Today's Talk Show guest was Isaac Newton - The English physicist and mathematician, best known as the genius who explained gravity and one of the greatest scientists of all time! He shared his story with Joebar and the audience.
Isaac Newton was born on January 04, 1643, at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. From the age of about 12 until he was 17, he studied at The King's School, Grantham. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student. In 1661 he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge as a sizar — a sort of work-study role.
In 1665 Cambridge was closed because of plague and Newton returned to the family farm for a year and a half. During this period in the country he first developed new methods in mathematics. In the following year, he completed his invention of calculus with the method of finding areas of curved regions. During the same period, he experimented with light and found that white light is a mixture of colors. He also began to think about gravity - whether the same force that causes an apple to fall to Earth also affects the Moon.
Newton returned when the school reopened and completed his studies at Cambridge. After that he stayed as a professor of mathematics. Instead of publishing his work, he circulated manuscripts to friends. He built the first reflecting telescope and presented one to the Royal Society. They elected him a fellow and he began to communicate some of his discoveries about optics to them. He was urged to publish his ideas on the motion of planets, and his work Principia contained his laws of motion and gravity as well as such topics as artificial satellites. His Principia Mathematica is regarded as the stepping block of modern science.
Newton was elected president of the Royal Society of London in 1703 and became the first scientist ever to become a knight in 1705. After he became president of the Royal Society, he kept that post for the rest of his life. The following year he wrote a full account of his study of light, called Opticks.
A famous story says that he uncovered the laws of gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple. This story isn’t entirely true. However, he was inspired to think about gravity after seeing an apple fall in his garden around 1666.
Those were just some of the interesting facts Isaac Newton shared in our Talk Show today. Next week we have invited Leonardo Da Vinci!
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