The man who built the foundation of physics with no shoulders to stand on
In short: Most great scientists build upon the work of those before them. But in the 1600s, Isaac Newton had almost no predecessors to cite. He lived in an era of magic and miracles, yet he managed to derive the laws of motion and universal gravitation in just 18 months.
During the 17th century, the prevailing worldview was dominated by beliefs in astrology, spells, and a literal interpretation of the earth being 6000 years old. Unlike 19th-century scientists like Maxwell or 20th-century giants like Einstein and Bohr, Newton lacked a substantial body of established scientific work to utilize. He had to forge the path of modern physics from a landscape where everything was still considered a miracle.
Newton's output was staggering: he discovered many laws of optics, developed the laws of motion, and derived the universal law of gravitation. While any one of these would be Nobel-prize worthy today, he produced the theoretical basis for all four in only 18 months before publishing them in his 1687 landmark work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. His most profound contribution was uniting the earth with the heavens through the law of universal gravitation.
The breakthrough famously involved an apple falling on his farm during plague years. Newton realized that the force pulling the apple to the ground—an 'action at a distance'—might be the same force keeping the moon in orbit, only with a different magnitude. He reasoned that this force was proportional to mass and must decrease as it spread out from the earth's surface like a sphere. This led him to conclude the force decreases by the square of the distance (r squared), resulting in the formula F = G M1 M2/d^2.
To explain why the moon doesn't crash into Earth, Newton combined his laws: an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon. The moon is essentially falling toward Earth at a constant velocity, but because gravity continuously pulls it inward, its trajectory becomes circular. He visualized this as a cannon firing from a mountain; if fired fast enough, the ball would travel around the globe and hit the back of the cannon, mirroring the moon's orbital path.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: The Greatest Scientist Who Ever Lived!
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