The World Changed Here......

In a quiet Lincolnshire hamlet on Christmas Day 1642 Sir Isaac Newton was born. 

Born sickly and premature, two servant women were hastened from the household to collect urgently needed items for the new child, but they sat down on a stile and said there was no need to hurry for they were sure the boy would have died before their return. But baby Isaac beat the odds and lived on for 84 more years.

An English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment that followed. 

His mother described him as different from other boys saying "he could not bring himself to concentrate on the rural affairs of the farm - set to watch the cattle, he would curl up under a tree with a book."

"I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".

At the age of 12 he attended The King's School in Grantham, where he was taught Latin, Ancient Greek, and mathematics. He was unmoved by literature and poetry but loved inventing, and made an elaborate system of sundials which was accurate to the minute. His mother had hoped he would run the family farm, but his uncle and his headmaster realised that he was destined for an intellectual life. Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 1661. Soon after he obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August 1665 the university had to close temporarily as a precaution against the spreading outbreak of the Great Plague. 

Newton returned home to Woolsthorpe Manor to escape the plague, and whilst there he wrote "I was in the prime of my age for invention." He tried to solve the system of the universe whilst musing in the orchard about the power of gravity causing an apple to fall down from a tree to the ground. This could not be limited to a certain distance from the earth, but he reasoned that the same power must extend far further than was commonly thought. Why not as high as the moon? This led him to consider what influenced the moon's motion.

This is the Flower of Kent apple tree behind the inspiration for Newton's theory of gravity. Dendrochronology done by the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at the University of Oxford, confirms this tree to be over 400 years old, having regrown from roots surviving from a tree which was blown over by a storm in 1816.

Paper was expensive, but as the walls of the manor would have been lime washed regularly, using his bedroom walls as a sketchpad as he explored the world around him made sense. 

The coloured lights from a prism on his bedroom wall has been achieved using Newton's very own original prism. It was recently discovered in a box at Trinity College, Cambridge and given to Woolsthorpe Manor. There is a YouTube explanation showing Newton's prism experiment here.

 

Newton became Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an MP, Master of the Mint, and President of the Royal Society. He was the author of Principia, one of the most important books in the history of science, was fascinated by calculus, the planets and the 'laws of motion', and, in keeping with his age, blurred the borders between natural philosophy and speculation: he was as passionate about astrology as astronomy and dabbled in alchemy, while his religious faith was never undermined by his scientific reasoning.