![]() With his newfound influence, Newton opposed the attempts of King James II to reinstitute Catholic teachings at English Universities. His work was a foundational part of the European Enlightenment. “Principia” propelled Newton to stardom in intellectual circles, eventually earning universal acclaim as one of the most important works of modern science. Newton’s three laws of motion state that (1) Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it (2) Force equals mass times acceleration: F=MA and (3) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. ![]() The result was the 1687 publication of “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which established the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity. Upon learning that Newton had mathematically worked out the elliptical paths of celestial bodies, Halley urged him to organize his notes. In 1684, English astronomer Edmund Halley paid a visit to the secluded Newton. In the following years, he returned to his earlier studies on the forces governing gravity and dabbled in alchemy. Known for his temperamental defense of his work, Newton engaged in heated correspondence with Hooke before suffering a nervous breakdown and withdrawing from the public eye in 1678. His methods drew sharp rebuke from established Society member Robert Hooke, who was unsparing again with Newton’s follow-up paper in 1675. Through his experiments with refraction, Newton determined that white light was a composite of all the colors on the spectrum, and he asserted that light was composed of particles instead of waves. Asked to give a demonstration of his telescope to the Royal Society of London in 1671, he was elected to the Royal Society the following year and published his notes on optics for his peers. He constructed the first reflecting telescope in 1668, and the following year he received his Master of Arts degree and took over as Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow. Today, of course, the radical claims that Galileo first made in Sidereus Nuncius are the foundation of our understanding of how solar systems work: planets orbit stars, and other worlds follow the same laws of physics and geology as Earth.Isaac Newton’s Telescope and Studies on Light In the early 1600s, that amounted to heresy, and Galileo's refusal to back down landed him a sentence of house arrest for life. He supported the radical idea that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun, challenging the accepted doctrine that God had placed Earth at the center of everything - and he dared to stick to his guns. The claim sparked some debate, but the Church quickly accepted the idea of uneven terrain on the Moon.īut another idea Galileo published in Sidereus Nuncius landed Galileo in trouble with the Church. Galileo, on the other hand, published his sketches and conclusions in his 1610 work Sidereus Nuncius. But Aristotle's view held sway until Galileo's observations came along to challenge it.Ī few months before Galileo's late November observations, on July 26, 1609, English astronomer Thomas Harriot also studied the Moon through a telescope, but he seems not to have drawn any particular conclusions based on what he saw, and he didn't publish his drawings or notes. ![]() In the first century CE, the philosopher Plutarch had described mountains and valleys on the Moon back in the first century CE, and suggested that, like Earth, the Moon was inhabited. Galileo wasn't the first person to propose that the Moon might have terrain similar to Earth. ![]()
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