Isaac Newton


SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Jude Ignatius (JI)
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from Coimbatore

Newton was born on 25th December 1642 in a village called Woolsthorpe in England.
Newton was a weak baby and he wasn't expected to live, but he lived till the age of 84.



Did you know?
                The great scientist called Galileo Galilei died the same year when Newton was born.

When Newton was 11 years old, he was sent to a town called Grantham to study at King's school.

There, he lived with Mr.Clark, who was a pharmacist. Mr.Clark had a laboratory that young Newton spent much time in, tinkering with tools to build small machines like floating lanterns, a water clock and even a windmill run by a live mouse.

When Newton turned 16, his mother brought him back to Woolsthorpe to take care of her farm, but he was terrible at it. 

When he was supposed to be herding the cattle he would sit under the tree with a book.

His mother later, realised that he hated farming, so she sent him back to school.

After few more years, Newton was ready for college. He joined the fomous Trinity College in Cambridge. There he studied natural philosophy, which is the study of nature and universe.

While at Cambridge, Newton worked hard on his own course, but also read books about philosophers and scientists like Aristotle and René Descartes. He learnt what they had said about how the world works.

Newton completed his bachelor's degree in 1665 and wanted to study more, but Cambridge closed in 1665 due to the Great Plague, a deadly diseases that killed loads of people in London.

Newton returned to Woolsthorpe after 2 years of thinking and conducting small experiments.

This is the time he thought of his most famous idea, gravity, which is the invisible force of the Earth that pulls objects towards each other .

It is the gravity of the Earth that makes a ball come down after you throw it up.

The story is that, Newton came up with this idea while sitting under an apple tree. He saw how apples always fall straight to the ground and they never go sideways or upwards.This inspired him to study the matter further, and he formed the theory of gravity.

When Cambridge reopened in 1667, Newton went back to study for a master's degree.  In 1668, he built a reflecting telescope using mirrors instead of lenses. His mathematics that he took it to the Royal Society of London, the most respected society of scientists in England. They were very impressed too.

In 1684 Newton began writing his most important book know as Principia, in which he wrote about the 3 laws of motion.
It explains the movement of objeccts and how it can be affected by various things.

He also wrote about the Law of Gravitation. It explains that all objects and planets in the Universe are attracted towards each other by a force called gravitation.

In 1704, he published another book, Opticks, which talked about light. He discovered that white light is made up of seven colors: Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. These are the colors of rainbow.

He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. It is the highest honour in U.K. Now, Newton was called, Sir Issac Newton

Newton died on 20 March 1727. He was one of the greatest scientists in history.

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