ISAAC NEWTON

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ISAAC NEWTON
Progetto Physics in English

• TRIVIA QUIZ

Prof.ssa A. Martorana
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ISAAC NEWTON
1642-1727 English mathematician and physicist,
one of the foremost scientific intellects of all
time
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ISAAC NEWTON

• Where was he born?

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ISAAC NEWTON

• He was born on Easter
• False, he was born on Christmas

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ISAAC NEWTON

• His father was a scientist, just like him
• False, his father was a farmer who could hardly
  write his own name

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Isaac, as a child, was the best student in his
  class.
• False, it is said that he showed little promise
  in grammar school. He was described as "idle" and
  "inattentive, one of the worst in his class
  until a bully at school kicked him. Isaac
  challenged him to a fight even though he was
  smaller. He won. That wasnt enough for him, he
  decided to be better than the bully at school as
  well.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• He loved drawing.
• True, his room was all coloured, even the
  ceilings, by drawings and paintings made by him.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Isaac studied law at Cambridge
• True, but then he stumbled upon Galilei, Kepler
  and philosophy and decided to change to science.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Newton never became a professor
• False, he became professor of mathematics at the
  age of 26

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ISAAC NEWTON

• What other jobs did Isaac do during his life?

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ISAAC NEWTON

• During the plague of 1665 he didnt do any
  research at all.
• False, it was in this period he wrote his best
  works and made most of his discoveries.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,
  known simply as Principia is recognized as the
  greatest scientific book ever written.
• True, in it we can find the law of universal
  gravitation

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ISAAC NEWTON

• What are some of his other works?

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Isaac wasnt at all religious, in fact he was an
  atheist
• False, he was very religious, in fact, in his
  lifetime he wrote more theological essays than
  scientific ones

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ISAAC NEWTON

• What were Isaacs ideas on religion? Find as many
  elements as you can.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• He studied alchemy
• True, he was obsessed by it he studied all the
  books on it that he could obtain and spent time
  on end in his laboratory trying to turn base
  metals into gold

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ISAAC NEWTON

• His White Light Theory was accepted by his
  scientific peers with enthusiasm
• False, he was often criticised by his peers.

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Isaac never suffered any mental or physical
  illnesses.
• False, he suffered from nervous breakdowns,
  probably caused by poisoning by all the mercury
  he was exposed to during his alchemical
  experiments or perhaps because he was the victim
  of a bipolar disorder

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ISAAC NEWTON

• In the archives of London's Royal Society there
  was a manuscript containing the truth about
  Newtons apple story. It is the manuscript for
  what would become a biography of Newton
  entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's
  Life written by William Stukeley, an
  archaeologist and one of Newton's first
  biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told
  the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as
  such
• "After dinner, the weather being warm, we went
  into the garden and drank thea, under the shade
  of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in
  the same situation, as when formerly, the notion
  of gravitation came into his mind. It was
  occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in
  contemplative mood. Why should that apple always
  descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he
  to himself..."

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ISAAC NEWTON

• So it turns out the apple story is true - for the
  most part. The apple may not have hit Newton in
  the head, but we can still picture it that way!

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ISAAC NEWTON

• Isaac predicted the end of the world
• True, he predicted that the world will end no
  later than 2060, using biblical references 
• " . . . not to assert when the time of the end
  shall be, but to put a stop to the rash
  conjectures of fanciful men
• . . .