Sir Isaac Newton Biography for Kids – makemegenius.com – MakeMeGenius.Com | Science Videos For Kids

  • Born on December 25, 1642 (January 4, 1643) in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
  • Raised by his grandparents
  • Pulled out of school at 14 to run the family farm
  • Wasn’t good at farming, so they sent him back to school

The Newton residence, circa 1689

►Entered Trinity College at Cambridge University at age 18 and began studying to become a minister

►Graduated at age 23

►Returned to the farm because of the Black Death

  • He got bored and ended up working on the binomial theorem, light, telescopes, calculus, and theology

Newton in about 1702

Calculus

►Started developing Calculus as early as 1666 but never really got around to publishing much

►In about 1668, Wilhelm Leibniz began developing very similar ideas and published them before Newton’s published his work

►Arguing ensued

►(Leibniz used dy/dx notation; Newton used ẏ)

Opticks

►Discovered that light is made up of a spectrum of colors

►Made the first telescope that used a curved mirror instead of lenses

►Believed that light was made up of “corpuscles” rather than waves (Hooke and Huygens disagreed)

►Didn’t publish any of this until the after the death of Hooke in 1703

Newton in the Lab

Apples and Stuff

►Formulated Newton’s Laws

►Proved that the force of gravity is inversely proportional to distance squared

►After conquering gravity, motion and optics, decided to work on changing lead into gold

His Book

  • Isaac Newton got a book published called Principa.
  • Principa has Newton’s 3 laws of motion.

His laws of motion

►1. An object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

►2. Force equals mass times acceleration.

►3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newtonian Trivia

►Became Master of the Royal Mint in 1699

►First scientist to be knighted for his work (1708)

►Elected President of the Royal Society every year from 1703 to 1727

►Member of Parliament (1689-1690)

►Died in 1727

Newton in 1726

  “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

– Isaac Newton

Newton’s Legacy

  • Newton’s laws of motion and gravity provided a basis for predicting a wide variety of different scientific or engineering situations, especially the motion of celestial bodies.
  • His calculus proved vitally important to the development of further scientific theories.
  • Finally, he unified many of the isolated physics facts that had been discovered earlier into a satisfying system of laws.