Newton's New Universe
1687 AD
1687 1687
00.03W51.25N
SCI

LONDON, ENGLAND
	Though he was bright, Isaac Newton was at the bottom of his class in Grantham, England. At least he was until one morning a bully beat him up.
	Newton was so angry he fought the boy again after school. He won, but wasn't satisfied with proving he was a better fighter. He decided to be a better student as well, and rose to the top of his class.
	Eventually Newton's mother took him out of school to help on the farm, but he never could concentrate on his work.
	Then his uncle came to visit one day and found Newton by a hedge working a math problem. Where the sheep he was watching had gone to was anybody's guess. Newton's uncle told his mother she was wasting her time trying to make him into a farmer, and suggested sending him to Cambridge University.
	Newton found a home at Cambridge. While there he discovered a method for calculating the area of curved objects or the volume of curved solids. (This process is now called calculus, the term used by Gottfried Leibniz, who discovered the process independently.)
	Newton also found that light does not pick up colors from the objects it strikes, as was commonly believed, but already has all colors in it.
	Newton went home to Woolsthorpe in 1665 to escape the Black Plague. While he was there, one story goes, he saw an apple fall from a tree and wondered why it fell straight down and not off to the side, or even up. Perhaps, he decided, the earth attracts the apple and the apple attracts the earth.
	His final explanation of this principle is in his greatest work, "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica," or just "Principia," published in 1687.  This book explains that gravity holds the planets and suns in their orbits. It was the accepted explanation for the working of the universe for 200 years, until Albert Einstein introduced a new concept.
	In 1689 Newton was elected to Parliament, though he never spoke  except to ask a porter to close a window.
	Then, in 1705, Queen Anne visited Cambridge and made Newton a Knight of the Realm. Since then, he has always been known as Sir Isaac Newton.