Newton’s quirks
Stories from Physics
for 11-14
14-16
Newton’s eccentric character is often commented upon. He kept a record of the sins he felt he had committed including:
- Making a Mousetrap on Thy day
- Peevishness with my mother
- Punching my sister
- Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
- Robbing my mother’s box of plums and sugar and
- Using a fellow student’s towel to spare my own.
Newton predicted that the Day of Judgement could not come before 2060 and would perhaps occur even later. While investigating the formation of colours, Newton reports he took a bodkin and pushed it ‘as neare to the backside of my eye as I could’ causing circles to appear in his vision. After staring at the Sun for an extended period he reported that white paper appeared red when he looked at it with his damaged eye, and green when viewed through a pinhole. During the time Newton served as a member of parliament, the only record of his contribution is a request for a window to be closed. Newton argued that the vapour of comets’ tails might be attracted to the Earth and ‘… so for the conservation of the seas, and fluids of the planets, comets seem to be required’.
Interpreters have observed that Newton’s writing contains a number of alternative conceptions that are similar to those students hold. For example, at some points in his work, Newton implied that forces are transferred between objects during collisions and assumed that the motion of the planets required a centrifugal force.
References
A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 5-6
R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 816
R. Lliffe, Newton: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p.39
D. Berlinski, Newton’s Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World, New York, NY, The Free Press, 2000, p. 145
I. Newton, Principia, Book III (Trans. A. Mote), New York, NY, Daniel Adee, p. 493
M. Bartusiak, Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking became loved, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2015, pp. 88-89
H. Collins, Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Wave, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 828-829
M. Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Mineola, NY, Dover Publications Inc., 1957, p. 94
H. Kragh, Varying Gravity: Dirac’s Legacy in Cosmology and Geophysics, Cham, Springer International Publishing, 2016, p. 69
M. Howard, Mark the Spot: Defying Gravity, April 8th 2015, Tufts Now
M. S. Steinberg, D. E. Brown, & J. Clement, Genius is not immune to persistent misconceptions: conceptual difficulties impeding Isaac Newton and contemporary physics students. International Journal of Science Education, vol. 12, no. 3,1990, pp. 265-273