Newton: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

161 Pages·2007·1.9 MB·English

by  Robert Iliffe

Newton: A Very Short Introduction
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Rob Iliffe
Newton
A Very Short Introduction
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Martin Beagles, John Young, Luciana
O’Flaherty, Larry Stewart, and Sarah Dry for commenting on earlier
versions of this work, and also for suggesting improvements.
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Preface
In Victorian Britain, every schoolboy knew that Sir Isaac Newton
was an unrivalled mathematical and scientific genius, and most
would have been able to give a basic account of his central
discoveries. In optics, Newton found that white light was not a
fundamental element within nature but was composed of more
basic, primary rays being mixed together. Bodies appeared a
particular colour because they had a disposition to reflect or absorb
certain colours rather than others. In the realm of mathematics,
Newton discovered the binomial theorem for expanding the sum of
two variables raised to any given power, as well as the basic laws of
calculus. This treated the rate of change of any variable (the shape
of a curve or the velocity of a moving object) at any moment, and
also offered techniques for measuring areas and volumes under
curves (amongst other things). Both his mathematical and optical
work took many decades to be fully accepted by contemporaries, the
first because his work was shown only to a handful of
contemporaries, and the second because many found it hard to
reproduce and too revolutionary to be easily grasped.
The crowning glory of Newton’s system was contained in his
Principia Mathematica of 1687, in which he introduced the three
laws of motion and the incredible notion of Universal Gravitation –
the idea that all massive bodies continuously attracted all other
bodies according to a mathematical law. Using completely novel