Isaac Newton is probably one of the smartest people of all time. Aside from discovering the foundations of physics, he was also the first person to describe the force of gravity. He designed the first practical reflecting telescope and explained how colours work based on the phenomenon of white light splitting into a rainbow after passing through a prism. He has been credited with inventing ridge-edged coins (to fight counterfeiting) and the cat-flap door (seriously), and was an influential religious philosopher. But my favourite story about Newton is the following.
Today, both men are credited with inventing calculus, although Leibniz’s firmer grasp of publicity earned him the small victory of having his notation, rather than Newton’s, live on in mathematics even today.
But despite the man’s peculiarities, without Newton’s work, physics would not be anywhere near the point it is at today.
Newton described his laws of motion in a 1687 work with the catchy title PhilosophiƦ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for over three weeks (a record at the time). This book remains one of the most important scientific works in human history. In it, he famously used his laws of motion in combination with a new theory of gravity to explain the movement of the stars and planets (more on this in the chapter on gravity). Newton thus brought new mathematical insights to problems that had been baffling humanity for ages and effectively founded an entire branch of physics, now known as classical mechanics.
In order to fully understand each of the three laws, we’ll need to spend a bit of time explaining what a force is.
Next: 2.2 – Forces
Previous: 1.3 – Falling Objects