Physicist and mathematician — Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe, 1643 – London, 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician and astronomer, considered one of the greatest scientists of all time. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he later became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. In his “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (1687) he formulated the three laws of dynamics and the law of universal gravitation, unifying for the first time the mechanics of terrestrial bodies and that of celestial bodies within a single mathematical framework. He also developed, in parallel with Leibniz, infinitesimal calculus and, through experiments with a prism, demonstrated that white light is composed of the colours of the spectrum. His work founded classical physics and remained the dominant paradigm until relativity and quantum mechanics.
Trivia
The famous apple: according to Newton’s own account, related by friends such as Stukeley, watching an apple fall in his garden led him to reflect that the same force attracting the apple might extend as far as the Moon.
Theories and contributions
- Newton’s second law — The net force on a body equals the product of mass and acceleration: .
- Universal gravitation — Two masses attract each other with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance: .
- Principle of inertia — A body not subject to forces remains at rest or in uniform straight-line motion.
- Decomposition of light — White light is a superposition of different colours, separable by means of a prism (dispersion).
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
60 linked atoms.
00 Grandezze fisiche, stime, equilibrio
00a Come usare il libro
00b Metodo sperimentale
01 Cinematica
02 Forze e leggi di Newton
- How to draw an interaction diagram
- From the interaction diagram to the free body
- Circling a system
- First law (principle of inertia)
- Newton’s Principia
- Newton’s second law
- Mass: inertial or gravitational?
- Third law (action and reaction)
- Second law for a system
- Conclusion: the tools of mechanics
- The second law as a promise
03 Piano inclinato e moto circolare
- Choosing axes
- Frictionless inclined plane
- Pulley on a double inclined plane
- The Atwood machine: measuring gravity in the living room
- Centripetal force
- A car on a flat curve
- The conical pendulum
04b Oscillazioni e moto armonico
05 Quantità di moto e urti
- Conservation of momentum
- Why is momentum conserved?
- Momentum: the principle before the law
- The impulse-momentum theorem and the fence diagram
- Huygens and the laws of collisions
- Types of collision: elastic, inelastic, perfectly inelastic
06 Centro di massa
07 Dinamica rotazionale
08 Gravitazione universale
- Newton’s law of universal gravitation
- Kepler’s laws
- From Kepler to Newton: universal gravity
- The apple and the Moon
- Newton, Hooke and priority for the inverse-square law
- An apple and a moon: the invention of the terrestrial sky
09 Teoria cinetica dei gas
11 Entropia
13 Forza di Coulomb ed elettrostatica
- Coulomb’s law
- Coulomb and Newton: two twins with an asymmetry
- From the torsion balance to Franklin’s lightning
- Two conservation laws together
16 Onde
- Newton versus Huygens: waves or particles?
- The light ray
- Newton’s reflecting telescope
- Newton’s prism
- Rainbow
20 Relatività ristretta
- The paradox of light
- Relativistic momentum and the energy-momentum invariant
- The equivalence principle