PHYF 115 SOFT SKILL ASSIGNMENT SIR ISAAC NEWTON TRIMESTER1 2011/2012

NAME: AHMAD AZIZI AKMAL BIN ABDUL WAHID AKMAL ID: PC87189 SECTION: 2

INDEX
Newtons Life ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Newtons Discoveries------------------------------------------------------------------------------4 Newtons Famous Quotations-------------------------------------------------------------------6

Newtons Life
Isaac Newton is today remembered as the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. His discoveries about light, physics, and mathematics have changed the world. Isaac was born on a cold Christmas Day in 1642 outside the English town of Woolsthorpe. His father died before his birth. His Mother was poor. She was afraid Isaac would not live through the harsh winter. Isaac Newton survived the first few days. He grew into a healthy farm boy. The young Isaac Newton enjoyed making models of clocks, wagons, and windmills. His models actually worked. Doors opened, wheels turned, and sails spun. He made a miniature flour mill with a grindstone turned by the wind. Isaac also made tiny lanterns of crinkled paper with a candle inside. On dark winter mornings, the lanterns lighted his way to school. At school, Isaac made his best grades in Bible class. At the time, England suffered through a bloody Civil War. The Bible gave Isaac the faith to look to the future. The Bible was his favourite book. He read it through time and again. One morning in 1658, Isaac Newton awoke to a threatening sky. Dark, dangerous-looking clouds raced overhead. A few hours later a powerful storm swept across England. Isaac rushed outside to lead the animals into the barn and to bolt the doors. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. The wind howled and uprooted trees. Limbs flew through the air. The vicious storm frightened most people, but not Isaac. Its force fascinated him. When Isaac grew older, he attended Cambridge University. He paid for his room and board by doing chores for his professors. He polished shoes, delivered messages, ran errands into town and served the professors their meals. Isaac studied theology and mathematics at Cambridge. In 1665, terrible news interrupted Isaac's schooling. The Black Death--bubonic plague--struck London. As many as 10,000 people a month died. The Black Death spread to Cambridge itself. University officials closed the school for two terms. Students scattered to the countryside where they would be safe from the epidemic.

Isaac Newton fled to his mother's farm in the country. The forced holiday gave him time to think deeply about the unsolved problems of science. In good weather, he worked at a study table in the apple orchard. Isaac explored a dozen different subjects, including light, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. When he tired of one subject, he switched to some other unsolved mystery of science. For instance, scientists were puzzled by the fact that bodies on earth and bodies in the heavens appeared to follow different laws. Imagine a ball rolling across a perfectly smooth and level table. It rolls forward at a constant speed in a straight line. It only slows because of air resistance and the friction between it and the table. The moon, like a ball on a flat and perfectly smooth table, keeps moving year after year without slowing. However, the moon does not travel in a straight line. Instead, it circles the earth. Why did the moon not travel in a straight line? Isaac Newton remembered the force of the wind. Although invisible, it turned his windmill. The force of the storm had uprooted trees. He concluded that a force acts upon the moon to bend its straight-line path into a closed orbit. What was the unknown force? One day an apple fell from the tree overhead and banged onto Isaac's worktable in the orchard. He picked up the apple. As he held it, he noticed the moon, which had risen in the east. Could it be, Isaac asked, that the moon and the apple are both subject to the same force of gravity? Isaac proved that gravity acts on both the apple and the moon He showed that earth's gravity extends far out into space and controls the moon in its orbit. Isaac Newton returned to Cambridge where he taught mathematics. Working off and on for the next 20 years, he proved that all objects attract each other according to a simple equation. The sun, moon, planets, even apples and grains of sand are all subject to the law of gravity. The law of gravity became Isaac Newton's best-known and most important discovery. Isaac warned against using it to view the universe as only some machine like a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done."

As the years passed, people came to understand the importance of his many discoveries. Isaac received many honors. In 1705, Queen Anne knighted him, Sir Isaac Newton. It was the first knighthood for scientific discoveries rather than deeds on the battlefield or in government. When Isaac Newton died in 1727, the poor country boy from Woolsthorpe was buried in a plot reserved for a king. Despite the fame as scientist, the Bible and not nature had been Isaac Newton's greatest passion. He devoted more time to Scripture than to science. He said, "I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."

Newtons Discoveries
Newtons laws of Motion Newton constructed three laws of motion. His first law is that any moving object will carry on moving at a constant speed forever, or a non-moving object will remain non-moving, unless other external forces act upon it. His second law is that a force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by the acceleration of the object; this shows that the more force you apply to an object the faster it will accelerate and that if an object has more mass then it shall have more momentum, thus propelling it further. Newtons third law is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newtons work on optics During Newtons time most people thought of light as just being white. But Newton had observed spectral colours on the edges of prisms and lenses of telescopes when light was shone through them; other people before Newton had seen the same effect in raindrops and prisms on the edges of mirrors and thought that the raindrops or prisms added the colour to the light. He investigated this phenomenon further by shining white light through prisms. The prisms broke up the white light into a spectrum of colours. When he blocked off all the colours but one and passed it through a prism, it remained the same, so Newton came to the conclusion that white light consisted of the different colours of the spectrum but the colours of the spectrum did not consist of more basic colours. Gravitational theory Newton observed that all things fall towards the centre of the earth such as the apple in the orchard. From his first law of motion, he knew that some force must be causing this downwards acceleration; he called this force gravity. Newton assumed that if gravity extended to even high mountains it would probably extend to the moon. He also thought that gravity caused the moons orbit around the earth and that all large objects have a gravitational field. The reason he gave for the moon not crashing down to earth is the momentum, which propels the moon away while the gravity pulls it towards the earth, causing the orbit.

Alchemy Alchemy is the practise of trying to turn elements such as lead into gold. Newton was a very keen alchemist. However, we know little about his alchemistical studies because he wanted to keep much of it secret as many alchemists did. His passion for alchemy did have an impact on his life. Isaac Newton had white hair by the age of 30 and was deeply depressed for a period of his life. These are both symptoms of lead and mercury poisoning. As far as anyone knows, he never succeeded in turning any other elements into gold. Astronomy Newton had noticed spectral colours on the edge of bright objects viewed through telescopes, he then designed and made a new type of telescope, a mirror telescope, which enabled bright objects to be viewed without the spectral edges. In his most famous book Principia (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica), he analyzes the movements of moving objects such as planets. He also explained how all the planets in the solar system are attracted to the sun and how all celestial bodies are attracted to each other. Newton also explained other phenomena such as the effect of the suns gravity on the moon and the orbit of comets. Among many other things he also theorised that the earth was oblate (broader at the equator than a sphere), some scientists disagreed with him and said the earth was more egg-shaped. To settle the matter they sent expedition teams to the North Pole and Peru to take measurements which would prove who was right. The expedition teams returned a decade later with the measurements which supported Newtons theory.

Newtons Famous Quotations

It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. Plato is my friend Aristotle is my friend but my greatest friend is truth.

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Its much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of anything.

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.