Sir Issac Newton Essay Research Paper Isaac

Sir Issac Newton Essay, Research Paper

Isaac Newton

Newton was born on the 25th December 1642 and died in 1727. He was born

In Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. His father was a farmer but he died

Three months before Newton was born. His mother remarried and Newton

spent his childhood with his grandmother. At school he showed great

skill in making model kites, sundials and windmills. In 1665 when he was

18 he went to study mathematics at Cambridge University. He continued

his studies at home when the University closed because of the plague.

The Reflecting Telescope

Because Newton was working with light in 1668 he made the first

reflecting telescope. The light was collected and reflected from a

curved mirror instead of being refracted through a lens. It was far

superior from the refracting telescopes at that time because it

reflected all the light in the same way. It did not produce colour

fringing or blurring which occurred in the early refracting telescopes.

The Nature of Light

Newton discovered the nature of light when he darkened his room and

“made a small hole in my shuts to let in a convenient quantity of the

sun’s light.” He passed this beam of sunlight through a prism. When the

light came out of the prism is was not white but was of seven different

colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet. The

spreading into rays was called DISPERSION by Newton and he called the

different coloured rays the SPECTRUM. He learnt that when the light rays

were passed again through a prism the rays turned back into white light.

If only one ray was passed through the prism it would come out the same

colour as it went in. Newton concluded that white light was made up of

seven different coloured rays. The rays were dispersed through the prism

because the rays were reflected at different angles.

Newton wondered whether the different colours of the spectrum travelled

at different speeds. He wrote to Flamstead to ask if when he observed an

eclipse whether the colour changed all at once of at different times.

Flamstead wrote back to him to say that the colours changed all at once.

The Calculus

Newton invented the Calculus branch of mathematics around 1669. He did

not publish his ideas until around 1704, 35 years later. This branch of

mathematics is divided into two parts:

Differential Calculus

Integral Calculus

Differential Calculus

Differential Calculus deals with the rates things change at. When a car

moves off from a halt the distance changes slowly at first. When the

speed increases the distance changes quicker. As shown in the graph