Newton - Physicist and Mathematician

1643 - 1727

Physicist and mathematician. Born January 4, 1643 (some sources say December 25, 1642) in Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in southwestern Lincolnshire, England. When Newton was a child, Lincolnshire was a battleground of the civil wars, in which religious dissension and political rebellion was dividing England's population. Also of significance for his early development were circumstances within his family. He was born after the death of his father, and in his third year his mother married the rector of a neighboring parish and left her son at Woolsthorpe in the care of his grandmother.

After a rudimentary education in local schools, he was sent at the age of 12 to the King's School in Grantham, where he lived in the home of an apothecary named Clark. It was from Clark's stepdaughter that Newton's biographer William Stukeley learned many years later of the boy's interest in her father's chemical library and laboratory and of the windmill run by a live mouse, the floating lanterns, sundials, and other mechanical contrivances Newton built to amuse her. Although she married someone else and he never married, she was the one person for whom Newton seems to have had a romantic attachment.

At birth Newton was heir to the modest estate which, when he came of age, he was expected to manage. But during a trial period midway in his course at King's School, it became apparent that farming was not his metier. In 1661, at the age of 19, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. There the questioning of long-accepted beliefs was beginning to be apparent in new attitudes toward man's environment, expressed in the attention given to mathematics and science.

In grade school, we all learned Isaac Newton's major contribution to the science of physics: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." We see it whenever a jet plane takes off or a kid releases a blown-up balloon and it zips across the room just short of the speed of sound. Probably long before Newton, but certainly ever since he noted the obvious