essay on isaac newton in 300 words

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Essay on Isaac Newton in 100 words to 300 words

Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a towering figure in the scientific revolution. His groundbreaking work in physics, mathematics, and optics revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. From formulating the laws of motion and universal gravitation to his discoveries in optics and the invention of calculus, Newton’s contributions shaped the foundations of modern science. His rigorous approach to scientific inquiry and his profound insights continue to inspire and influence scientists and researchers worldwide. Isaac Newton’s legacy as one of the greatest scientific minds in history remains an enduring testament to the power of human curiosity and intellectual pursuit.

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Essay on Isaac Newton

Essay on Isaac Newton in 100 words

Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists in history, was born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England. He made groundbreaking discoveries in physics and mathematics, laying the foundation for modern scientific understanding. Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, revolutionizing our understanding of how objects move and interact. His work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” published in 1687, remains a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. Newton’s contributions to optics, calculus, and the study of light have had a profound impact on various scientific disciplines. His genius and discoveries continue to shape our understanding of the natural world.

Essay on Isaac Newton in 150 words

Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a brilliant mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. His groundbreaking contributions to science laid the foundation for modern physics and established him as one of the greatest scientists in history.

Newton’s most notable work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” published in 1687, introduced his laws of motion and universal gravitation. These laws explained the motion of objects and the force that holds them together. Newton’s discoveries revolutionized the scientific understanding of the physical world.

In addition to his work in physics, Newton made significant contributions to mathematics and optics. He developed calculus, a mathematical tool used to solve complex problems, and conducted experiments on light, leading to his theory of color and the invention of the reflecting telescope.

Newton’s scientific achievements earned him numerous accolades and recognition, including the presidency of the Royal Society. His ideas continue to be fundamental to modern scientific inquiry and are taught in classrooms worldwide. Newton’s profound contributions to science have shaped our understanding of the universe and continue to inspire generations of scientists and researchers.

Essay on Isaac Newton in 200 words

Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a prominent figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. He is best known for his groundbreaking contributions to physics and mathematics, which have shaped the foundation of modern science.

Newton’s most famous work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” published in 1687, presented his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. These laws explained the motion of objects and the force of gravity that governs their interactions. They provided a unified framework for understanding the behavior of physical objects, from falling apples to celestial bodies.

In addition to his laws of motion, Newton also made significant contributions to optics. He conducted experiments on the nature of light and discovered that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors. This led to the development of the theory of color and the invention of the reflecting telescope.

Newton’s mathematical achievements were equally remarkable. He independently developed calculus, a mathematical tool used to study rates of change and solve complex problems. His work in calculus laid the foundation for the branch of mathematics that is widely used in physics and engineering today.

Newton’s ideas and discoveries revolutionized the scientific world and had a profound impact on subsequent generations of scientists. His rigorous approach to experimentation and mathematical analysis set the standard for scientific inquiry. Newton’s theories and laws remain essential in the study of physics and continue to be taught and applied in classrooms worldwide.

Isaac Newton’s contributions to science earned him widespread acclaim and recognition during his lifetime, including being elected President of the Royal Society. His legacy as one of the greatest scientific minds in history endures, and his work continues to inspire and shape our understanding of the physical world.

Essay on Isaac Newton in 250 words

Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a towering figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. His profound contributions to physics, mathematics, and optics laid the foundation for modern science and transformed our understanding of the natural world.

Newton’s most renowned work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” published in 1687, presented his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. These laws revolutionized physics by explaining the fundamental principles governing the motion of objects and the force that attracts them to one another. Newton’s laws of motion provided a mathematical framework to describe the behavior of objects on Earth and in the cosmos.

In addition to his laws of motion, Newton made significant strides in the field of optics. Through meticulous experiments, he demonstrated that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors and developed the theory of color. His work laid the foundation for understanding the nature of light and led to advancements in fields such as optics and photography.

Newton’s mathematical achievements were equally remarkable. He independently developed calculus, a mathematical tool used to study rates of change and solve complex problems. His invention of calculus provided a powerful methodology for analyzing motion, change, and intricate mathematical concepts. Today, calculus is a fundamental component of many scientific and engineering disciplines.

Furthermore, Newton’s insights into celestial mechanics and the law of universal gravitation expanded our understanding of the universe. His calculations and explanations of planetary motion formed the basis for predicting and understanding the movements of celestial bodies.

Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work continues to shape the way we comprehend the physical world. His scientific rigor, intellectual curiosity, and dedication to empirical evidence set the stage for future scientific advancements. Newton’s ideas and discoveries have had a profound and lasting impact on various scientific disciplines, making him one of the most influential scientists in history.

Essay on Isaac Newton in 300 words

Isaac Newton, born on December 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a pioneering figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century. His contributions to physics, mathematics, and optics transformed our understanding of the natural world and laid the foundation for modern science.

Newton’s most significant work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” published in 1687, revolutionized the field of physics. In this groundbreaking book, he formulated his three laws of motion, which describe how objects move and interact with one another. Newton’s laws of motion provided a universal framework for understanding the mechanics of physical objects, from everyday phenomena to the celestial bodies in the heavens. Furthermore, Newton’s law of universal gravitation explained the force that attracts objects to one another based on their mass and distance.

In addition to his contributions to physics, Newton made remarkable advancements in the field of optics. Through a series of experiments, he demonstrated that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors and that prisms can separate light into its constituent colors. Newton’s pioneering work in optics laid the foundation for our understanding of the nature of light and led to significant developments in fields such as photography and spectroscopy.

Newton’s mathematical accomplishments were equally profound. He independently developed calculus, a branch of mathematics that deals with rates of change and mathematical modeling. Calculus provided powerful tools for solving complex problems and became essential in physics and engineering. Newton’s work in calculus was revolutionary and laid the groundwork for many future mathematical developments.

Furthermore, Newton made significant contributions to the field of astronomy. He formulated the laws of planetary motion, which explained the movement of celestial bodies in the solar system. His calculations and explanations of planetary motion brought new insights into the structure and dynamics of the universe.

Isaac Newton’s genius and pioneering spirit continue to inspire scientists and researchers today. His systematic approach to scientific inquiry, his dedication to empirical evidence, and his ability to unify various fields of study have had a profound impact on our understanding of the natural world. Newton’s discoveries and theories remain fundamental to modern science, making him one of the most influential scientists in history.

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Essay On Isaac Newton

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Topic: Education , Science , Students , Literature , Innovation , Violence , World , Isaac Newton

Published: 11/15/2019

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Isaac Newton was an English scientist who not only studied but made stupendous discoveries in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. However, he is also a well-known astronomer, natural philosopher and theologian. Sir Isaac Newton was born in three months after the death of his father and when his mother remarried he moved to his grandparents. These were the people that raised him from his youth. On reaching the proper age, Newton attended Cambridge University where he stayed until the plague hit. Even though he called his age of the time of the plague "the prime of my age for invention", no natural disaster was able to stop him from his scientific studies.

It was after the university that he began his discoveries connected with optics. His invention of the reflecting telescope in 1668 finally drew the attention of other scientists. Isaac Newton conducted a number of experiments concerning light and its composition. That’s to this hard work he was able to put forward a number of discoveries. He proved that light can be measured by patterns. Moreover, he proved that white light consists of different colored rays which correspond to the colors of the rainbow. Each ray can be defined by the angle through which it is reflected. All this and much more was published in his book “Optics” in 1704.

Isaac Newton is mostly known for what is now something of a legend, a story told to kids. His discovery of the laws of gravity is what he is best known for among people who do not tie their lives with science. The story goes like this. Isaac was allegedly sitting under a tree. All of a sudden an apple fell on his head. A bit stumped at first, our great scientist started to think and analyze. By measuring the force needed to hold the moon in orbit he inevitably understood that there must be some other force, one which has not been studied before. And so there is – the force of gravity.

Isaac Newton was not only a scientist but also a powerful public figure. He was elected member of the parliament for the University of Cambridge to oppose the Kind James II’s attempts to make universities catholic. It should be noted that he also held the post of a Mint and was even knighted. This was a prominent figure in the scientific world and in the public world of his time. His work will not be forgotten.

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• Scientific Methods
• Famous Physicists
• Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Apart from discovering the cause of the fall of an apple from a tree, that is, the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the most brilliant and greatest physicists of all time. He shaped dramatic and surprising discoveries in the laws of physics that we believe our universe obeys, and hence it changed the way we appreciate and relate to the world around us.

Table of Contents

About sir isaac newton, sir isaac newton’s education, awards and achievements, some achievements of isaac newton in brief.

• Universal Law of Gravitation

Optics and Light

Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in a small village of England called Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. He was an English physicist and mathematician, and one of the important thinkers in the Scientific Revolution.

He discovered the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further laid the foundation of modern physical optics. His famous three laws of Motion in mechanics and the formulation of the laws of gravitation completely changed the track of physics across the globe. He was the originator of calculus in mathematics. A scientist like him is considered an excellent gift by nature to the world of physics.

Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem. He was bestowed with his B.A. degree in the same year.

Isaac Newton held numerous positions throughout his life. In 1671, he was invited to join the Royal Society of London after developing a new and enhanced version of the reflecting telescope.

He was later elected President of the Royal Society (1703). Sir Isaac Newton ran for a seat in Parliament in 1689. He won the election and became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He was also appointed as a Warden of the Mint in 1969. Due to his exemplary work and dedication to the mint, he was chosen Master of the Mint in 1700. After being knighted in 1705, he was known as “Sir Isaac Newton.”

His mind was ablaze with original ideas. He made significant progress in three distinct fields – with some of the most profound discoveries in:

• Calculus, the mathematics of change, which is vital to our understanding of the world around us
• Optics and the behaviour of light
• He also built the first working reflecting telescope
• He showed that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are exceptional cases of Newton’s universal gravitation.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Contribution in Calculus

Sir Isaac Newton was the first individual to develop calculus. Modern physics and physical chemistry are almost impossible without calculus, as it is the mathematics of change.

The idea of differentiating calculus into differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equations came from Newton’s fertile mind. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.

Law of Universal Gravitation

The famous apple that he saw falling from a tree led him to discover the force of gravitation and its laws. Ultimately, he realised that the pressure causing the apple’s fall is responsible for the moon to orbit the earth, as well as comets and other planets to revolve around the sun. The force can be felt throughout the universe. Hence, Newton called it the Universal Law of Gravitation .

Newton discovered the equation that allows us to compute the force of gravity between two objects.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

• First law of Motion
• Second Law of Motion
• Third law of Motion

Watch the video and learn about the history of the concept of Gravitation

Sir Isaac Newton also accomplished himself in experimental methods and working with equipment. He built the world’s first reflecting telescope . This telescope focuses all the light from a curved mirror. Here are some advantages of reflecting telescopes from optics and light –

• They are inexpensive to make.
• They are easier to make in large sizes, gathering lighter, allowing advanced magnification.
• They don’t suffer focusing issues linked with lenses called chromatic aberration.

Isaac Newton also proved that white light is not a simple phenomenon with the help of a glass prism. He confirmed that it is made up of all of the colours of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.

Watch the video and solve complete NCERT exercise questions in the chapter Gravitation

Frequently Asked Questions

How did newton discover gravity.

Seeing an apple fall from the tree made him think about the forces of nature.

What is Calculus in Mathematics?

Calculus is the study of differentiation and integration. Calculus explains the changes in values, on a small and large scale, related to any function.

Define Reflecting Telescope.

It’s a telescope invented by Newton that uses mirrors to collect and focus the light towards the eyepiece.

Name all the Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.

Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are:

• The Law of Ellipses
• The Law of Equal Areas
• The Law of Harmonies

Who discovered Gravity?

Watch the full summary of the chapter gravitation class 9.

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Essay on Isaac Newton in 100 Words

Sir Isaac Newton, a brilliant scientist and mathematician, is one of history’s most influential figures. His groundbreaking discoveries in physics and mathematics continue to shape our understanding of the world.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

Newton formulated the laws of motion, which describe how objects move. His first law states that objects at rest stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. These laws revolutionized physics.

According to physicist Dr. Sarah Turner, Newton’s laws are fundamental in understanding the behavior of everything, from falling apples to spacecraft.

Universal Law of Gravitation

Newton’s law of universal gravitation explains why objects are attracted to each other. It states that every mass attracts every other mass with a force. This law helped explain planetary motion and is still used in space exploration.

Astronomer Dr. Robert Adams notes that Newton’s law of gravitation is the foundation of modern astronomy and our ability to predict celestial movements.

Conclusion of Essay on Isaac Newton in 100 Words

In conclusion, Sir Isaac Newton’s contributions to science and mathematics are immeasurable. His laws of motion and universal gravitation transformed our understanding of the physical world and continue to inspire scientists today. Newton’s genius and legacy remain a testament to the power of human curiosity and exploration.

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Newton, The Last Magician

The great man of science had more than a passing interest in alchemy..

Sir Isaac Newton, by Samuel Freeman, (1773–1857)

British Library / Art Resource, NY

Precisely at 1 p.m., just after luncheon on July 13, 1936, bidding opened on a remarkable lot at Sotheby’s auction house in London: a metal chest full of Isaac Newton’s private, hand-written papers and lab books, some almost three hundred years old, most never published.

When Cambridge University, Newton’s alma mater, had acquired the trove in 1872, a team of scholars had dedicated sixteen years to cataloging the contents. This was Newton, after all, and they were hungry for any insight into how he’d developed his theories of motion, gravity, light, and color—work that defines the very Newtonian universe we inhabit.

Strangely, after riffling through and picking out select papers, Cambridge returned virtually the entire bundle to the owner, the Earl of Portsmouth. Soon forgotten, the chest barely survived a house fire in 1891, and by 1936 one of the Earl’s descendents was selling it to make some quick cash. Sotheby’s itself barely publicized the sale—it was easily overshadowed that season by a spectacular, £140,000 auction of Rubens and Rembrandt paintings through rival house Christie’s. As the gavel fell for the last time at Sotheby’s on July 14, the bulk of Newton’s life’s work had been split up among three dozen book buyers for a pitiful £9,000.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, a Newton admirer, was one of those three dozen, though he’d heard about the auction too late to buy much. Disturbed by the “impiety” of the transactions, he began acquiring more of the papers piecemeal. In many cases, he had to play the slick antiquarian, swapping Newton papers with collectors, trying to out-connive them. Keynes later remembered, with a touch of Bloomsbury snobbery, “I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them. . . . The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America.”

Keynes sought papers on any topic at first, but eventually concentrated on one niche—Newton’s alchemy. Few people knew the father of modern science had dabbled in alchemy; but the more Keynes collected and the more he “brood[ed] over these queer collections,” the clearer it became that alchemy wasn’t a niche to Newton at all. It was, in many ways, Newton’s life work—more vital to him than physics or mathematics ever was. This Newton “was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes concluded. “He was the last of the magicians.”

Keynes’s findings threw the standard narrative of science history into confusion. Keynes re-donated the alchemical papers to Cambridge in 1946, but most historians, still nonplussed, either ignored them or tried to explain them away. In fact, only recently have scholars begun to systematically study the entire corpus, line by line, picture by picture, rune by rune. Those efforts are getting a big boost from Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science John Walsh and science historian William Newman, both at Indiana University, who head a project to digitize and post online the thousands of pages that Newton wrote on alchemy. One quarter has been posted so far, but Newman and Walsh say they’ve already gleaned insights into not only Newton the man, but into how alchemy shaped Newton’s science.

Early in life Newton turned to alchemy as a diversion. His father died before he was born (Newton, a sickly infant, almost joined him in the grave), and Newton grew up with a distant stepfather who kept the boy’s mother away from him. Nor did Newton, too precocious for his own good, make friends among his peers.

As compensation, he disappeared into books like  Mysteries of Nature and Art —fascinated by their odd mix of occult philosophy and practical engineering. Showing early ingenuity, Newton built a water clock and other contraptions described in  Mysteries ; showing an early mischievous streak, he also built a lantern described therein, tied it to a kite, and flew it at night near his home, a spectacle “which wonderfully affrighted all the neighboring inhabitants,” he recalled. At Cambridge, Newton further developed his interest in both the practical and theoretical sides of the field, devouring books by alchemist Robert Boyle.

Newton described such work as  chymistry . And the word is a useful reminder—with its echo of modern “chemistry,” yet archaic spelling—of what alchemy meant to people in Newton’s time. Today, most people think of alchemists as either foolish necromancers or lowlifes obsessed with  chrysopoeia —turning base metals into gold. That view comes down to us largely through the enemies of alchemy, Enlightenment thinkers, for example, who wanted to stamp out “magical” thinking and, ironically, install a mechanistic, “Newtonian” outlook instead. But alchemists were important for humankind’s intellectual development—the larvae that metamorphosed into Enlightenment philosophes and modern scientists. Especially important was the later alchemists’ willingness to test their theories with experiments, even theories that conflicted with accepted doctrines. Boyle was the primary example here, but John Locke, Gottfried Leibnitz, and others exchanged letters with and befriended alchemists, too, looking to chymistry for wisdom about the natural world.

Newton’s chymistry followed this tradition in many ways, Newman says, especially his view of nature as a riddle that only a gnostic brotherhood of alchemists could unravel. At the same time, Newton was unique among alchemists for uniting his chymistry with other, seemingly disconnected scientific obsessions of his, such as optics. Newman even argues that Newton’s famous demonstration that white light was merely a combination of colored light rays owes a significant debt to the alchemy of Boyle.

In the 1660s, Boyle got tangled up in a dispute with scholastic philosophers over the essence of matter. These adherents of Aristotle believed that once a substance dissolved into something else, it lost its identity forever. Boyle devised an experiment to dissolve camphor, an aromatic chemical, in acid, at which point the camphor lost its scent. This agreed with scholastic thought. But Boyle then added water to the solution—at which point the camphor reappeared, regaining its odor and all other properties. Boyle could pull similar tricks with dissolved metals like gold. This classic alchemy proved scholastics wrong, Boyle said: Dissolved substances don’t lose their identity.

The scholastics retorted that there was no proof it was really the same camphor. When the water was added, the solution might have created the camphor anew. But Boyle rejected this reasoning. Why, he argued, should the camphor’s essence be any different because it came from an experiment and not from nature? If it talked like camphor and walked like camphor, it  was  camphor, period.

Newton studied Boyle’s arguments, and soon devised a similar theory about color. While on leave from Cambridge during an outbreak of plague, Newton began separating sunlight into colors with a prism, among other experiments. He thought they proved that colored lights were “in” white light from the start. Colleagues like the eminent Robert Hooke disagreed, arguing that the prism itself could have produced the colors as light streamed through, the way an organ pipe produces sound when air rushes through. (No one would say that sharps and flats are “in” the pipe before they’re played.)

To counter this objection, Newton adopted Boyle’s tactics. He showed he could tease white light apart into reds, yellows, greens, and blues, then meld them back together. Crucially, this synthesized white light had all the properties of sunlight. Newton argued from this that the individual colors in light had a permanent, incorruptible existence, even if humans couldn’t always sense them. Boyle had made the exact same logical points about the permanence of camphor in acid. According to Newman, Newton’s fundamental theory of color was therefore midwifed by Boyle’s alchemy.

This success with color and chymistry must have thrilled Newton—he’d uncovered secrets in nature and a little magic of his own. And although Newton expanded his work into gravity and astronomy (not to mention Biblical prophecies, another obsession), he felt pulled back to chymistry his entire working life. Indeed, he dedicated six weeks to chymistry every fall and every spring for decades, the seasons when his unheated lab was bearable—and he often worked through the unbearable months, too. In all, Newton penned over one million words (five hundred times the length of this article) on chymistry.

Merely counting words doesn’t capture the richness of the chymical work. Like all alchemists, Newton peppered his prose with gnomic shorthand. Consider this line in a recipe for “sophic mercury,” which dissolved gold and allowed the precious metal to “vegetate” and mature into the philosopher’s stone: “Marry [sulfur] with , that is our [mercury] which is impregnated with must be espoused with our gold then hast thou two sulphurs married & two s of one of[f]spring whose father is the [gold] & [silver] the mother.”

Newton also included allegorical drawings, like a head with three faces or an elaborate caduceus crowned with a Holy Spirit dove, and verses copied verbatim from other alchemists. Moreover, those million words don’t capture the countless hours Newton spent running chymistry experiments on intriguing substances like antimony and mercury. Doctors in later eras have even speculated that Newton suffered from chronic mercury poisoning as a result, which could certainly explain his peculiar personal life.

Given how much labor went into Newton’s chymistry, why did none of it come to light until the Sotheby’s auction? It wasn’t all genteel scholarly embarrassment. English alchemists had to veil their true interests because alchemy had been illegal in England since 1404. The crown feared alchemy because transforming lead into gold would have destabilized the country’s economy, through counterfeit coins. The general ban on alchemy—the Act Against Multipliers—was lifted in 1689, thanks to Boyle’s lobbying, but alchemists were still tainted by association, and counterfeiting remained a capital crime in England. (When Newton took over as director of the Royal Mint in his dotage, in fact, he had one notorious counterfeiter hanged and publicly disemboweled—and took great delight in seeing it done.)

Still, the illicit nature of chymistry doesn’t completely explain why Newton concealed his research (Boyle didn’t). There’s no delicate way to put it: Almost everyone who knew him found him disarmingly weird. He had a mean temper, probably never had sex, and suffered at least one raving breakdown, during which he wished death on Locke, one of his few friends. Thoughts of sin tormented Newton. As a young man he wrote a letter addressed to God outlining every peccadillo he ever committed, faults ranging from the touchingly innocuous—“making pies on Sunday night”—to the abusive and creepy—“punching my sister” and “threating my [step]father and mother . . . to burne them and the house over them.”

This eccentricity spilled over into his science. Curious what would happen, Newton once stared into the sun for so long he had to lie in a dark room for several days before he stopped seeing spots. He also once wedged a needle into the socket behind his eye, to see how changing the curvature of the eyeball affected his vision. But for someone willing to experiment on just about anything, Newton was very guarded about discussing his experimental results, especially in chymistry. He loathed the thought of someone figuring something new out from his ideas, and he was obsessed with getting full credit for discoveries. (This desire bared its teeth in the 1680s when Leibnitz published a theory of calculus independent of Newton’s earlier but unpublished work, at which point Newton set out to destroy Leibnitz’s reputation.)

But really, can we blame Newton for being so secretive, for obsessing? For him, so much was at stake. He wouldn’t have recognized the distinction we draw today between “real” science full of experiments and equations and alchemical pseudoscience full of spells and bootless speculation. Chymistry was one grand body of work to him, the grandest, and he’d coveted knowing nature’s secrets since boyhood. He labored so long and so secretly because chymistry seemed the most promising path to obtaining near-magical powers and near-mystical insights into nature—discoveries that would, if only he could make them, vault him into the first rank of geniuses who ever lived.

Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, D.C., where he works as a correspondent for Science . He is the author of The Disappearing Spoon , an unconventional history of the periodic table.

Funding information

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project at Indiana University has received $200,000 in NEH funding to edit and publish online Newton’s writings in alchemy and chemistry.

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Distillations magazine

Chasing the clues in isaac newton’s manuscripts.

The tricks and tools book sleuths use to date the undated.

The dispersal of Isaac Newton’s chaotic manuscripts at a Sotheby’s sale in 1936 was the final chapter in a centuries-long disordering of the scientist’s wide-ranging collection of notes. In the wake of the sale, little by little, order has been restored and, arguably, imposed.

What were described at his death as “reams of loose and foul papers” have over the years been organized by their custodians. For instance, some of the first collectors, including economist John Maynard Keynes, tried to regather the manuscripts by focusing on theme (alchemical manuscripts in Keynes’s case). More recently, large-scale digital humanities projects have been reuniting the manuscripts—if only in virtual form—and organizing them by subject and other criteria.

The oldest and largest of these digital ventures is the Newton Project , now based at Oxford University. Created in 1998, the project has transcribed more than four million words of Newton’s writings, primarily those in physics, mathematics, and theology. Working in tandem with the Newton Project is the Chymistry of Isaac Newton at Indiana University, an undertaking to produce a similarly comprehensive, web-based edition of Newton’s papers but limited in scope to alchemical manuscripts. I am very familiar with the latter project; in 2003 I was hired as the first full-time employee, and I now serve as senior consulting editor. There are about a million words in the alchemical manuscripts, which the Chymistry of Isaac Newton is steadily putting online.

The mass of digital surrogates and transcriptions assembled by these projects allow scholars to ask some previously unanswerable questions: Is there any way to make chronological sense of these mostly undated manuscripts? Is there any way we can establish—nearly 300 years after their creation—which document came before which or even what year some of them were written in? The answer is, surprisingly, yes. There are tools and techniques based on content, orthography , and physical characteristics that we can wield like detectives as we try to put Newton’s notes in order.

The first among these techniques—the analysis of the manuscripts’ contents—depends on the skills of the historian.

When the Newton manuscripts owned by chemist and bibliophile Roy Neville first came to the Science History Institute’s Othmer Library in 2004, one of the first historians to examine the manuscripts since the Sotheby’s sale in 1936 was Lawrence Principe, who recognized that the notes detailed two of three “periods,” or steps, in the making of the philosophers’ stone. Principe knew these steps had originally been described by Robert Boyle and had become the topic of an exchange of letters between Newton and John Locke (yes, that John Locke ) after Boyle’s death. From the correspondence and a corresponding entry in Locke’s diary, Principe was able to pinpoint the date of the manuscript to May 1692.

The content of the manuscripts can help date them even in the absence of corroborating dated material, as with the Newton–Locke correspondence. The preponderance of Newton’s alchemical papers are reading notes. Newton spent years trying to fight his way through the thicket of metaphors and Decknamen (code names) used by alchemists to misdirect all but the most worthy from understanding their secrets. One of the ways he did this was by cross-referencing terminology used by different authors in the hope of triangulating to the truth. He kept mostly clear records of the passages he copied out from alchemical authors, noting the work and page number where he found the material.

In some cases, we can use those references to provide a terminus post quem , a “limit after which” something must have been written. For example, in a manuscript known as Keynes Ms. 53, now at King’s College Library in Cambridge, Newton cites “Le Triomphe, p. 42, 43, 44.” This citation refers to a French translation of the anonymous German Uralter Ritter-Krieg, first published in Amsterdam by Henri Wetstein in 1689, indicating that the manuscript could not have been written before that time.

But dating manuscripts in this way is not always so straightforward. Sometimes we can distinguish which edition of a book Newton is referring to by matching his page reference to the material in the book, but this works only if the type was reset between editions and the contents end up falling on different pages, in which case Newton’s page references act as a kind of fingerprint that distinguishes one from the other. But often a reprint was simply a line-for-line copy of an earlier edition. There’s a good reason for this—setting and justifying type was hard, time-consuming work. It was much easier to copy the work of the original compositor than to start over again.

The vagaries of the early printing industry can make it even more difficult to use page references as dating devices because it was also common for publishers to reissue previously printed sheets in a new “edition.” Books were commonly stored as unbound stacks of printed sheets. If a book did not sell out, it was child’s play for a printer to throw away the old, stale title page from years past, print a new title page with the current year, and—presto!—a new “edition.” I use quotes around “edition” because bibliographers call this kind of shenanigan a ­ reissue ; a new edition arises only if the type has been physically reset. (It doesn’t matter if it’s a line-for-line copy; as long as it’s been reset, it’s called a new edition.)

This repurposing and reissuing can become downright Byzantine. Consider one of Newton’s sources, Trois traitez de la philosophie naturelle . It was originally published in Paris in 1612 in a 103-page edition by Guillaume Marette. Almost 50 years later another publisher reissued the book in a clandestine 98-page edition. Confusingly, much—but not all—of the print run falsely bore the date 1612, named the publishers as “Widow of M. Guillemot and S. Thiboust,” and included a colophon (a statement of printing information found on the final page of a book) also dated 1612. 

The widow of M. Guillemot and S. Thiboust were indeed publishers who had been active in 1612, though the pirate publisher possessed neither of their printer’s marks to complete the forgery. We can tell this second “1612 edition” was actually printed in 1659 because other copies have the identical setting of type but bear the date 1659 and are attributed to two different Parisian publishers, Thomas Jolly and Jacques d’Allin. (Whether either of these men was the actual 1659 publisher is an open question.) The colophon was also updated to 1659 in the Jolly and d’Allin copies, but the deceit was not perfectly executed: at least one copy ended up with the 1612 colophon.

This book’s story gets even more convoluted. The unsold pirate copies were obtained in 1682. We don’t know which imprints were bought because the new publisher, well-known alchemical publisher Laurent d’Houry, discarded the title pages and reissued the sheets with a new title ( Philosophie naturelle de trois anciens philosophes ), a new preface, and a new translation of English alchemist George Ripley’s Traité du Mercure , which d’Houry appended to the end as pages 99 to 106. He did not, however, dispose of the 1612 or 1659 colophons, which sit awkwardly on page 98 after the word FIN (“the end”), in the midst, not at the end, of the printed text.

While the method of dating Newton’s manuscripts by the sources he references is sound, 17th-century publishers can throw us a curveball from time to time. For this reason, it is helpful to have a bibliographical expert on the team, which is the role I play for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton to undertake this kind of analysis.

In the absence of textual evidence, the physical manuscripts themselves can help suggest a composition date. One promising technique relies on watermarks.

All paper was handmade until the early 19th century. From the 13th century onward, most paper had watermarks, which acted as trademarks for the mill or region of mills producing the paper. Scholars have long used watermarks to roughly date paper. But the same watermark design might be used for decades and decades on end, so on their own they are only so useful for dating.

Fortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to create exact duplicates of watermarks over extended periods of time. Scholars have learned to spot evidence of these changes in the paper itself, and this knowledge often allows them to date a sheet’s manufacture quite accurately. To understand how, it helps to know how paper was made.

The process began with a papermaker passing a slurry of fibers through a rectangular sieve about the size of a cafeteria tray. The sieve was constructed of a wooden frame with a series of regularly spaced thin, wooden ribs running parallel to the shorter side of the mould. Attached to the top of each of these ribs was a tiny brass chain, and running through the links of the chains, parallel to the longer side of the mould, were scores of thin brass wires. When the slurry passed through the wires, less material was deposited where the water was obstructed by the chains, creating chain lines . If you hold the paper up to the light, you can see a series of parallel lines about an inch or two apart that are lighter than the rest of the paper. Papermakers as far back as the 13th century figured out they could manipulate this effect to produce decorations by sewing a design with brass thread onto the wires. Where the sewn pattern obstructed the flow of the slurry, the paper would be thinner and pass more light, creating a watermark.

Papermakers worked hard, producing hundreds of sheets of paper a day, and their moulds wore out after a year or so of use. The design sewn onto the new mould would not be identical to the one in the mould it was replacing. And this provides the potential for dating documents rather precisely based on their watermarks.

To speed their workflow, a team of papermakers used two moulds that were twins, so in principle half the sheets in a ream of paper would have one watermark and the other half would have its twin.

Paper was expensive, but we assume Newton bought enough to hold him for a few months or even up to a few years. Each clean sheet of paper he took off the stack should then have one of two watermarks. If we can find those watermarks in dated manuscripts, like letters or legal documents, they should provide the time frame for other undated manuscripts with the same watermarks.

This is the approach being used in a new research project, which brings together institutions that have undated alchemical manuscripts—for example, the Huntington Library and Science History Institute—with an institution that has dated Newton papers, such as the U.K. National Archives. By virtue of Newton’s appointment as warden and then master of the Royal Mint, there is a large body of dated correspondence and legal documents at the National Archives whose watermarks we hope to match to alchemical manuscripts.

This is easier said than done. Watermarks are tricky to image, especially on pages that have writing on them. (That is to say, all the interesting ones.)

For many years the gold standard in imaging watermarks was beta radiography, which worked by sandwiching a watermarked page between a piece of photographic paper and a thin sheet doped with a radioactive compound. After the sheets- were left clamped together for some hours, the beta particles released in radioactive decay would expose the film, more in areas where the paper was thinner and less where it was thicker, exactly the sort of effect that makes a watermark easier to see. Unfortunately, the process is expensive and time-consuming, making it impractical to implement on the scale necessary for this project. We need an easier method.

The National Archives has had some success manipulating ordinary reflected-light and backlit images of the same manuscript. Digitally subtracting one image from the other produces an enhanced picture of the underlying watermark. This method is fast and easy but requires reimaging of all the materials to perfectly align the reflected-light and backlit images. We are also investigating using infrared transmissive photography on the premise that the type of ink used by Newton is transparent under infrared light. A recent trial with some of the Huntington Library’s manuscripts was extremely promising, producing images similar to the reflected-light/backlit method but with a single exposure.

But we really want to be able to include far more Newton manuscripts than we can afford to reimage. And this is where machine learning comes in. Watermarks  can  be seen in photographs, but they are very difficult to pick out, especially amid the confusion of the writing on the page. Perhaps a neural network, trained on a data set of watermark images already compiled by American institutions and the National Archives, could extract and identify watermarks from a plain, reflected-light image? That would allow us to incorporate the watermarks from hundreds of already-imaged Newton manuscripts, such as those at Cambridge University Library, into the project database.

And there’s more potential for machine learning. Watermark investigators use a few tricks to characterize the small variations in the moulds used by a papermaker over time, for instance, by recording precisely where a design intersects the chain lines or noting how far from the chain lines the furthest left and right extent of the design are. But for the most part, matching two identical pieces of paper requires careful examination of each and every watermark, and there are liable to be dozens or scores of different watermarks in the Newton papers. What if we could train artificial intelligence to match identical watermarks? Such a program could be used to classify the hundreds or thousands of watermarks used in handmade paper across Europe and across the centuries.

Watermarks aren’t the end of the tools at our disposal to make order out of Newton’s manuscripts. For many years scholars have tried to date Newton manuscripts based on changes in his handwriting over his lifetime, but this method is now considered unreliable. However, there is still some value in this approach.

Historian William Newman noticed that the way Newton makes certain symbols seems to change over time. For instance, the symbol for the planet Saturn and the metal lead (♄) looks like an  h  with a cross through the ascender, as in a  t . In early manuscripts, Newton doesn’t bother crossing the ascender; in late manuscripts he always crosses the ascenders. So if all the lead symbols are uncrossed, a manuscript is generally early; if they’re all crossed, it’s late. If the symbol usage is mixed, the manuscript is probably somewhere in-between.

Similarly, in earlier manuscripts Newton consistently misspells the Latin word  separare  as “seperare,” but in later manuscripts he corrects this error. His English spelling is probably too inconsistent—sometimes comically so—to attempt the same.

A potentially more scientific approach involves analyzing the ink Newton used. The first alchemical recipe I encountered as a transcriber for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project was near the beginning of a document known as  Cambridge University Additional Manuscripts 3975 . It is titled “To make excellent Ink.” At the conclusion of the recipe is this charming note: “With this Ink new made I wrote this.” Newton, like many of his chemically adept contemporaries, made his own iron gall ink. Could differences in the batches of ink help determine the sequence of their composition? (Chymistry of Isaac Newton project manager Wallace Hooper used the color of ink in Galileo’s manuscripts to try to figure out their sequence of composition. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is now trying something much more sophisticated.)

Newton made his ink from oak galls, gum arabic, copperas (impure iron sulfate), and beer. Needless to say, none of these were laboratory-grade reagents, and we would expect the chemical composition of the ink to vary considerably from batch to batch. So, is there a nondestructive way to distinguish different batches of Newton’s ink? This kind of information would be helpful in situations where Newton may have revised his notes months or years after their initial composition.

The answer is, we hope, yes, and the method of choice is  X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy  (XRF). In XRF a sample is bombarded by X-rays. When an X-ray dislodges an electron in one of the lower energy states in an atom, an electron in a higher energy state will repopulate the lower level, but to do so the electron must discard some energy in the form of a photon. The X-rays emitted when changing from one energy level to another are characteristic for each element. By collecting a range of X-ray energies coming back from the sample, the XRF spectrometer can determine both the elements in a sample and their proportions. By  plotting characteristic ratios  of iron, copper, and zinc in Newton’s ink, we hope to be able to identify and date different batches and so reveal the relationship between manuscripts and, consequently, when they were written.

In Query 31 of his  Opticks , Newton  famously asks , “Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting them but also upon one another for producing a great part of the Phaenomena of Nature?” He was groping toward the idea that there were tiny constituents of matter that attracted or repelled one another, thereby producing chemical effects.

It is charming to think now that those tiny atoms, either the chemical impurities in the ink with which he wrote those words or in the semiconductors in the imaging and computer systems used to analyze them, are providing the means to make sense of the writings of the man who conceived them.

Funding for a portion of this research is provided by NSF award 2021012, “A Multidimensional Reconstruction of the Order of Composition of Historical Manuscripts from Textual and Material Evidence.” The research on watermarks is a collaborative project jointly funded by NEH grant HC-278119-21 and an Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) grant, “Digital approaches to the capture and analysis of watermarks using the manuscripts of Isaac Newton as a test case,” whose participating institutions are Indiana University, the Huntington Library, the Science History Institute, Cambridge University, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

James R. Voelkel is the curator of rare books at the Science History Institute and a senior advisory editor to the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project.

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Isaac Newton and His Accomplishments During The Plague Years

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Introduction, newton’s law on gravity, newton's theory for calculus, work with prisms and light.

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Netflix's hit sci-fi series '3 Body Problem' is based on a real math problem that is so complex it's impossible to solve

• The three-body problem is a centuries-old physics question that puzzled Isaac Newton .
• It describes the orbits of three bodies, like planets or stars, trapped in each other's gravity.
• The problem is unsolvable and led to the development of chaos theory.

While Netflix's "3 Body Problem" is a science-fiction show, its name comes from a real math problem that's puzzled scientists since the late 1600s.

In physics, the three-body problem refers to the motion of three bodies trapped in each other's gravitational grip — like a three-star system.

It might sound simple enough, but once you dig into the mathematics, the orbital paths of each object get complicated very quickly.

Two-body vs. three- and multi-body systems

A simpler version is a two-body system like binary stars. Two-body systems have periodic orbits, meaning they are mathematically predictable because they follow the same trajectory over and over. So, if you have the stars' initial positions and velocities, you can calculate where they've been or will be in space far into the past and future.

However, "throwing in a third body that's close enough to interact leads to chaos," Shane Ross, an aerospace and ocean engineering professor at Virginia Tech, told Business Insider. In fact, it's nearly impossible to precisely predict the orbital paths of any system with three bodies or more.

While two orbiting planets might look like a ven diagram with ovular paths overlapping, the paths of three bodies interacting often resemble tangled spaghetti. Their trajectories usually aren't as stable as systems with only two bodies.

All that uncertainty makes what's known as the three-body problem largely unsolvable, Ross said. But there are certain exceptions.

The three-body problem is over 300 years old

The three-body problem dates back to Isaac Newton , who published his "Principia" in 1687.

In the book, the mathematician noted that the planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun. Yet the gravitational pull from Jupiter seemed to affect Saturn's orbital path.

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The three-body problem didn't just affect distant planets. Trying to understand the variations in the moon's movements caused Newton literal headaches, he complained.

But Newton never fully figured out the three-body problem. And it remained a mathematical mystery for nearly 200 years.

In 1889, a Swedish journal awarded mathematician Henri Poincaré a gold medal and 2,500 Swedish crowns, roughly half a year's salary for a professor at the time, for his essay about the three-body problem that outlined the basis for an entirely new mathematical theory called chaos theory .

According to chaos theory, when there is uncertainty about a system's initial conditions, like an object's mass or velocity, that uncertainty ripples out, making the future more and more unpredictable.

Think of it like taking a wrong turn on a trip. If you make a left instead of a right at the end of your journey, you're probably closer to your destination than if you made the mistake at the very beginning.

Can you solve the three-body problem?

Cracking the three-body problem would help scientists chart the movements of meteors and planets, including Earth, into the extremely far future. Even comparatively small movements of our planet could have large impacts on our climate, Ross said.

Though the three-body problem is considered mathematically unsolvable, there are solutions to specific scenarios. In fact, there are a few that mathematicians have found.

For example, three bodies could stably orbit in a figure eight or equally spaced around a ring. Both are possible depending on the initial positions and velocities of the bodies.

One way researchers look for solutions is with " restricted " three-body problems, where two main bodies (like the sun and Earth) interact and a third object with much smaller mass (like the moon) offers less gravitational interference. In this case, the three-body problem looks a lot like a two-body problem since the sun and Earth comprise the majority of mass in the system.

However, if you're looking at a three-star system, like the one in Netflix's show "3 Body Problem," that's a lot more complicated.

Computers can also run simulations far more efficiently than humans, though due to the inherent uncertainties, the results are typically approximate orbits instead of exact.

Finding solutions to three-body problems is also essential to space travel, Ross said. For his work, he inputs data about the Earth, moon, and spacecraft into a computer. "We can build up a whole library of possible trajectories," he said, "and that gives us an idea of the types of motion that are possible."

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