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| Isaac Newton |
As I said in the
previous article, in my biographical dictionary 1000
great scientists (1996) and an unpublished book, I proposed an
objective quantification of the importance of different scientists, using
measures such as the number of lines that various encyclopedias assign to each.
Six scientists, one Greek (Aristotle), of whom we have already spoken, and five
from the West (Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein) were tied with
the highest score in these studies. Among these five, is there one who can be
considered the greatest scientist of our civilization?
In 1964 Isaac Asimov conducted another study (The Isaac Winners) on the relative importance
of men of science, which resulted in a list of the 72 best scientists of all
time, in his opinion. This list is simply qualitative and does not establish a
relative order among the names that appear in it, although Asimov (again in his
opinion) asserts that Isaac Newton, who happened to be his namesake, was the greatest
scientist of all time.
Let’s look at some of Newton’s achievements:
- He made important advances in mechanics, whose modern origins date from
the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, Jean Buridan presented the
concept of impetus, the first step towards the idea of inertia,
while the Calculatores of Merton College (Oxford) defined uniform
motion, uniformly accelerated motion
and average velocity, and enunciated the theorem of the average velocity,
which states that a uniformly accelerated body starting at rest travels
the same distance as a body moving at a constant velocity equal to half
the final velocity of the accelerated body. The proof of this theorem,
which has been improperly attributed to Galileo, is in fact due to Nicole Oresme,
bishop of Lisieux (14th century), who was also the first to graph velocity
as a function of time and to affirm that the space traveled is the
area enclosed under the graph. At the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Domingo de Soto stated that heavy bodies fall in the void with
uniformly accelerated movement, which Galileo Galilei proved experimentally
in 1608. In this field Newton formulated the three
fundamental laws of dynamics, which put order in a set of previous
theorems and discoveries. That is why he said that famous phrase: If I have seen further it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants. The three laws are:
- Law of inertia: an object at
rest remains at rest unless some force acts upon it. A moving object
remains in motion in the same direction and at the same speed, unless
some force acts upon it.
- When a force acts on a mass,
the movement of that mass accelerates with an acceleration proportional
to the force.
- Every action corresponds to an
equal reaction in the opposite direction.
- He revolutionized classical
physics and astronomy with the theory of universal
gravitation, which achieved spectacular results by unifying
phenomena as apparently different as the fall of bodies and the movement
of celestial bodies. This theory made possible the discovery of Neptune,
whose existence and position were predicted in the nineteenth century by
Adams and Le Verrier from anomalies detected in the orbit of Uranus, a
deviation of a few seconds of arc from the position it should occupy
according to Newton’s law. The publication of this law provoked the widespread
acceptance of Copernicus cosmological theory, which however was not
experimentally proved until the nineteenth century, when the astronomer
and mathematician Bessel detected the parallax of a nearby star, thus
proving for the first time that Earth moves around the sun along the year.
Newton’s theory remained as he had built it for over two centuries, until
Albert Einstein replaced it by his theory of general relativity.
- He was the father of modern
optics with his discovery of the decomposition of white
light by a prism of transparent glass, which led him to propose a
corpuscular theory of light that for over two centuries competed with the
wave theory proposed by Huygens, until in the twentieth century the
problem was solved by the wave-particle duality, which
asserts that both theories are correct, each in certain circumstances.
- He revolutionized mathematics
by creating differential (or infinitesimal) calculus at the same
time as Leibniz, which gave rise to a great controversy about priority. Apparently
they came independently to the same result, although Leibniz’s notation is
more convenient and now universally accepted.
- He was also a great technologist,
having built the first reflection
telescopes.
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| Gottfried Leibniz |
Newton was
less successful in his studies on alchemy, which had not yet reached the rank
of science and had to wait until the end of the eighteenth century. He also
studied in depth biblical chronology and the writings of the Church Fathers,
and wrote articles on theological studies, some of which were published during
his lifetime and others remained unpublished until after his death.
Newton was
a convinced believer. In relation to his own theory of universal gravitation,
he said this:
Gravity explains the motions of
the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion... [God]
rules all things, and knows all things that happen or can happen.
Manuel Alfonseca
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