See main: Universal gravitation lawIn Jan 1684, Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke were engaged in an animated conversation, either over drinks before a roaring fire (Christianson, 1988), or at a coffee house in London (Ѻ), on the topic of why planets traveled in ellipses, according to which, either Hooke or Halley, or both, depending on story, claimed to have solved the problem, via the theory that the inward force of attraction between planets and the sun must decrease in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Wren, to settle the matter, offered them either a large sum or money or book worth forty shillings to whoever could come up with the mathematical means of proving their theory. Hooke, supposedly, claimed to have solved the problem, “but would conceal the solution for some time so that others trying and failing might know how to value it, when he should make it public.”
“In 1684, Halley came to visit Newton at Cambridge, after they had been some time together, Halley asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it. Newton replied immediately that it would be an ellipsis; Hooke, struck with hoy and amazement, asked him how he knew it, to which Newton said that he had calculated it, whereupon Halley asked him for his calculation. Without any further delay, Newton looked among his papers, but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it, and send it.”
See: Newton on godThe subject of Newton and religion, supposedly, is a large topic. To put things into perspective, in 1619, when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), derived his three laws of planetary motion, on the nature of elliptical orbits, based on astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), data which provided one of the key foundations for Newton’s theory of universal gravitation (1687), scientists, nearly unanimously, not only believed in God or gods, but also, Kepler being one example, believed that the planets were pushed around by "angels" beating their wings.
“God who gave animals self-motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be shown.”
— Isaac Newton (1674), philosophical query notes: [5]
“Did Christ send his apostles to preach metaphysics to the unlearned people, and to their wives and children?”— Isaac Newton (c.1680), religious notes (Ѻ)
“Any self-respecting editor—aiming to undertake a publication of Newton’s collected works—would have to be absorbed in Newton's 'defunct' world for many years, and 'probably he would never quite find his way out of it'.”— Ralph Sampson (1924), English astronomer (Ѻ)
Newton's anchor-point publication, his 1686 Principia, in which the laws of motion were presented. |
Reaction existence (Old System, Julian calendar): 25 Dec 1642 – 20 Mar 1726
Reaction existence (New System, Gregorian calendar): 4 Jan 1643 – 31 Mar 1727
“1642 [Newton’s birth] is the Christmas of the modern age.”— Goethe (c.1815), Publication (Ѻ) (Ѻ)
“Was Newton really born the year Galileo died? No. Galileo died 361 days before the birth of Newton. The death of one and the birth of the other occurred in different Julian years (1641 and 1642) and in different Gregorian years (1642 and 1643). The year is the same (1642) only when the death of Galileo is recorded in the Gregorian calendar (then prevalent in Italy) and the birth of Newton is recorded in the Julian calendar (still prevalent in England at the time).”
“The most famous contemporary of Kepler was Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). William Shakespeare was born the same year as Galileo and Isaac Newton was born the year he died.”— Ching-Yao Hsieh and Meng-Hua Ye (1991), Economics, Philosophy, and Physics [3]
“Galileo died on 8 Jan 1642, exactly three hundred years before the day I was born. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day of that year later becoming Lucasian Professor of mathematics at Cambridge, the chair I now hold.”— Stephen Hawking (2005), God Created the Integers [8]
“I can calculate the movements of stars, but not the madness of men.”— Isaac Newton (c.1690), after losing his hat in a market collapse [4]
“Is it not for want of an attractive virtue between the parts of water and oil, of quick-silver (Hg) and antimony (Sb), of lead (Pb) and iron (Fe), that these substances do not mix; and by a weak attraction, that quick-silver and copper (Cu) mix difficultly; and from a strong one, that quicksilver and tin (Sn), antimony and iron, water and salts, mix readily?”
Left: Newton shown experimenting with a prism, behind a telescope. Right: a later photo of Newton. |
See main: Geoffroy's affinity tableIn 1718, during a translation into French of Newton’s Opticks, French physician and chemist Étienne Geoffroy used Newton’s descriptions of affinity reactions to construct the world’s first affinity table, containing twenty-four reacting species, detailing specifically what affinity reactions would occur between various combinations of reactants. This table seeded the chemical revolution: [2]
“It is likely that animals, being less perfect than man, could have been fashioned first? As they imitated each other, so man probably imitated them; for their whole kingdom is in truth only made up of different, more or less skillful apes, at the head of which Pope placed Newton.”— Julien la Mettrie (1750), “On the System of Epicurus” (§23)
“Newton, by the age of 23, invented calculus, explained that light was made up of colored light, and discovered the law of gravity, although he waited to publish. His Principia (1687) drew on Descartes’ law of inertia, Galileo’ ideas on acceleration, and Kepler’s laws, and brought it all to a mathematically expressed synthesis that made the world strangely intelligible. In the early drafts for the second edition, Newton included ninety lines from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in association with his concept of inertia.”— Jennifer Hecht (2003), Doubt: a History (pg. 326)
“Immanuel Kant and Isaac Newton are both considered to comprise the smartest people to have ever lived. Based on some recent IQ conjectures, both of the above supposedly had IQ’s beyond the 250 mark.”— Rork Azak (2011), “Comment to article on Eudoxus” (Ѻ), Nov 14