STS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Scientific Revolution, Centripetal Force, Numerology
8 Jun 2018
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Week 10: Newton
Newton
• Born in 1642 and died in 1727, Newton’s work in many texts were interpreted as the triumph/ pinnacle of
the Scientific Revolution, especially his work ‘Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ or ‘Principia’
which was published in 1687
• Spends considerable periods of life engaging in Alchemy, Numerology and Theological speculation
• Newton’s father died months before he was born, while his mother remarried when he was 3 years old and
left him to be brought up by his maternal grandmother
• Contributions:
o Contributed to theories of optics, helped develop various forms of calculus, helped develop new ways of
doing experiments
o Provided a coherent set of mathematical explanations to synthesise the work of Galileo and Kepler and
others
o Solved most of outstanding problems of physics of the time, unifying celestial and terrestrial physics this
included a decisive solution to the problems of planetary motion
Universal Gravitation
• A particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force which is directly proportional to the
product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres
3 Laws of Motion
• Every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state
by the action of an external force
• F=m*a
• For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction
Planetary Motion
• Planetary motion: a mixture of inertial straight-line motion and centripetal force or attraction to the centre
Technical Limits on Mechanical Philosophy
• Newton observed that light bouncing off a mirror obeys mathematical/geometric laws
o Newton suggests that if we assume that light and the mirror were made up from corpuscles light should in
fact be scattered
o Newtons answer was that the light particles don’t actually hit the mirror but must give off a short-range
repulsive force acting at a distance which creates a thin ‘force field’
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