My name is Isaac Newton. I am a mathematician and a physicist. My theories revolutionized the scientific thinking of my time, although I never looked for popularity or fame.
I was always a solitary person, but today I will have the pleasure of showing you how I managed to understand the laws that govern the universe. This is not an adventurous travel story. It is a story of stubbornness and passion.
The school was a long way from our house, so I lived in Grantham with a very kind family called Clark, who looked after me well. Mr. Clark was a pharmacist, and one of his daughters, Catherine, became my best friend. I didn’t make friends easily. I was a bit of a loner, and I liked studying and building strange devices. I made very complicated mechanical objects, like sundials and water clocks. However, I was quite content.
When I was sixteen, my mother insisted I return home to Woolsthorpe. I was supposed to look after the family estate and my three stepbrothers. It was not a good idea. I was not meant to be a farmer! Our animals trespassed on our neighbors’ land, and I was even taken before the feudal tribunal.
Fortunately, my uncle William and my old school teacher convinced my mother to let me return to my studies, so in 1661, I enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge.
Everything changed when I met my first professor of mathematics. I had never studied this subject before, and it opened up a new, fascinating, and wonderful world.
Unfortunately, in 1665, there was an outbreak of the plague in the city of Cambridge and all the colleges were closed. I returned home, but I retained my interest in mathematics and decided to continue my studies. I remained absorbed by my books, as if I had never left Cambridge.
From that moment on, I thought only about mathematics. I loved inventing new problems, solving them, and finding ways of doing calculations that had never even been imagined until then.
I discovered that mathematics could be useful for understanding the world around me, and over the years, I applied it to physics, optics, and astronomy. I realized that everything moves, everything changes, and I had to find a way to calculate these changes.
Around 1666, I began studying gravity, the force that attracts all bodies toward the center of the earth. Some people think that the idea came to me when an apple fell on my head. I won’t say that is exactly what happened, but there was an apple tree outside my bedroom window.
I was also fascinated by light, and I began to take an interest in optics. I carried out a lot of experiments, and I realized that the light was not just white. Using a prism, I managed to break light into all its components: the colored rays that form the rainbow.
In 1669, when I was twenty-seven years old, I became a professor of mathematics, but my lessons were not very popular. Perhaps it was because I often forgot to go to the lecture room (I had too many experiments to carry out) or because the lessons were too difficult. I decided to change the topic of my lessons and began teaching optics and showing students the phenomena of light and color.
At the same time, I began working on a new kind of telescope, which I built using mirrors instead of the usual glass lenses. This would become the first reflecting telescope in history. Two years later, I presented it at a meeting of the Royal Society of London. It was a success. In 1672, I was made a fellow of this renowned scientific association.
Around 1693, I became ill, and in that same period, I lost the support of my friend Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss mathematician who had always taken my side in discussions with scientists who questioned my theories. It was a severe blow, and I succumbed to a nervous breakdown.
My health continued to worsen. The metals and the substances that I had used in my past alchemic experiments were poisonous and had made me ill. However, this was only discovered at a later date.
In spite of my work at the Royal Mint, I continued to formulate my theories and to perfect them on the basis of the new things I learned every day. Scientists all over Europe anxiously awaited my writings.
