Isaac Newton biography

Synopsis

Early Life

On December 25, 1642, Isaac Newton was born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, England, the only son of a prosperous local farmer, also named Isaac Newton. Young Isaac never knew his father, who died three months before he was born. A premature baby born tiny and weak, Isaac was not expected to survive. When he was three, his mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton, remarried a well-do-do minister, Barnabas Smith, and went to live with him, leaving young Isaac with his maternal grandmother. The experience left an indelible imprint on Isaac which manifested itself later in life as an acute sense of insecurity. He anxiously obsessed over his published work and defended its merits with irrational behavior.

At age twelve, Isaac Newton was reunited with his mother after her second husband died. She brought along her three small children from her second marriage. Isaac had been enrolled at the King's School, Grantham, England, where he lodged with a local apothecary and was introduced to the fascinating world of chemistry. His mother pulled him out of school, for her plan was to make him a farmer and have him tend the farm. Isaac failed miserably for he found farming monotonous. He soon was returned to King's School to finish his basic education. Perhaps sensing his innate intellectual abilities, his uncle, a graduate of Trinity College at Cambridge persuaded Isaac's mother to have him enter the university. Isaac enrolled in 1661 in a program similar to a work study where he waited on tables and took care of wealthier students' rooms.

When Isaac Newton arrived at Cambridge, the scientific revolution was already in full force. The heliocentric view of the universe—theorized by astronomers Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler and later refined by Galileo Galilea—was well known in most European academic circles. Philosopher Rene Descartes had begun to formulate a new conception of nature as an intricate, impersonal, and inert machine. Yet, as with most universities in Europe, Cambridge was steeped in Aristotelian philosophy and view of nature resting on a geocentric view of the universe and dealing with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.

During his first three years at Cambridge, Isaac Newton was being taught the standard curriculum but fascinated with the more advanced science. All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers. The result