In 1665 Newton took his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge without honors. The university closed the next two years because of plague, so Isaac returned to Woolsthorpe in midyear. In the next year and a half, he made a series of new contributions to science. He later recalled, “All this was in the two plague years of 1655 and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since.” In mathematics, Isaac conceived his “method of fluxions,” laid in the foundations for his theory of light and color, and achieved significant understanding into the problem of planetary motion. This understanding eventually led to the publication of his Principia.
In April 1667, when Cambridge opened back up, Isaac returned to school. Against firm odds, he was elected a minor fellow at Trinity. In the next year, he became a senior fellow after taking his master of arts degree. In 1669, before he reached his twenty-seventh birthday, he succeeded Isaac Barrow as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The duties of this job offered Isaac Newton the chance to
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In 1779, Hanna, Isaac’s mother, died. His reaction was to cut off all contact with others and engage himself in alchemical research. These students were once an humiliation to him, but they were difficult investigations into hidden forces of nature. Isaac’s alchemical studies opened theoretical avenues not found in the world view that sustained his early work. While the mechanical philosophy reduced all wonders to the impact of matter in motion, the alchemical tradition upheld the possibility of attraction and the repulsion at the particulate level. Isaac Newton’s later insights in astronomic mechanics can be traced in part to his alchemical interests. By combining action-at-a-distance and mathematics, he transformed the mechanical philosophy by adding gravitational force