TRADUZA

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

A.P. French

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

When one considers all that Newton achieved, and the cultural and scientific environment in which he achieved it, there is reason to regard him as the greatest scientist and perhaps the greatest genius who has ever lived.

Despite the godlike status that some have tried to ascribe to him, he was of course a fallible human being. He groped and fumbled, as all scientists do, in approaching a new problem; he even fudged things a bit sometimes in trying to reconcile theory with observation. But the extent and profoundity of his discoveries remain without parallel.

This would not have been predictable from his beginnings as a somewhat unloved child growing up in the English countryside, though he did demonstrate practical ingenuity and a probing curiosity, and was a good enough student to be admitted to Cambridge University. It was there that the real Newton emerged, with astonishing suddenness, as he approached the end of his undergraduate career. This young man, still an undergraduate, devoured most of what was then known in mathematics and began making his own original contributions. His physics began at about the same time with investigations into optics, and through a succession of controlled experiments he built up a picture of what light is and how it behaves. Here his powers as an experimentalist revealed themselves the brilliantly analytical mind behind the experiments that it devised.