Einstein and Newton

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. Newton grew up on his family's agricultural estate, Woolsthorpe, and spent his time working the farm land when he was not in school. Under the supervision of a local apothecary near his boarding school in Grantham, Newton studied Latin, and he constructed wooden models, clocks, and sundials in his spare time. Though he sometimes neglected his schoolwork, his analytical [Page 398]intellect landed him a place at Cambridge's Trinity College in 1661, relieving him of the daily tedium of rural life.

At Cambridge, Newton devoted much of his time to independent study. He read books by René Descartes and Galileo Galilei, reflecting on them in handwritten notebooks. His study of Descartes also led him to read about “analytic geometry,” and before long he received a scholarship to continue his studies at Cambridge until he received his B.A. in 1665.

Later that summer, Cambridge shut down because of an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and Newton was forced to return to Woolsthorpe. It was here that he made the discoveries for which he is most famous. The observation of fruit falling from trees let him to deduce that a force attracted them to the earth. from this he pieced together the laws of universal gravitation and developed corresponding formulas for these laws based on the assumption that space and time were unchanging absolutes. Newton used these formulas to estimate the relation between objects in the universe, including the gravitational forces that keep the planets in orbit.

Newton had difficulty proving his calculations to the scientific community, and it was nearly 20 years before he published his findings. He first achieved renown through his experiments with prisms, light, and color. Once accepted as a notable scientist, he published his famous Principia Mathematica, and his laws of universal gravitation finally received the acclaim they deserved. Newton also used his knowledge to assist the astronomer Edmund Halley, who utilized Newton's formulas to predict the arrival of the comet that is now named after him. Newton retained a noble status in the scientific community until his death in 1727. Before he died, he was working to find a unified theory to explain matter in relation to the universe.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879, to a middle-class Jewish family. One of his earliest memories was of his father, showing him a compass with its precise dials and needles, and Einstein wondered about the invisible forces that imparted motion to the magnetized needle. However, he was temperamentally unsuited to submit to the harsh discipline and rote memorization required in the German education system of the day and ended up dropping out of school and leaving Germany at the age of 15.

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