. In the following year, he completed his invention of calculus with the method of finding areas of curved regions (the integral calculus). During the same period, Newton experimented with light and found that white light is a mixture of colors. He also began to think about gravity -- whether the same force that causes an apple to fall to Earth also affects the Moon.

Newton completed his studies at Cambridge and stayed as a professor of mathematics. Instead of publishing his work he circulated manuscripts to friends. He built the first reflecting telescope and in 1672 presented one to the Royal Society. The Royal Society elected him a fellow and he began to communicate some of his discoveries about optics to them. He was urged to publish his ideas on the motion of planets, and Newton's Principia of 1687 contained his laws of motion and gravity as well as such topics as artificial satellites.

In 1696 Newton left Cambridge and took charge of the British Mint in London. In 1703 he became president of the Royal Society, keeping that post for the rest of his life. The following year he wrote a full account of his study of light, called Opticks. Although Newton devoted a major portion of his time to alchemy, the predecessor of chemistry, he did not publish any results.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was an English scientist and mathematician. He made major contributions in mathematics and theoretical and experimental physics and achieved a remarkable synthesis of the work of his predecessors on the laws of motion, especially the law of universal gravitation.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in southwestern Lincolnshire. In his early years Lincolnshire was a battle-ground of the civil wars, in which the challenging of authority in government and religion was dividing England's population. Also of significance for his early development were circumstances within his family. He was born after the death of his father, and in his third year his mother married the rector of a neighboring parish, leaving Isaac at Woolsthorpe in the care of his grandmother.

After a rudimentary education in local schools, he was sent at the age of 12 to the King's School in Grantham, where he lived in the home of an apothecary named Clark. It was from Clark's stepdaughter that Newton's biographer William Stukeley learned many years later of the boy's interest in her father's chemical library and laboratory and of the windmill run by a live mouse, the floating lanterns, sundials, and other mechanical contrivances Newton built to amuse her. Although she married someone else and he never married, she was the one person for whom Newton seems to have had a romantic attachment.

At birth Newton was heir to the modest estate which, when he came of age, he was expected to manage. But during a trial period midway in his course at King's School, it became apparent that farming was not his métier. In 1661, at the age of 19, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There the questioning of long-accepted beliefs was beginning to be apparent in new attitudes toward man's environment, expressed in the attention given to mathematics and science.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1665, apparently without special distinction, Newton stayed on for his master's; but an epidemic of the plague caused the university to close. Newton was back at Woolsthorpe for 18 months in 1666 and 1667. During this brief period he performed the basic experiments and apparently did the fundamental thinking for all his subsequent work on gravitation and optics and developed for his own use his system of calculus. The story that the idea of universal gravitation was suggested to him by the falling of an apple seems to be authentic: Stukeley reports that he heard it from Newton himself.

Returning to Cambridge in 1667, Newton quickly completed the requirements for his master's degree and then entered upon a period of elaboration of the work begun at Woolsthorpe. His mathematics professor, Isaac Barrow, was the first to recognize Newton's unusual ability, and when, in 1669, Barrow resigned to devote himself to theology, he recommended Newton as his successor. Newton became Lucasian professor of mathematics at 27 and stayed at Trinity in that capacity for 27 years.

Experiments in Optics

Newton's main interest at the time of his appointment was optics, and for several years the lectures required of him by the professorship were devoted to this subject. In a letter of 1672 to the secretary of the Royal Society, he says that in 1666 he had bought a prism "to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours." He continues, "In order thereto having darkened the room and made a small hole in my window-shuts to let in a convenient quantity of the Suns light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall." He had been surprised to see the various colors appear on the wall in an oblong arrangement (the vertical being the greater dimension), "which according to the received laws of refraction should have been circular." Proceeding from this experiment through several stages to the "crucial" one, in which he had isolated a single ray and found it unchanging in color and refrangibility, he had drawn the revolutionary conclusion that "Light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays."

These experiments had grown out of Newton's interest in improving the effectiveness of telescopes, and his discoveries about the nature and composition of light had led him to believe that greater accuracy could not be achieved in instruments based on the refractive principle. He had turned, consequently, to suggestions for a reflecting telescope made by earlier investigators but never tested in an actual instrument. Being manually dexterous, he built several models in which the image was viewed in a concave mirror through an eyepiece in the side of the tube. In 1672 he sent one of these to the Royal Society.

Newton felt honored when the members were favorably impressed by the efficiency of his small reflecting telescope and when on the basis of it they elected him to their membership. But when this warm reception induced him to send the society a paper describing his experiments on light and his conclusions drawn from them, the results were almost disastrous for him and for posterity. The paper was published in the society's Philosophical Transactions, and the reactions of English and Continental scientists, led by Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens, ranged from skepticism to bitter opposition to conclusions which seemed to invalidate the prevalent wave theory of light.

At first Newton patiently answered objections with further explanations, but when these produced only more negative responses, he finally became irritated and vowed he would never publish again, even threatening to give up scientific investigation altogether. Several years later, and only through the tireless efforts of the astronomer Edmund Halley, Newton was persuaded to put together the results of his work on the laws of motion, which became the great Principia.

His Major Work

Newton's magnum opus, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, to give it its full title, was completed in 18 months - a prodigious accomplishment. It was first published in Latin in 1687, when Newton was 45. Its appearance established him as the leading scientist of his time, not only in England but in the entire Western world.

In the Principia Newton demonstrated for the first time that celestial bodies follow the laws of dynamics and, formulating the law of universal gravitation, gave mathematical solutions to most of the problems concerning motion which had engaged the attention of earlier and contemporary scientists. Book 1 treats the motion of bodies in purely mathematical terms. Book 2 deals with motion in resistant mediums, that is, in physical reality. In Book 3, Newton describes a cosmos based on the laws he has established. He demonstrates the use of these laws in determining the density of the earth, the masses of the sun and of planets having satellites, and the trajectory of a comet; and he explains the variations in the moon's motion, the precession of the equinoxes, the variation in gravitational acceleration with latitude, and the motion of the tides. What seems to have been an early version of book 3, published posthumously as The System of the World, contains Newton's calculation, with illustrative diagram, of the manner in which, according to the law of centripetal force, a projectile could be made to go into orbit around the earth.

In the years after Newton's election to the Royal Society, the thinking of his colleagues and of scholars generally had been developing along lines similar to those which his had taken, and they were more receptive to his explanations of the behavior of bodies moving according to the laws of motion than they had been to his theories about the nature of light. Yet the Principia presented a stumbling block: its extremely condensed mathematical form made it difficult for even the most acute minds to follow. Those who did understand it saw that it needed simplification and interpretation. As a result, in the 40 years from 1687 to Newton's death the Principia was the basis of numerous books and articles. These included a few peevish attacks, but by far the greater number were explanations and elaborations of what had subtly evolved in the minds of his contemporaries from "Mr. Newton's theories" to the "Newtonian philosophy."

London Years

The publication of the Principia was the climax of Newton's professional life. It was followed by a period of depression and lack of interest in scientific matters. He became interested in university politics and was elected a representative of the university in Parliament. Later he asked friends in London to help him obtain a government appointment. The result was that in 1696, at the age of 54, he left Cambridge to become warden and then master of the Mint. The position was intended to be something of a sinecure, but he took it just as seriously as he had his scientific pursuits and made changes in the English monetary system that were effective for 150 years.

Newton's London life lasted as long as his Lucasian professorship. During that time he received many honors, including the first knighthood conferred for scientific achievement and election to life presidency of the Royal Society. In 1704, when Huygens and Hooke were no longer living, he published the Opticks, mainly a compilation of earlier research, and subsequently revised it three times; he supervised the two revisions of the Principia; he engaged in the regrettable controversy with G. W. von Leibniz over the invention of the calculus; he carried on a correspondence with scientists all over Great Britain and Europe; he continued his study and investigation in various fields; and, until his very last years, he conscientiously performed his duties at the Mint.

His "Opticks"

In the interval between publication of the Principia in 1687 and the appearance of the Opticks in 1704, the trend was away from the use of Latin for all scholarly writing. The Opticks was written and originally published in English (a Latin translation appeared 2 years later) and was consequently accessible to a wide range of readers in England. The reputation which the Principia had established for its author of course prepared the way for acceptance of his second published work. Furthermore, its content and manner of presentation made the Opticks more approachable. It was essentially an account of experiments performed by Newton himself and his conclusions drawn from them, and it had greater appeal for the experimental temper of the educated public of the time than the more theoretical and mathematical Principia.

Of great interest for scientists generally were the queries with which Newton concluded the text of the Opticks - for example, "Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its rays?" These queries (16 in the first edition, subsequently increased to 31) constitute a unique expression of Newton's philosophy; posing them as negative questions made it possible for him to suggest ideas which he could not support by experimental evidence or mathematical proof but which gave stimulus and direction to further research for many generations of scientists. "Of the Species and Magnitude of Curvilinear Figures," two treatises included with the original edition of the Opticks, was the first purely mathematical work Newton had published.

Mathematical Works

Newton's mathematical genius had been stimulated in his early years at Cambridge by his work under Barrow, which included a thorough grounding in Greek mathematics as well as in the recent work of René Descartes and of John Wallis. During his undergraduate years Newton had discovered what is known as the binomial theorem; invention of the calculus had followed; mathematical questions had been treated at length in correspondence with scientists in England and abroad; and his contributions to optics and celestial mechanics could be said to be his mathematical formulation of their principles.

But it was not until the controversy over the discovery of the calculus that Newton published mathematical work as such. The controversy, begun in 1699, when Fatio de Duillier made the first accusation of plagiarism against Leibniz, continued sporadically for nearly 20 years, not completely subsiding even with Leibniz's death in 1716.

The inclusion of the two tracts in the first edition of the Opticks was certainly related to the controversy, then in progress, and the appearance of other tracts in 1707 and 1711 under the editorship of younger colleagues suggests Newton's release of this material under pressure from his supporters. These tracts were for the most part revisions of the results of early research long since incorporated in Newton's working equipment. In the second edition of the Principia, of 1713, the four "Regulae Philosophandi" and the four-page "Scholium Generale" added to book 3 were apparently also designed to answer critics on the Continent who were expressing their partisanship for Leibniz by attacking any statement of Newton's that could not be confirmed by mathematical proof; the "Scholium" is of special interest in that it gives an insight into Newton's way of thought which the more austere style of the main text precludes.

Other Writings and Research

Two other areas to which Newton devoted much attention were chronology and theology. A shortened form of his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms appeared without his consent in 1725, inducing him to prepare the longer work for publication; it did not actually appear until after his death. In it Newton attempted to correlate Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew history and mythology and for the first time made use of astronomical references in ancient texts to establish dates of historical events. In his Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, also posthumously published, his aim was to show that the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments had so far been fulfilled.

Another of Newton's continuing interests was the area in which alchemy was evolving into chemistry. His laboratory assistant during his years at Cambridge wrote of his chemical experiments as being a major occupation of these years, and Newton's manuscripts reflect the importance he attached to this phase of his research. His Mint papers show that he made use of chemical knowledge in connection with the metallic composition of the coinage. Among the vast body of his manuscripts are notes indicating that his Chronology and Prophecy and also his alchemical work were parts of a larger design that would embrace cosmology, history, and theology in a single synthesis.

The mass of Newton's papers, manuscripts, and correspondence which survives reveals a person with qualities of mind, physique, and personality extraordinarily favorable for the making of a great scientist: tremendous powers of concentration, ability to stand long periods of intense mental exertion, and objectivity uncomplicated by frivolous interests. The many portraits of Newton (he was painted by nearly all the leading artists of his time) range from the fashionable, somewhat idealized, treatment to a more convincing realism. All present the natural dignity, the serious mien, and the large searching eyes mentioned by his contemporaries.

When Newton came to maturity, circumstances were auspiciously combined to make possible a major change in men's ways of thought and endeavor. The uniqueness of Newton's achievement could be said to lie in his exploitation of these unusual circumstances. He alone among his gifted contemporaries fully recognized the implications of recent scientific discoveries. With these as a point of departure, he developed a unified mathematical interpretation of the cosmos, in the expounding of which he demonstrated method and direction for future elaboration. In shifting the emphasis from quality to quantity, from pursuit of answers to the question "Why?" to focus upon "What?" and "How?" he effectively prepared the way for the age of technology. He died on March 20, 1727.

Further Reading

Newton's writings are available in many editions, several of which contain scholarly introductions and notes of great value. Louis T. More, Isaac Newton (1934), is the major biography written in this century, but it lacks the benefit of recent scholarship. Two good newer accounts are Herbert D. Anthony, Sir Isaac Newton (1960), a short but comprehensive and interestingly presented biography, and Frank Manuel, Isaac Newton (1968), an illuminating psychological study of Newton.

A convenient biographical introduction in John David North's brief study, Isaac Newton (1968), which relates the highlights of Newton's life and work. A psychologically oriented essay on Newton is in Dunkwart A. Rustow, ed., Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership (1970). Among the older works, William Stukeley's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, for which he collected material during Newton's last years but which was not published until 1936, is an interesting compilation of anecdotes and observations. Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855; repr. 1965), is still a useful biographical source.

Useful evaluations of Newton's work include Edward N. da C. Andrade, Isaac Newton (1954), available in paperback; the chapter on Newton in James G. Crowther, Founders of British Science (1960); Arthur E. Bell, Newtonian Science (1961); and Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (1965).

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727). Newton was born near Grantham after his father's death, on Christmas Day. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661; during the plague year, 1665-6, the undergraduates were sent home, and he is supposed to have thought of the nature of light, differential calculus, and the theory of gravity. In 1669 he was appointed to the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, where he divided his time between mathematical sciences, alchemy, and biblical study. In 1672 his first paper went to the Royal Society, containing his ‘crucial experiment’ to prove that white light is a mixture of all the colours. Because he believed that refraction inevitably produced coloured fringes, he advocated reflecting telescopes, and made one. In 1684 Edmond Halley came to see him after discussing planetary orbits with Hooke and Christopher Wren, and found that Newton had worked out the laws of motion and of gravity. With Halley as midwife, Newton's Principia was published in 1687. It began by setting out the nature of space, time, and motion; then came the laws of mechanics, a proof that whirlpools of ether cannot explain the phenomena, and, finally, the demonstration that gravity and inertia fitted the facts. He represented the university in Parliament, and in 1696 was appointed warden (later master) of the mint in London, where he supervised recoinage. By the time of his death, he was regarded with awe, and came to stand as the symbol of enlightenment.

Newton, Isaac (1642-1727) British mathematician and physicist, and a principal source of the classical scientific view of the world. The man Hume called ‘the greatest and rarest that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species’ was born in Lincolnshire and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. His major mathematical discoveries are usually dated to between 1665 and 1666, when he was secluded in Lincolnshire, the university being closed because of the plague. In 1669 he became professor of mathematics. His great work, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, usually referred to as the Principia), was published in 1687. He supervised reform of the currency when in 1696 he was given the post of Warden of the Mint, (according to Voltaire, because the Treasurer, Lord Halifax, was enamoured of his niece).

Throughout his career, Newton engaged in scientific correspondence and controversy. The often-quoted remark, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants', occurs in a conciliatory letter to Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the secretary of the Royal Society, concerning priorities in making optical discoveries (wittingly or not, Newton was in fact echoing the remark of Bernard of Chartres in 1120: ‘we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants’). The dispute with Leibniz over the invention of the calculus is his best-known quarrel, and certainly the least edifying, with Newton himself appointing the committee of the Royal Society that judged the question of precedence, and then writing the report, the Commercium Epistolicum, awarding himself the victory. Although the father of the ‘age of reason’, Newton was himself interested in alchemy, prophecy, gnostic wisdom, and theology (his manuscripts include some 1,300,000 words on biblical subjects, as well as Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St John, 1733).

The philosophical influence of Principia was incalculable, and from Locke's Essay onwards philosophers recognized Newton's work as a new paradigm of scientific method, but without being entirely clear what different parts reason and observation play in the edifice. Although Newton ushered in so much of the scientific world view, in the general scholium at the end of Bk. iii of Principia he argues that ‘it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions’, and hence that his discoveries pointed to the operations of God, ‘to discourse of whom from phenomena does certainly belong to natural philosophy.’ Newton confesses that he has ‘not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena’: hypotheses non fingo (I do not make hypotheses). It was left to Hume to argue that the kind of thing Newton does, namely place the events of nature into lawlike orders and patterns, is the only kind of thing that scientific enquiry can ever do. See also action at a distance, field.

Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton – who is considered by many to be the father of modern science – was born on this date in 1642. A professor at Cambridge University, Newton returned to the family farm for nearly two years when the university closed due to an outbreak of plague. During that time at home, he did his greatest work, developing differential calculus, his theory about the nature of light and about gravity. Newton was the first scientist to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, December 25, 2005

Newton, Sir Isaac, 1642-1727, English mathematician and natural philosopher (physicist), who is considered by many the greatest scientist that ever lived.

Early Life and Work

Newton studied at Cambridge and was professor there from 1669 to 1701, succeeding his teacher Isaac Barrow as Lucasian professor of mathematics. His most important discoveries were made during the two-year period from 1664 to 1666, when the university was closed and he retired to his hometown of Woolsthorpe. At that time he discovered the law of universal gravitation, began to develop the calculus, and discovered that white light is composed of all the colors of the spectrum. These findings enabled him to make fundamental contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and theoretical and experimental physics.

The Principia

Newton summarized his discoveries in terrestrial and celestial mechanics in his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [mathematical principles of natural philosophy] (1687), one of the greatest milestones in the history of science. In it he showed how his principle of universal gravitation provided an explanation both of falling bodies on the earth and of the motions of planets, comets, and other bodies in the heavens. The first part of the Principia is devoted to dynamics and includes Newton's three famous laws of motion; the second part to fluid motion and other topics; and the third part to the system of the world, i.e., the unification of terrestrial and celestial mechanics under the principle of gravitation and the explanation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Although Newton used the calculus to discover his results, he explained them in the Principia by use of older geometric methods.

Later Work

Newton's discoveries in optics were presented in his Opticks (1704), in which he elaborated his theory that light is composed of corpuscles, or particles. His corpuscular theory dominated optics until the early 19th cent., when it was replaced by the wave theory of light. The two theories were combined in the modern quantum theory. Among his other accomplishments were his construction (1668) of a reflecting telescope and his anticipation of the calculus of variations, founded by Gottfried Leibniz and the Bernoullis. In later years Newton considered mathematics and physics a recreation and turned much of his energy toward alchemy, theology, and history, particularly problems of chronology.

Later Life

Newton was his university's representative in Parliament (1689-90, 1701-2) and was president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death. He was made warden of the mint in 1696 and master in 1699, being knighted in 1705 in recognition of his services at the mint as much as for his scientific accomplishments. Although Newton was known as an open and generous person, at various times in his life he became involved in quarrels and controversies. The most notable was his dispute with Leibniz over which of them had first invented calculus; today they are jointly ascribed the honor.

Bibliography

An eight-volume edition of Newton's mathematical papers (ed. by D. H. Whiteside et al., 1967-81) has been published. See biographies by R. S. Westfall (1980), G. E. Christianson (1984), and J. Gleick (2003); J. Herivel, The Background to Newton's Principia (1965); A. Koyré, Newtonian Studies (1965); I. B. Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia (1971) and The Newtonian Revolution (1983); M. S. Stayer, ed., Newton's Dream (1988).

Newton, Isaac (1642–1727), natural philosopher, lay theologian, and administrator. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 in the tiny Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe. Named after a father who died before his birth, Isaac at the age of three lost his widowed mother, Hannah, who left Woolsthorpe to marry an elderly clergyman. He would not live under the same roof as his mother until, after being widowed a second time, she returned with three additional children in 1653. Two years later, Newton was sent to the King's School in nearby Grantham. Although he received little instruction in mathematics, he benefited from a thorough preparation in the classics and the Bible. Described later by the daughter of the apothecary with whom he lodged at Grantham as "a sober, silent, thinking lad," he eventually emerged as the top-ranked student of his class. Nevertheless, Newton's mother took him from the grammar school at fifteen so he could begin to fulfill his duties as lord of Woolsthorpe manor. After Newton proved himself almost worthless as a farmer, Hannah reluctantly gave in to the admonishments of his schoolmaster and sent him back to the King's School to prepare for university. In June 1661, a year after the Restoration, Newton matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Cambridge Student, Fellow, and Professor

Having enrolled as a sizar, Newton was required to serve and wait on scholars of higher status. He still found ample time to devour the undergraduate curriculum, which focused on Plato and Aristotle and such traditional disciplines as logic, rhetoric, and chronology. But Newton was not long detained with the medieval curriculum; he was increasingly drawn to the thought of the new mechanical philosophy, adding, among others, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Robert Boyle to his academic fare. By the time he took his B.A. in the spring of 1665, he was poised to make his own contributions to the new philosophy. The plague that swept through Cambridge that summer brought academic life at the fenland university to a standstill. But for Newton, after returning home to Woolsthorpe, the pace of his intellectual journey only quickened. While at Woolsthorpe, Newton finished his development of calculus, thus providing a new and effective tool for mathematicians to work out problems relating to curves and rates of change. He also carried out refraction experiments with prisms that confirmed the heterogeneous nature of light. A second Newtonian icon also came from this period. As an elderly man, Newton recalled that on one summer evening at Woolsthorpe during the plague, he saw the falling apple that would provide a crucial clue to his understanding of universal gravitation. It was also around this time that Newton took up a serious interest in the secret arts of alchemy. He remained in the domestic sphere for almost two years, a period often referred to as Newton's anni mirabiles. Shortly after his return to Cambridge in the spring of 1667, he was made a fellow of Trinity College. In following year he received his M.A. In 1669 the twenty-six-year-old Newton was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, after Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), who recognized Newton's great talents in this discipline, resigned in the latter's favor. The same year, after acquiring two furnaces, some chemicals and the alchemical manual Theatrum Chemicum, he initiated his quest for the Philosophers' Stone.

Optics, Controversy, and Theology

It was not long before Newton's innovations came to the notice of the wider intellectual world. The Royal Society of London had learned that Newton had constructed the first working reflecting telescope. When Barrow brought a specially made copy of this telescope to a Society meeting in late 1671, it was an immediate sensation. Encouraged by this success, Newton sent a paper on his optical discoveries to the Society's secretary Henry Oldenburg (c. 1618–1677). This now-celebrated paper on colors graced the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1672. But Newton soon found himself embroiled in a controversy when the Royal Society's Robert Hooke made his skepticism known, and continental readers complained that they could not replicate the paper's experiments. Around the time that this controversy was driving him back into the safety of the cloisters of Cambridge, Newton commenced a more dangerous revolution.

As one of the requirements of his Trinity fellowship, Newton was obligated to take holy orders by 1675. This may help explain the sudden explosion of theological studies in the early 1670s. Whether or not the pending ordination deadline was a factor, Newton's thorough research of early church doctrine and history led him to conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity was not a part of the primitive Christian faith. As an anti-Trinitarian heretic, Newton could not become an Anglican clergyman in good faith. Expressing the reasons for this was out of the question, and he had resolved to resign his fellowship quietly when a special dispensation came in 1675 from Charles II permitting Lucasian Professors to retain their College fellowships without ordination. Newton thus continued on at Cambridge as a secret heretic.

Newton's most important theological discovery was that the Bible taught that only the Father was God in an absolute sense. Christ, although not "very God" in the Nicene formulation, was nevertheless central to Newton's eschatology and view of the atonement. Although a precise categorization of his beliefs would be artificial, it can be said that he arrived at a Christology similar to Arianism. Newton concluded that the Athanasian or homoousian party of the fourth century had corrupted the church by imposing on it the Trinity—a doctrine Newton believed to be post-biblical and inspired by Greek metaphysics. Denial of the Trinity was illegal in Newton's day and for a long time afterward. Thus, for more than half a century, he confined his heresy to the private sphere, while outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church. Newton's theological explorations were not limited to doctrine. Taking one of his leads from the Cambridge prophetic exegete Joseph Mede, Newton adopted a premillenarian eschatology, writing his first manuscript treatise on the Apocalypse in the 1670s. Even in his prophetic views, he differed from the mainstream. Although retaining the standard Protestant opinion that the "whore" of Revelation was the Roman Church, Newton added as the chief sin of the Catholics the introduction of the Trinitarian dogma, thus bringing his heresy and prophetic interpretation together.

The Principia

Newton devoted much of his fourth decade to studying biblical doctrine, taking notes on church history, analyzing the early creeds, studying the Book of Revelation, and carefully writing out the results of his research on enough manuscript sheets to fill several large books. Additionally, a large portion of this time was spent copying out alchemical recipes and working feverishly over his furnaces as he sought the secrets of chemical and metallic matter. He also fulfilled the duties of his mathematics professorship. Newton's penetrating mind was once again drawn to natural philosophy in earnest when, during the summer of 1684, Edmond Halley came to Cambridge to ask him if he could provide a mathematical explanation for the elliptical orbits of planets. This elicited from Newton later that year a short manuscript bearing the title De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (Concerning the motion of revolving bodies). But this was just the beginning. For close to two years, Newton refined and expanded the inchoate physics of De Motu. Important to this refinement was his and Halley's work on the comets of 1680 and 1682, which demonstrated both that comets move in close, albeit highly parabolic, orbits and that Descartes's system of fluid planetary vortices was untenable. Newton worked out his laws of motion and a theory of universal gravitation that dissolved the traditional distinction between celestial and terrestrial physics. The final result was published in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical principles of natural philosophy), its title an apt description of its contents. Although it was retained by some in France until the 1740s, Cartesian physics was immediately rendered obsolete.

Those few mathematicians who could understand this virtually impenetrable book recognized its revolutionary nature at once. Fewer still understood that its author was powerfully motivated by the Renaissance topos of the prisca sapientia and was convinced he was recovering knowledge lost by the ancients rather than discovering secrets that Nature had never before yielded to humanity. This helps explain why Newton hid much of his analysis behind a classical facade of geometry. Nor was there more than an oblique hint here and there of the work's theological substratum. Not only were Newton's influential notions of absolute space and time underpinned by his conceptions of God's omnipresence and eternal duration, but he believed the Principia contained within its pages an armory of testimonies to natural theology. As he wrote to Richard Bentley in late 1692, "When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beleife of a Deity & nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose."

With the Principia in print and beginning to draw praise and near worship for its contents, Newton redirected his attention to theology. In the late 1680s and early 1690s he produced a lengthy commentary on Revelation, an attack on Athanasius and his Theologiae Gentilis Origines Philosophicae, an exploration of the original religion of Noah and the roots of idolatry. Perhaps emboldened by the success of his work on mathematical physics, in 1690 he sent his friend John Locke a work of antitrinitarian textual criticism entitled "Two Notable Corruptions" for anonymous publication on the Continent and only suppressed the publication at the last moment. The post-Principia period also brought the commencement of Newton's public life, which was signaled by his public opposition in 1687 to the attempt of James II to force the University of Cambridge to grant a degree to a Catholic priest and his election as university M.P. in 1689, shortly after the Glorious Revolution. By the early 1690s, Newton was also looking for a way to move on from Cambridge.

London: the Mint and the Royal Society

Newton's opportunity came in 1696 with the wardenship of the Royal Mint in London. As warden, he was charged with bringing "coiners" to justice. Having already traced doctrinal corruption in church history, textual forgery in the Bible, and the corruption of natural philosophy, Newton exerted the same zeal and energy in the pursuit of counterfeiters. In 1699 he was promoted to the position of master. He retained this post for the rest of his life, demonstrating considerable talents as an administrator as he led the Mint efficiently through a recoinage.

More honors came his way. In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society, a position he also kept until his death. Once at the helm, Newton reinvigorated the stagnating experimental program at the Society. Queen Anne (ruled 1702–1714) knighted him at Cambridge in 1705. A year before, Newton had published his Opticks. Unlike his Principia, this work was written in English and contained a heavy experimental focus. The appended Queries, which grew in number in later editions, proposed questions about the nature of heat, light, and the ether, as well as the forces responsible for attraction and repulsion, thereby laying out a research agenda for many years to come. ALatin editionofthe Opticks was prepared by the Newtonian Samuel Clarke and published in 1706. His work on the calculus (fluxions) was edited by William Jones and appeared as De Analysi per Aequationes in 1711.

Newton's increasing fame and status, along with his further entrenchment in the British establishment, led to rising confidence and occasional displays of hubris. Although his portrait was first painted as late as 1689, in the early eighteenth century Newton sat for portraits with growing regularity. He also became entangled in a dispute over priority in the discovery of calculus with Leibniz, doing himself little honor in the process. He fired volleys at the philosophies of Leibniz and Descartes in the General Scholium he added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713. The theologically astute recognized in this same appendix an encoded attack on the Trinity. More apparent in this appendix was Newton's advocacy of the design argument, his espousal of induction in natural philosophy, and his attack on vain hypothesizing. Shortly after this, Clarke represented Newton's views in a literary debate with Leibniz on the nature of natural philosophy and providence.

Although he almost completely left alchemy behind when he departed Cambridge, Newton's theological studies continued unabated. His overall theological system, which included believers' baptism, mortalism, and a denial of a literal devil, finds close parallels in the thought of continental radical reforming movements such as the Anabaptists and the Polish Brethren. His religious ethos was similar to English Nonconformity. Spiritually, Newton also felt close to the primitive church, and his uncompromising monotheism reveals a strong Hebraic strain.

His millenarianism and commitment to a prophetic outlook shows the stamp of his puritan roots. As he grew older, he set the time of the end, which he believed would see the fall of the corrupt church, the preaching of the original Gospel, the return of the Jews to Israel, the Second Coming, andthe battle of Armageddon, further and further into the future. One rough date he setfortheseevents, andthefuture peaceful reign of the saints on earth, was 2060 C.E. As death neared, he labored to complete his work on chronology. When death came on 20 March 1727, Newton shocked his nephew-in-law John Conduitt by refusing the last sacrament of the Anglican Church. In this act, he finally broke with the corrupt church, within which he had so uneasily communed, and found his peace with God.

Legacies and Constructions

In stark contrast to the humble funeral of his father some eighty-five years before, Newton was given a state funeral, his body borne by nobles with great pageantry to the pantheon of British greatness, Westminster Abbey in London. A young Voltaire was among the mourners and was incredulous that a natural philosopher could be so honored. Within a few short years, Voltaire would make some of the first contributions to the Enlightenment conception of Newton as a secular saint of the Age of Reason.

Newton's literary remains helped fuel image-making on both sides of the English Channel. There appeared after his death the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), De Mundi Systemate (1728; published in English as System of the World in the same year), an English translation of the Principia (1729), the Cambridge optical lectures (1729), the fourth edition of the English Opticks (1730), the Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733), and the Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series (1736). To these works by the master were added a plethora of popular texts by Newton's disciples rendering Newton's philosophy easy for the masses.

Partly because Newton hid his alchemy and heretical theology from the prying eyes of the public and partly due to the remaking of Newton by Enlightenment apologists, most still know Newton primarily as a great, perhaps the greatest, scientist of his time. More than two and a half centuries after his death, with his private manuscripts available for scrutiny, scholars are revealing a mind that seemingly knew few limits, moving freely through the fields of mathematics, natural philosophy, alchemy, history, and theology in a career befitting a child of the seventeenth century.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton. Edited by H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. Rupert Hall, and Laura Tilling. 7 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1959–1977.

——. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall. New York and London, 1995.

——. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman with the assistance of Julia Budenz. Berkeley and London, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Cohen, I. Bernard, and George E. Smith. The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Dobbs, Betty Jo Tetter. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. Cambridge, U.K., 1991.

Fauvel, John, et al., eds. Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Works. Oxford, 1988.

Force, James E., and Richard H. Popkin, eds. Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence. Dordrecht and Boston, 1999.

Manuel, Frank. The Religion of Isaac Newton. Oxford, 1974.

Snobelen, Stephen D. "'God of Gods, and Lord of Lords': The Theology of Isaac Newton's General Scholium to the Principia." Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208.

Westfall, Richard H. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, U.K., 1980.

—STEPHEN D. SNOBELEN

Quotes:

"A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding."

"Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it."

"I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light."

"If I have made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent."

"The Christian ministry is the worst of all trades, but the best of all professions."

"I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

See more famous quotes by Sir Isaac Newton

An English scientist and mathematician of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Newton made major contributions to the understanding of motion, gravity, and light (see optics). He is said to have discovered the principle of gravity when he saw an apple fall to the ground at the same time that the moon was visible in the sky. He also invented calculus. (See Newton's laws of motion.)

See words rhyming with "Newtonian."

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