Chapter 1 Lonely Boy
Isaac Newton was born in England.But he never saw his father who died before his birth.It's because he was born so early, so weak, so tiny that he could even be put into a quart mug. When Isaac was only 3, his mother got married with a minister again. But he only wanted a wife, not a son. Thus his mother left him on his grandparents' home, Isaac often liked to stare at his mother's new home on the tree. Because of the bad relation between his father and mother, he suffered a lot in his stepfather's home. I think he was very lonely and full of hated and even wanted to burn down his home. But when he was ten, his stepfather died, his mother lived back, things began to change.
His mother sent him to the local village school. But this school didn't teach much beyond how to read. He seemed unusually intelligent. So he went to a better school. Unfortunately, it's hard for Newton to make friends. So he hardly ever had any friends. And he didn't do well at school. Because of his bad marks,some top students sometimes fought with him. He beat them, and he studied harder. Finally, he became top student. However,his mother thought he should run a farm. But the farm's work bored him easily. Then he deliberately did bad things to disappoint his mother.One of the most silly things he had done was he even let the herd of sheep wandered into the neighborhood. And his mother had to pay a fine for him. After all of this, his mother lost her last patience. And he didn't turn into the kind of farmers his mother hoped.
Chapter 2 Cambridge
Luckily, Newton wasn't the only one who hated becoming a farmer. So did his uncle and his school master.His uncle managed to talk to his mother to send him into a university. So he went to the part of Cambridge University. Although his mother was well-off, she didn't want to pay his fees. So he had to be a sizar. However, much of the university teaching didn't interest Newton at all. Thus he went to the library to read what he wanted. Newton began to read some famous people's writings on his own.
Newton was still based on the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle made his theories based on observation of the world around him. Some scholars had been challenging the old ways of explaining how the world worked. Thus, Newton set out to learn from them. He read the ideas of Copernicus. His most famous thing was to overthrow Aristotle's geocentric theory, but the heliocentric theory. He also read about Galileo. He also overthrew some of Aristotle's ideas. For example, Aristotle believed that the heavier ball must come to the ground faster than the light one. But Galileo proved that it's wrong with his experiment.
From these books, Newton had known that everything would be wrong although it seemed reasonable.He was curious about new things he didn't know. So he started to explore by himself. Finally, he passed the exam and became a scholar. So far, he didn't feel so lonely. He wanted to have a good life. However, the plague came again. He had to leave.
Chapter 3 The Plague Years
In 1665,because the plague had broken out, the university was closed. And Newton had to go back to Lincolnshire. He lived there for eighteen months. For this time, he was happy to be left alone to think about exactly what he wanted. He thought, these days were his prime of age to think of new ideas.
He wondered about things that were changing all the time. For instance, what if you shot a cannonball into the air? He tried to think about it. He wasn't satisfied with think about mathematical problems raised by others. He invented his own form of mathematics. One is calculus. Modern physics, the study of matter and energy, wouldn't be possible to work without it. Another subject that always interested Newton was light. He bought a prism to make experiments. He began playing around with it and testing what he learned about light. He also overthrew Aristotle's idea about light by his experiments. By this, he was able to explain a mystery －Why the rainbow appeared in the sky.
He made many correct ideas on physics so far. And he never wanted to stop.
Chapter 4 Falling Apples
He still kept thinking about the world. Newton's years at his mother's house were called miraculous years by himself. It seemed like a miracle that one young man could figure out so much in short time. Discovering the true nature of light and inventing calculus was just his beginning of physics.
He began to study gravity. Some books wrote that Newton discovered gravity because of falling apples. Newton said his first notion of gravity was "occasioned by the falling of an apple". And he also found that Aristotle was wrong again. He thought things fall is because heavy things have a natural tendency to move downward. But Newton didn't think so. He thought maybe the force didn't have any limits. There were forces that even could pull the apples to the moon or space. This was a brand-new idea. At last, he thought the moon could circled around the Earth instead of fixing off into space by the same forces-gravity.
Though he discovered many ideas, no one knew about this, no one knew where he was, no one knew where he was doing. All his life, Newton hated going public with his discoveries. He didn't like to tell anyone until he was positive he had worked out every detail perfectly. He wanted to make sure that no one could catch his mistakes. He kept his bold, exciting ideas all to himself. At the same time, he could go back to the university to teach students.
Chapter 5 The Wonderful Telescope
When the plague finally ended in 1667, Newton went back to Cambridge. One of his teacher Isaac Barrow, encouraged him to share at least one of his discoveries. So two years later, Newton shared the calculus with his teacher. Barrow was amazed by his wonderful new mathematical tool. And Barrow thought Newton could show it to more people. Newton reluctantly let Barrow show it to a very small number of people and absolutely refused to get it published.
In 1669, Barrow left the Cambridge. He thought so highly of Newton that he arranged Newton to take his place as a professor of mathematics. Thanks to Barrow, Newton could live exactly the kind of life he wanted. The job was easy for him. All he had to do was to give a few lectures. However, he was a dull lecturer and difficult to understand. So only a few students came to listen. But he didn't mind. He liked wandering around the university with a mess look. He was so busy thinking that he only slept a few hours at night and often not on his bed.
He wanted to learn more about how the planets move. But the telescopes in that time was not good enough for him. He wanted a telescope that could give a clearer image. But the trouble was lens. Luckily, Newton liked to build models in his childhood. So he made one by himself. It worked ten times bigger than the telescopes.
Chapter 6 Fighting about Light
Newton became a member of the Royal Society, since his telescope caught the group's interest. This period was often called"the Age of Enlightenment". This group believed working together. Newton was considered one of the Enlightenment's greatest figures, but his personality didn't fit the Royal Society's ideas. But he didn't want advice from others. He wanted to keep his work to himself until it was perfect. If anyone asked him, he would lose his temper. And his telescope still interested with others, even the king. As for these things, Newton donated one to the group.
But the member of the group-Robert liked to have fights with Newton. He actually agreed with much of what Newton said. But he didn't believed that Newton's experiments really proved what Newton said. For this reason, Newton lost his last temper. And they became enemies for life. So he went back to work all by himself.
Chapter 7 A Secret Life
Arguing with other scholars wan't Newton's only problem, he also had a more personal difficulty. He was a fellow of the Cambridge University. But it was a part of the church of England. Every scholar had to become a minister in the church within seen years. But Newton couldn't be a minister, secretly, he had his own serious belief. So he decided that he didn't agree with the church of England about the Holy Trinity. Unfortunately, if he wanted to stay at there, he must swear that he would accept this idea. If he refused, he would be forced to leave there in disgrace. In 1675, Newton approached the king on purpose, trying to communicate with him if it was possible not to be a minister. Luckily, although he didn't tell the real reason for his problem, the king still accepted his advice. At last, he could still stay there without being a minister.
For this reason, he could do what he liked at his private lab. He wanted to unlock the mysteries of alchemy. He spent more time on this than on ordinary science. But no one knew what he was doing until the Royal Society discovered his theory about alchemy after he died. But they thought it was too long to print. So his theory about alchemy was printed until 2004.
Chapter 8 A Competition
After his fight with the member of the Royal Society, Newton withdrew into himself. He didn't join any activities. He concentrated on his secret study of alchemy. He claimed he wasn't interested in scientific research anymore. His greatest work was still ahead of him.
In 1684, three members of the group were charting in a coffee house about current scientific issues. They were Newton's enemies. One of them-Wren was trying to understand how and why the planets orbited the sun. But he couldn't work it out. So he asked the others for help. One scientist-Johannes Kepler had found the path around the sun was an ellipse. The force changed faster and faster more than the distance grew. The scholars had came up with all kinds of ideas to explain the relationship. Wren put the problem to his friends. But his friends didn't want to think about it. So they just stall for the time again and again.
Finally, he asked Newton to for help. Newton tried to solve it as soon as possible. He thought about it day after day, night after night. He figured out the problem after two months. Unfortunately, he wasn't sure that his result was true. He only had done it for his own amusement. At last, he proved he was right. He was able to send Wren his proof.
Chapter 9 Newton's Big Book
Wren's question rekindled Newton's interest in the way planets moved. He wrote a nine-page essays to answer it and then kept going. Then he finished his five-hundred-page masterpiece. With this book, he laid the foundation of modern physics. Every physicist since 1687 had built their work on the ideas in Newton's book. Halley was excited about this. But his old enemy Hook claimed that Newton copied some of his ideas. Newton was so furious that he threatened not to publish all the pages he had written. It took all Halley's tact to calm him down. The book finally came down in 1687 and caused a sensation. A French mathematician even thought Newton didn't drink, eat, sleep like normal men. Since he was so talented that almost nobody could follow him. And his thoughts were very strange from others. And his book was almost impossible to follow or copy.
Newton's book made him so famous that he was elected to Parliament . He became a member of it. Except for this, one important vote which brought a new king to England, he didn't take any advice role in Parliament.
Chapter 10 Laws of Motion
Over three hundred years after Newton's boo was written, it's hard to understand how great its impact had been. The things he figured out now seemed natural and obvious to us. Newton completely changed the way people think. He spent his life studying two forces which he divided into three laws of motion.
The first one says if something is moving, it will keep moving until something makes it stop. If somethings is still sitting, it won't move until some force makes it move.
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All in all, these laws are about gravity. For instance, if you're skating on a skateboard, and you push against the ground, the ground pushes back against you with is why the skateboard moves forward. This same principle makes a rocket's engine work.
One odd thing was missing from Newton's explanation of gravity. Although he explained of gravity, he never said exactly what it was. We still don't really know so far.
Chapter 11 Becoming a Legend
After his book came out, Newton became legendary. Suddenly, the students of Cambridge saw him in a whole new way. But in 1693, he had a mental breakdown. He couldn't eat or sleep. He wrote his friends strange letters saying wishes they were dead.
When he recovered, he decided he needed a change. He asked some powerful friends to help him for a job. At last, they arranged him to help run the Royal Mint. For this reason, he moved to a grand house in London. For years, counterfeiters had been clipping bits of silver off the edges of coins to make new coins. So the Mint changed the shape of it. As for this, Newton turned his attention to catch counterfeiters. He made himself into a kind of detective with a network of spies and informers. His greatest triumph was the capture of the clever counterfeiter named Chaloner. Newton pursued him for years and finally succeeded in having him executed.
When he first arrived in London, Newton kept his distance from the Royal Society. He didn't want anymore fights. In 1703, his old enemy and premier were dead. So Newton was immediately elected in the premier's place. In 1704, Newton finally published his theory of optics. He said he had been waiting until Hook was dead.
Chapter 12 Battles at the Royal Society
Newton ruled the Royal Society like a tyrant. And this led to some ugly incidents. The worst fight was about who on earth invented calculus at the first place.
Newton had created his form of calculus as early as 1665, but he refused to publish it. Only a few people got the chance to see it. Around 1675, a German mathematician named Leibniz had came up with a similar system which he also called calculus. He had been working on the same kinds of problems and had it published after solving these problems. At first, there didn't seemed to be a problem. But Newton published his theory of calculus in 1704. It's twenty years later than Leibniz. So a anonymous reviewer hinted that Newton might have borrowed some of his ideas. At first, Leibniz agreed that Newton developed it before him. Though he became reasonable. Later, he appealed to the Royal Society about who invented calculus first. But Newton was the premier. He put himself in charge of the committee looking into the issue. What's more, he secretly wrote the committee's report himself. It twisted the evidence to make it seem that Leibniz had stolen Newton's ideas. Leibniz was angry about this, so he remembered it for a long time. Three years later, he died of it. To our surprise, Newton never regretted what he had done. Years later, he recalled happily that he "had broken Leibniz's heart". In one sense, Leibniz was won. Because nowadays, most people chose to use Leibniz's form of calculus, not Newton's. If Newton had known about this, he would have been furious.
Chapter 13 Genius
Newton was over 80. Although being so weak in health, Newton didn't seem like an old man in fact. But his last years he was wealthy, powerful and respected. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne. He became Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's mind remained sharp and his health mostly good almost to the end. He even was leading a meeting of the Royal Society less than a month before his death. He died on March 20,1727, at the age of 85. He was buried in London's Westminster Abbey-the first scientist to receive such an honor. The things Newton did for a life could be a story of how the universe worked. For the next two hundred years, almost all physics had its root in his ideas. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did another great genius-Albert Einstein-discovered the limits of Newton's discoveries.
It's quite common for most us to think of that strange, bad-tempered, brilliant loner Isaac Newton, whenever we are riding, running, skating and so on.
