contemplation,”^25 with the glaring exception of a young man in
Woolsthorpe.
Whether in Woolsthorpe, Cambridge, or later, London, Newton was
characterized by one, most unusual trait: his power of concentration.
When asked by a devotee how he had conjured the concept of gravitation,
Newton replied, “By thinking on it continually.” When faced with a
theoretical dilemma, he did without sleep and almost completely without
food. He took no pleasure in exercise, avocation, epicurean delights, or
fraternity; only intellectual pursuits provided temptation. For a man who
decoded the tides, it is remarkable that he never saw the sea, yet his
ascetic lifestyle yielded profound insights into the physics of motion,
light, and gravity. His radical curiosity about the mechanics of the world
did not extend, physically, more than a one-hundred-mile radius from his
origination.
Completely (intellectually) alone in Woolsthorpe, Newton began a
project of mathematical and philosophical exploration in 1665 that started
with the proof of the binomial theorem, a pillar of mathematics to this day.
How much farm work and tasks around the house did the twenty-three-
year-old perform? We don’t know, but it is clear that a huge amount of
mental energy was expended by Newton.
For any reader who has struggled with high school and college calculus,
it is startling to consider one man inventing the process of differentiation,
and later, integration. (There was a protracted debate over primacy in the
innovation of calculus between Newton and German Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1716), with Newton never surrendering the title.) Newton
developed the mathematics of calculus to deal with the complex
computations he was faced with when considering the motions of the
planets and properties of gravity. Setting aside his new math weapon, he
turned to the triangular glass prism he had purchased at a country fair
outside Cambridge.
Rainbows in the sky have always had the same color pattern
(ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet); but nothing
more than the order of the colors was understood. Why were they always
the same? Newton retreated upstairs to his room where a small window
faced the southern sky. Cutting a small hole into a board covering the
window, Newton was able to isolate a shaft of light into the dark room.
This afternoon light, particularly on a sunny winter day, was used to pass
marcin
(Marcin)
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