Isaac newton life biography of senator kennedy

Born in in Woolsthorpe, England, Sir Isaac Newton began developing his theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics while on break from Cambridge University. The son of a farmer who died three months before he was born, Newton spent most of his early years with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. When the Great Plague shuttered Cambridge in , Newton returned home and began formulating his theories on calculus, light and color, his farm the setting for the supposed falling apple that inspired his work on gravity.

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Newton returned to Cambridge in and was elected a minor fellow. Asked to give a demonstration of his telescope to the Royal Society of London in , he was elected to the Royal Society the following year and published his notes on optics for his peers. 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.

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 In the following years, he returned to his earlier studies on the forces governing gravity and dabbled in alchemy. In , English astronomer Edmund Halley paid a visit to the secluded Newton.

Upon learning that Newton had mathematically worked out the elliptical paths of celestial bodies, Halley urged him to organize his notes. His work was a foundational part of the European Enlightenment. King James II was replaced by his protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange as part of the Glorious Revolution of , and Newton was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament in