![]() ![]() The Copernican system was highly controversial bringing its proponents into direct conflict with the Church, who considered mankind to be at the centre of everything. In 1543 Copernicus had published his book On the revolution of heavenly spheres, in which he replaced the earth-centred planetary system of the ancient Greeks (the Ptolemaic system) by one with the sun at the centre, and the earth as just one of several planets in circular orbits around it. It was, however, a good time for a scientist to be born, as the world of science had been overturned during the previous century. When he was just three years old, his mother remarried and moved away, leaving him to be cared for by his grandmother, a situation that the young Isaac always resented bitterly. His father, a yeoman farmer, had died three months earlier, and the young Isaac, born very prematurely, was not expected to survive, being so small (it is said) that he could be fitted into a quart pot. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 in this house in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe, in the county of Lincolnshire, just seven miles south of Grantham. ![]() So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast What balance of the mass, what reckoningsĭivine! Here ponder too the Laws which God,īut made the fixed foundations of his work. Lo, for your gaze, the pattern of the skies! Indeed, as I wrote in my Ode prefixed to the Principia: This law was expounded by Sir Isaac in his Principia Mathematica, the greatest highth of Knowledge that humane nature has yet arrived to, as the antiquarian John Aubrey has asserted, and I feel deeply honoured to have been so closely associated with its production over forty years ago. ![]() There is only one universe, and it could thus be given to only one person to discover its fundamental law, the universal law of gravitation. No person ever reached higher than Isaac Newton his achievements remain unsurpassed. His death, just a few weeks ago, was the signal for much pomp and pageantry, and a wealth of poems, statues, medallions and other commemorations are even now beginning to appear. It is difficult to believe that the great Isaac Newton is with us no longer. ![]() Edmond Halley (1727): On the Shoulders of Giants ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |