![]() He had few close friends, rarely spoke, and sometimes got so caught up in his work that he forgot to eat. Newton was the quintessential absent-minded professor.Īs a student and later a professor at Cambridge, Newton had a reputation for being reclusive, and even a bit nasty. And he never claimed it bonked him on the head. As he recalled later, he “began to think of gravity as extending to the orb of the moon.” Historians suggest that the apple story, which Newton only told very late in life, should be taken with a grain of salt. Lazing in the garden of his boyhood home, Newton saw an apple fall to the ground in contemplating its fall, he also thought about the Moon moving in its orbit around the Earth, eventually deducing that the same force-gravity-was the cause of both. Like the story of Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the story of Newton and the Apple has taken on legendary proportions. The apple probably didn’t hit Newton on the head. John Conduitt wrote that “Though Sir Isaac was not so lusty as his antagonist, he had so much more spirit and resolution.” Newton won the fight, which ended with Newton pulling the other boy by the ears, and pushing his face “against the side of the church.” The incident may have kick-started Newton’s academic performance: Before the fight, he was near the bottom of his class afterward, he rose to be first in the school. One day, the school bully kicked Newton in the stomach, prompting Newton to challenge the boy to a fight after class. Young Isaac was bullied at school-and fought back.Īs a youngster, Newton attended the King’s School, the local grammar school in Grantham, Lincolnshire (still functioning as a boys school to this day). John Conduitt, who would later marry Newton’s niece, recounted Newton’s claim that “when he was born, he was so little they could put him into a quart pot.” 2. When his mother, Hannah, gave birth, the baby was so tiny he wasn’t expected to survive. Newton’s father, also named Isaac Newton, died a few months before young Isaac was born on Decem(or JanuNew Style). Isaac Newton was born prematurely and barely survived his first week on earth. Here are 14 things that you might not have known about Sir Isaac. Some of his achievements are readily filed under G for genius others simply reveal his complex and all-too-human personality. What Galileo and Descartes had begun, Isaac Newton polished: By discovering the mathematical principles that grounded everything from falling apples to orbiting moons, planets, and comets, Newton laid the foundations of modern physics.
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