Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton was a scientist and mathematician in the 1600s to early 1700s. He was born on January 4, 1643 and passed away on March 31, 1727. During his lifetime, he accomplished many things, leaving behind his theories, discoveries, and inventions for the future. Newton conducted experiments on light as a student, and discovered that normal light, or white light, consisted of all of the colors of the rainbow. When the white light passed through a prism, the light spectrum, or the colors of the rainbow, appears. Once the prism is removed, the colors combine back to make white light. Isaac Newton went on to invent the reflecting telescope, changing the world of astronomy. The reflecting telescope was a great improvement from the refracting telescope, and allowed people to see the stars easier while managing to be smaller than the latter. Another accomplishment of Newton was calculus. He invented it to solve problems geometry couldn’t. However, one of the creations he was most famous for were the three laws of motion. These laws connected inertia, force, acceleration, mass, and action and reaction. They changed the way people saw motion and showed how one thing, such as mass, could affect movement. These laws became the foundation for modern physics. Another accomplishment of Isaac Newton was his law of universal gravitation. In this theory, all particles of matter in the universe were thought to have some gravitational force. Unfortunately, this law was imperfect, but was widely received by the people in his time.
Although all of Isaac Newton’s accomplishments were great and worthy of recognition, I believe that his three laws of motion were his greatest. The first law states that an object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. This means that if an object in motion, it will keep moving until another force, stronger than the ones acting on the object, forces it to stop, or move in a different direction. This law connects to forces, including balanced and unbalanced ones. The second law of motion states that the acceleration of an object increases with increased force and decreases with increased mass. An example of this is if you have a bowling ball and a basketball. The bowling ball has more mass, and when you push both of the balls with the same force, the basketball will go further because it has less mass. The more mass an object has the harder it is to make it accelerate, and therefore the more inertia it has. Inertia is the resistance of an object to a change in its speed or direction of its motion. The second law of motion connects to force, mass, and acceleration. The force exerted on an object with a certain mass affected how fast the object would accelerate. In the third law, every action exerted on another object, there is an opposite and equal reaction from the object the action was exerted upon. This is shown if you have a tennis ball and are throwing it down on the ground. When you throw the tennis ball down, you are acting on the tennis ball. The tennis ball hits the ground, and the ground then acts on it. Then, the ball bounces up towards you, with the same amount of force that you used to throw it down on to the ground with. This law connects to action and reactions. Whenever you act on an object, the object will have an opposite reaction with the same force.
With Newton’s laws of motion, we can understand how and why objects react to the way we move them. It also allows us to further understand mass and acceleration and how they play a role in motion. This then connects to our daily lives, because we are constantly moving. It also helps us when we calculate force, and acceleration, and helps us determine how objects with different masses will react to different forces. These laws of motion form the basics to the physics of our many things in our daily lives.
In conclusion, I believe that Newton’s most significant contribution to science were his three laws of motion. These allow us to understand why objects react in certain ways to force and how multiple things can play a role in an object’s movement. Newton’s laws connect directly with our daily lives, and in order for us to fully comprehend motion and the movement around us, we need to understand Isaac Newton’s most important creation, the three laws of motion.
By Esther
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/newton-legacy.html
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/accomplishments-of-isaac-newton.html
http://www.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/isaac-newton2.htm
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