Sir Isaac Newton

The 4th January 2013, the 370th birthday of the late Sir Isaac Newton, decoder of gravity, calculus and many other subjects we hate. So why am I writing about Sir Issac today in March? Simple, gravity.What goes up must come down -- that's gravity in a nutshell, or at least gravity as we most commonly encounter it on Earth. The force is a lot more complicated than that, however. Due to rapid scientific advancement, our scientific understanding of gravity has improved quite a bit over the last 50 years. For starters, scientists finally figured out why regions of Canada boast marginally less gravity than the rest of the world.

Yes, early gravity mapping efforts in the 1960s revealed that the Hudson Bay area in particular exerts a weaker gravitational force. Since less mass equals less gravity, there must be less mass underneath these areas -- but why?

Scientists had two theories. Either convection in the planet's liquid core was pulling down on the continental plates or the area had yet to spring back up from glacial ice sheet compression that took place 10,000 years ago. Both scenarios see Earth's surface compressing, pushing some of the gravity-producing mass to either side of the affected area.

Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. He was a practical child, and so he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that could actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel. I wouldn't want to eat the bread made from the flour.

Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student, much like Einstein..

In 1665 the school temporarily closed because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm occurred. Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.

Despite his apparent affinity for private study, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and served as a mathematics professor and in other capacities until 1696. I remember reading from a book by Stephen Hawking that Sir Isaac Newton's post was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge, which was later succeeded by Paul Dirac in 1932.. then later by Prof Stephen Hawking himself.

Newton published his findings in 1687 in a book called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as thePrincipia. . Yet the book was read by only a handful, understood by far fewer. Yet they knew that the book was a great work, sorta like what Einstein did with his theory of relativity.

Despite his wealth of discoveries Isaac Newton wasn't well liked, particularly in old age, when he served as the head of Britain's Royal Mint, served in Parliament, and write on religion, among other things. As a personality, Newton was unattractive—solitary and reclusive when young, vain and vindictive in his later years, when he tyrannized the Royal Society and vigorously sabotaged his rivals.

In 1727, at 84, Sir Isaac Newton died in his sleep. What a good way to die for a tyrant.. anyway we have to thank him for his discoveries or else we wouldn't have GPS, TV Satellites, Rockets, this and that.. cheers Sir Isaac Newton.

One more myth to dispel about gravity.  The apple and it's story in the first place. 

There is a popular story that Newton was sitting under an apple tree, an apple fell on his head, and he suddenly thought of the Universal Law of Gravitation. As in all such legends, this is almost certainly not true in its details, but the story contains elements of what actually happened.

What Really Happened with the Apple?

Probably the more correct version of the story is that Newton, upon observing an apple fall from a tree, began to think along the following lines: The apple is accelerated, since its velocity changes from zero as it is hanging on the tree and moves toward the ground. Thus, by Newton's 2nd Law there must be a force that acts on the apple to cause this acceleration. Let's call this force "gravity", and the associated acceleration the "accleration due to gravity". Then imagine the apple tree is twice as high. Again, we expect the apple to be accelerated toward the ground, so this suggests that this force that we call gravity reaches to the top of the tallest apple tree.