Isaac Newton's life can be divided into three quite distinct periods. The first is his boyhood days from 1643 up to his appointment to a chair in 1669. The second period from 1669 to 1687 was the highly productive period in which he was the Caucasian professor at Cambridge. The third period (nearly as long as the other two combined) saw Newton as a highly paid government official in London, with little further interest in mathematical research.
Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Goldthorpe near Grant ham in Lincolnshire. Although by the calendar in use at the time of his birth he was born on Christmas Day 1642, we give the date. Of 4 January 1643 in this biography. Which is the "corrected" Gregorian calendar date, bringing it into line with our present calendar. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in England until 1752.) Isaac Newton came from a family of farmers but never knew his father, also named Isaac Newton, who died in October 1642, three months before his son was born. Although Isaac's father owned property and animals. Which made him quite a wealthy man, he was completely uneducated and could not sign his own name.
However. He seems to have shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'. His mother, by now a lady of reasonable wealth and property, thought that her eldest son was the right person to manage her affairs and her estate. Isaac was taken away from school but soon showed that he had no talent, or interest, in managing an estate.
Newton studied math, physics and astronomy at Cambridge University. He became Professor of Mathematics and worked at the university for over 30 years. Newton was also interested in alchemy – he spent a lot of time trying to discover how to change things like lead and mercury into gold.
► One of the fundamental problems which Newton explored was – ‘How do various colors arise?’. His experiments revealed that color arose from reflection and transmission of light. And primarily from selective absorption of light by materials. From observation of the different angles at which individual wavelengths of light dispersed from a prism, he concluded that color arises from a fundamental property of light itself, though revealed only through interaction with matter.
► He predicted the dispersion and aberration of light in telescopes and suggested remedies to correct the same. In the process, he invented a new kind of telescope. Newton promoted the concept of a universal ether through which light propagates. This was later proved wrong by experimental tests of the special theory of relativity
"Newton showed white light to be made of component colors."
► He also put forward the theory that light is made up of corpuscles, which was later proved wrong by Huygens’ wave theory of light. However, the idea got a sort of new life when Einstein introduced light to be made of photons. Which are energy corpuscles. However, photons. It is far different from the corpuscles that Newton imagined. Nevertheless, he provided the impetus to new lines of thought
Newton’s Law of Cooling
Among his other stellar discoveries, Newton also came up with an empirical theory explaining the rate at which your hot cup of coffee cools. The law discovered by him states that the rate of cooling in a body is directly proportional to the temperature difference between the body and its surroundings. Mathematically, it can be stated as follows:
DT/dt = – K (T – Ts)
where, T is temperature of the body, K is a constant, DT/dt is a time derivative representing change of temperature and Ts is the temperature of surroundings. The derivative is ‘negative’ as the body is cooling.
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