30 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2019
angry outburst in which he had threatened to burn the
house down around his mother and stepfather.
In fact, Newton made a list of 57 such “transgres-
sions,” including making pies on Sunday, striking
many people, setting his heart on money, stealing
plums and sugar from his mother, punching his sister,
gluttony, and beating Arthur Storer, the first astrono-
mer to move to colonial America. Newton felt he was
a great sinner.
Newton’s mother did her best to turn her son into
a farmer, but Newton would have none of it. He was
allowed to attend university because, according to his
mother’s brother, William Ayscough, he was not fit to
do anything else, thanks to his poor health growing
up and his apparent lack of interest in anything
except making models and reading books.
Newton was a vigorous experimenter, and the sto-
ries of his work and discoveries made while isolated at
Woolsthorpe during the plague years are well known.
This is when he developed the bino-
mial theorem that led to calculus,
completed his early work on the theory
of gravity, and conducted several opti-
cal studies, including his work with
sunlight. By sending the Sun’s light
through a slit in a window shade and
passing the light through a prism, he
broke the beam into a rainbow, or
spectrum. Then, passing the light
through a second prism, he realized
that the prism wasn’t creating the
colors, but that they were a property
of the Sun’s light.
Newton also used himself as a guinea pig in what
might have been a rather ill-advised attempt to better
understand color and vision. In the first half of the
17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes
had proposed a curious idea about color. He suggestedAs Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge,
Isaac Newton was required to give regular mathematics lectures.
Apparently, he was so bad at this that students stopped coming to class.
At times, Newton would simply speak to an empty room.
These engravings feature an older Isaac Newton; the image at left appeared
in an 1889 book, Famous Men of Science. The work at right is based on a 1725
portrait of the scientist belonging to the Royal Society. SARAH K. BOLTON; JOHN VANDERBANKWoolsthorpe Manor in
Lincolnshire, England,
was Newton’s home.
He was born there
and also retreated to
the family home while
the University of
Cambridge closed
during the plague
from 1665 to 1667.
During this time, he
carried out several of
his famous optical
experiments. DEFACTO/
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS