He also warmly congratulated Newton, who brushed aside Oldenburg's compliments with false modesty, but immediately replied with a carefully phrased suggestion. ĭetermined to establish English priority, Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Society and founder of the Philosophical Transactions, promptly wrote to Paris with the news. Having already succeeded Barrow as Lucasian professor, Newton was elected to a Fellowship on 11 January 1672. The astonishingly small but powerful telescope caused a minor sensation. It seems likely that Newton unobtrusively fanned rumours about his new invention, until within a couple of years his former mathematics tutor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, had arranged for it to be demonstrated to the Fellows of the Royal Society. To advertise a reflecting telescope he had built in Cambridge in 1669, he emphasized to his colleagues that it could magnify 150 times despite being only 6 inches long-and, he added, he had cast and ground the mirror himself from a home-made alloy ( figure 1). Newton is reputed to have been a reclusive scholar who shunned controversy, but an alternative reading of his rise to fame suggests that on those occasions when he did choose to promote himself, he deployed skills worthy of a professional publicity agent. Resistance to considering that a hero may be flawed-or humanly fallible-still colours modern views, although the same basic facts can often be interpreted in very different ways. Many historians of the Victorian era regarded Newton as a supremely rational scientist with impeccable morals, and they would have been horrified to read some recent accounts that focus on his alchemical research, biblical exegesis and sexual attitudes. For over a quarter of a millennium, generations of scholars have sifted through the surviving evidence about the processes that enabled Newton to achieve his great discoveries, repeatedly producing new analyses of his intellectual sources, his experimental acumen and his character. Because he has become an international icon of scientific genius, it can be hard to appreciate that he was scarcely known outside Cambridge before his ground-breaking paper on optics was published in 1672. Isaac Newton's outstanding reputation strongly affects how he is appraised retrospectively.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |