Isaac Newton's Advancements In The 17th Century

Every era has their fair share of innovations, whether they be technological or not. During the 17th century and much into the 18th century, there were quite a lot of advancements, a large sum coming from an established physicist and mathematician named Isaac Newton. His innovations range from his three laws of gravity, to constructing the first reflecting telescope. Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest physicist who has ever lived. He and Albert Einstein are almost equally matched contenders for this title. Each of these great scientists produced dramatic and startling transformations in the physical laws we believe our universe obeys, changing the way we understand and relate to the world around us.
Isaac Newton attended The King’s School,

When he was 17, his mother stopped his schooling so that he could become a farmer, though Newton found he had neither aptitude nor liking for farming; so his mother allowed him to return to school, where he finished as top student. In June 1661, aged 18, Newton began studying for a law degree at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, earning money working as a personal servant to wealthier students. By the time he was a third-year student he was spending a lot of his time studying mathematics and natural philosophy (today we call it physics). He was also very interested in alchemy, which we now categorize as a pseudoscience. His natural philosophy lecturers based their courses on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas from Ancient Greece. This was despite the fact that 25 years earlier, in 1638, Galileo Galilei had published his physics masterpiece Two New Sciences establishing a new scientific basis for the physics of motion. Newton began to disregard the material taught at his college, preferring to study the recent (and more scientifically correct) works of Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, and

The earliest telescopes, such as those used by Galileo, consisted of glass lenses mounted in a tube. Newton discovered that when light (from a star, for example) passed through a lens the different colors were refracted by differing amounts. This meant that the components of white light were brought to a focus at different places and the image of a star would then appear to be surrounded by a spectrum of colors. This effect is called chromatic aberration, and was not easily rectified using the technology available in Newton's time. To solve the problem, Newton designed a telescope that used mirrors, rather than lenses, to bring the light to a focus. It is interesting to note that Newton did not invent the idea of a reflecting telescope: the honour for this goes to the Scottish mathematician James Gregory, who designed such an instrument in the early 1660s. Newton communicated the details of his telescope to the Royal Society in 1670, but it did not become widely known until the publication of Opticks more than thirty years