Sir Isaac Newton Essays (342 words) - Copernican Revolution

Sir Isaac Newton (January 4, 1643 ? March 31, 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor, and natural philosopher, who is generally regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential scientists in history. In his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton enunciated his law of universal gravitation and three laws of motion. He thus laid the groundwork for classical mechanics, also known as Newtonian mechanics, which held sway in the physical sciences until the advent of quantum mechanics around the beginning of the twentieth century. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motions of bodies on Earth and celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and predictive power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and advancement of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Among other scientific work, Newton realized that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors and further argued that light consists of corpuscles (particles). He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum, and he developed a law describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air. Furthermore, he studied the speed of sound in air and voiced a theory of the origin of stars. Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz share the credit for playing major roles in the development of calculus in the Western world. This area of mathematics has since proved of enormous value for the advancement of science and technology. Newton also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, having derived the binomial theorem in its entirety. In addition to his monumental work in mathematics and science, Newton was a devout Christian, although a somewhat unorthodox and non-Trinitarian one. He claimed to study the Bible every day, and he wrote more on religion than he did on science. He thought that his scientific investigations were a way to bring to light the Creator's work and the principles used by the Creator in ordering the physical universe.