Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections Inflections and Colours of Light - Couverture souple

Newton, Sir Isaac

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0486602052 ISBN 13 : 9780486602059

Editeur : Dover Publications Inc., 2000

Synopsis

Book by Sir Isaac Newton I Bernard Cohen Albert Einstein S

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur :

ISAAC NEWTON was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, Eng­land, on December 25, 1642. His father having died before his birth and his mother having remarried, Newton was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the neighboring town of Grantham, where he attended school. An inattentive student, Newton nonetheless showed a great aptitude for making mechani­cal contrivances such as windmills and water clocks. While at school, Newton boarded with an apothecary, who may have imparted to the youngster a lifelong love of chemical experiments.

In 1656, following the death of her second husband, Newton's mother removed him from school and brought him back to Woolsthorpe with the idea of making her son a farmer. Newton's teacher at Grantham, recognizing the boy's talents, prevailed upon her to allow Newton to prepare for entrance to Cambridge University. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661, under the tutelage of Isaac Barrow, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and took his degree four years later.

Between 1665 and 1667, Newton made great strides in his method of "fluxions" (an early form of differential calculus) and began work on gravitation. It was also at this time that Newton inaugurated his studies on the nature of light: he demonstrated that differences in color resulted from differences in refrangibility, i.e., the ability of a ray of light to bend when passed through a refracting medium. In 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge from Woolsthorpe (where he had gone to escape the plague); two years later he succeeded Barrow as Lucasian Professor. In 1672 Newton was elected to the Royal Society.

Newton's great work, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philoso­phy (1687), grew out of his ongoing investigations into gravitation and planetary motion. Written over a period of only eighteen months, this book was immediately hailed as a masterpiece: it demonstrated how the law of gravitation could explain diverse phenomena, ranging from the tides to the irregularities of the moon's motion, and made possible a mathematical principle, unrealized up to that time, of the workings of a dynamic universe. Although Newton's system needed to be revised in the twentieth century in view of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, it remains valid for systems of ordinary dimensions, involving velocities that do not approach the speed of light.

Newton's contributions to science brought him fame and financial security: in addition to his professorship at Cambridge, Newton served for two years as a member of the Convention Parliament following the overthrow of King James II during the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. In 1696 Newton was ap­pointed warden, and later master, of the mint, a lucrative position he held until his death. In 1704 he was made president of the Royal Society, and in 1705 he received a knighthood from Queen Anne. While a member of Parliament, Newton came into contact with such luminaries as the philosopher John Locke and the diarist Samuel Pepys.

Newton's life was not without bitterness, however: a pro­tracted controversy raged over whether Newton or Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had been first in the invention of calculus, which strained scientific relations between England and the Continent. And, despite the Principia's enthusiastic reception, Newton's system would not be fully accepted among scientists and in university teaching until after his death.

Following his retirement from Cambridge in 1701, Newton prepared revised editions of the Principia (1713, 1726) and pub­lished his second great treatise, the Opticks, in 1704. He died in Kensington, England, on March 20, 1727.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

One of the most readable of all the great classics of physical science, Opticks presents a comprehensive survey of 18th-century knowledge of light. Newton describes his experiments with spectroscopy, colors, lenses, reflection, refraction, and more, in language lay readers can easily follow. Based upon the fourth edition, published in 1730. Foreword by Albert Einstein.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Dover Publications Inc.
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0486602052
• ISBN 13: 9780486602059
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 406