[Scientist Biography Series] Newton and the Apple

Isaac Newton (December 25, 1642, in the Julian calendar used in England; January 4, 1643, in the Gregorian calendar–March 31, 1727, Gregorian) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.

The scale of his contribution to science is captured rather nicely by the epitaph written after his death by the English poet Alexander Pope: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”

Newton made major contributions across the natural sciences: classical mechanics, astronomy, and optics in physics, as well as calculus, the brachistochrone problem, calculations involving pi, and many other topics in mathematics.

In 2005, the Royal Society ran a poll asking who had made the greater contribution to science, Newton or Einstein. Newton won both the public vote and the vote among Royal Society scientists!

Origins

Newton was born on December 25, 1642, in the Julian calendar then used in England (January 4, 1643, Gregorian), at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. His father had died three months before he was born.

Newton was premature and extremely small at birth. According to his mother, Hannah Ayscough, he was small enough to fit inside a quart mug. Fortunately, he survived.

When Newton was three, his mother remarried a minister from a neighboring village. Newton strongly disliked his stepfather and deeply resented his mother’s remarriage.

A Turning Point at School

According to stories passed down through early biographies, Newton was not immediately seen as an exceptional student. Strict school discipline did not exactly make him love attending class either. Back at home, however, he was always building things and even made a sundial that could tell the time. At the very least, the surviving stories make one thing clear: the boy was extremely good with his hands.

At twelve, Newton transferred from a village school to the King’s School in Grantham. Early biographies also describe a conflict with another student and say that Newton later redirected his competitive streak into schoolwork and craftsmanship, eventually becoming an outstanding student. It reads like such a wholesome, uplifting, work-hard-and-turn-your-life-around story QQ. Still, these details come from biographical anecdotes assembled after Newton’s death, so we should not treat every scene—and every neat cause-and-effect connection—as if it were a fully verified school record.

The Beginning of His Formal Scientific Education

When Newton was fourteen, his stepfather died and his mother was widowed again, so she brought Newton home to work as a farmer.

Newton went along with his mother’s wishes, but he was deeply unhappy as a farmer. He still wanted very much to study.

In June 1661, he entered Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and natural philosophy. He encountered the work of modern philosophers such as René Descartes and astronomers including Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler. This was the beginning of his formal intellectual path.

That said, Newton did not stand out during his first years at Cambridge. His extraordinary talent emerged more clearly later under Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), and Newton received his bachelor’s degree in 1665.

Classes Stopped; Learning Did Not

Only a few months after Newton received his degree, plague spread through England and Cambridge temporarily closed. Newton therefore spent substantial periods between 1665 and 1666 back at Woolsthorpe, away from ordinary university life.

And what a period it was! At home, Newton kept thinking about universal gravitation, calculus, and the dispersion of sunlight. The famous apple-tree story is also placed in this period. We should not flatten the history into “every university closed and he stayed home continuously for exactly two years,” but this time away from Cambridge really was one of the most creative periods of Newton’s life.

After the plague subsided, Newton returned to Cambridge and continued his research. He received his master’s degree the following year.

Newton and the Apple

Everyone knows that Newton formulated the law of universal gravitation. The story of Newton and the apple tree is especially famous among elementary- and junior-high-school students. I suspect quite a few children who are not fond of science have secretly muttered, “Why wasn’t he sitting under a coconut tree—or maybe a durian tree?” XDDD.

Teachers often bring up the story when introducing gravity and celestial motion, saying that an apple hit Newton and made him think of gravity—or even universal gravitation. The historical story is rather more complicated.

Several people who knew Newton mentioned an apple in biographies or recollections about him, but the story was not something Newton was known to present publicly as the formal origin of his theory.

Newton was not the first person to think about attraction or gravity either. Kepler and other earlier astronomers had already discussed related ideas. So it makes no sense to say Newton knew nothing of gravity until an apple struck him on the head.

One of the most important sources is Newton’s friend William Stukeley. In a memoir completed in 1752—but not formally published until 1936—Stukeley recalled a conversation from a spring afternoon in 1726. While the two men were drinking tea near apple trees, Newton described seeing an apple fall and wondering why it moved straight toward the ground rather than sideways or upward. That is probably much closer to the historical source of the Newton-and-the-apple story. After generations of retelling, it gradually became the head-smacking version everyone knows today.

Research, Public Life, and His Final Years

In 1669, Isaac Barrow retired and recommended the twenty-six-year-old Newton as his successor to the Lucasian professorship. Newton then began a long academic career, teaching, researching, and organizing his work for publication. This eventually included his most famous book, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, usually shortened to the Principia.

In the first book of the Principia, Newton defined ideas such as mass, momentum, inertia, force, and centripetal force, and laid out his fundamental views of time, space, and motion. On that foundation he presented the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation that students still encounter in junior-high science and high-school physics. He then applied gravitation to tides and celestial motion. The book had an enormous impact on natural science—even though the Royal Society could not afford to publish it and Newton’s friend Edmond Halley had to pay the cost himself XD.

Newton became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 and its president in 1703, remaining in that position until his death.

A contemporary account describes Newton falling ill after travelling into London in early 1727. He died on March 20 by the Julian calendar then used in England (March 31 Gregorian). We should not turn that account into a certain medical diagnosis or say that the journey alone caused his death.

Newton’s achievements earned him extraordinary honors after his death, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. The fact that a natural philosopher and mathematician received a place there says plenty about how highly his contemporaries regarded his work.

His Relationships with Other Scientists

For all his scientific brilliance, Newton fell out with several famous scientists over the publication and priority of their work. Two of the best-known cases involved Robert Hooke—whom I discussed in [Scientist Biography Series] Robert Hooke: Master Mechanic and Hooke’s Law—and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Even people who have never studied calculus have probably heard that the subject was developed independently by two mathematicians: Newton and Leibniz.

Newton was born in 1642 by England’s Julian calendar (1643 by the Gregorian calendar) and formed his system of calculus between roughly 1664 and 1666. Leibniz was born in 1646 and developed his system around 1672–1676.

Public accusations that Leibniz had copied Newton escalated in the early eighteenth century. Leibniz asked the Royal Society to clear his name, and the Society established a committee to investigate.

Leibniz had published work on calculus and had strong grounds for claiming an independent development. The complication was that Newton had previously sent material through correspondence describing aspects of his mathematical ideas.

Leibniz probably knew something of Newton’s approach, but his own system was already highly developed and differed in its concepts and notation. Even so, Newton’s supporters later argued that Leibniz had used those communications to build his calculus.

There was an investigating committee, yes—but Leibniz was a foreign member of the Royal Society while Newton was its president. You can probably guess how balanced that power relationship looked... Leibniz lost the institutional battle.

Leibniz’s notation and methods were generally easier to adopt, so mathematicians across continental Europe largely used his notation rather than Newton’s.

Britain, however, remained strongly attached to Newton’s fluxional method and its more difficult notation for a long time.

That attachment was one factor behind British mathematics becoming disconnected for a time from developments in continental analysis. In the 1810s, Cambridge’s Analytical Society gradually promoted Leibnizian notation through publications, translations, and teaching. In other words, Britain did not press a giant switch in 1813 and wake up the next morning with every mathematician using the new notation XDDD. It was a gradual process of reconnecting with the mathematical language used on the Continent.

Conclusion

Newton’s story is certainly inspiring. Even if we cannot treat every detail in the old school-conflict stories as a fully verified record, they still remind us that whether someone looks exceptional at one moment in school does not determine how far that person may eventually go. Newton’s life also shows that even when normal classroom instruction is interrupted, a person who truly wants to learn can keep reading, thinking, and investigating. We should not confine the pursuit of knowledge entirely to the classroom.

Scientist biographies are fun, right? XD I hope these stories help students see that every theory and law has years—sometimes decades—of work behind it. Scientists are people too. They communicate, collaborate, compete, and get tangled up in all kinds of love–hate relationships. Learning a little about their lives while studying the foundations of science is a pretty good addition to the formulas themselves.

References

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維基百科-艾薩克‧牛頓，URL：http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%89%BE%E8%90%A8%E5%85%8B%C2%B7%E7%89%9B%E9%A1%BF

最偉大的天文學家-牛頓的故事，URL：http://www.phy.cuhk.edu.hk/astroworld/vote_astronomers/newton.html

世紀的審判，URL：http://episte.math.ntu.edu.tw/articles/sm/sm_17_04_1/

A hero for their times: early biographies of Newton，URL：https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsnr/article/60/3/291/61245/A-hero-for-their-times-early-biographies-of-Newton

Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work，URL：https://wwwe.lib.cam.ac.uk/CUL/exhibitions/Footprints_of_the_Lion/learning.pdf

The personality of Isaac Newton，URL：https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsnr/article-pdf/49/1/1/352965/rsnr.1995.0001.pdf

Charles Babbage，URL：https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Babbage/

Fearon Fallows，URL：https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fallows/

The Nation's Memory，URL：https://www.westminster-abbey.org/history/explore-our-history/the-nations-memory