Post on 24-Mar-2021
Today we will be...Finding out about Isaac Newton’s scientific discoveries.
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Isaac Newton
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What can you remember about Isaac Newton’s early
life?
Think, pair, share your ideas.
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Did you remember these facts?
✴Isaac Newton lived a long time ago. He was born in 1642.
✴He grew up in Lincolnshire and had quite a difficult childhood. His mother abandoned him when he was 4.
✴He should have been a farmer but he went to university to study science instead.
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Isaac Newton made lots of important scientific discoveries during his life.
Do you know what any of these discoveries were?
Let’s find out...
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The Spectrum of Light
Isaac had bought a prism from a fair and he enjoyed watching the rainbows it created in the sun. He wanted to know why it made these
Isaac Newton doing an experiment with light and prisms
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rainbows so he conducted an experiment.
This picture shows light shining on a prism.
Have you ever seen a glass prism make a
rainbow?
Can you explain what is happening in
this picture?
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He shone a pinpoint of light onto the prism and it cast a spectrum of coloured lights onto the wall. He realised that the light from the sun is made
up of lots of different colours mixed together. We see this as white light.
He also found out that if the light is directed through a lens, it concentrates back into white light.
prism
prism
prism
lens
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Gravity
Isaac Newton went home to Woolsthorpe during the plague of 1665. One day, he was sitting under a tree in an orchard when he saw an apple fall to the ground. He wondered why it fell and why it didn’t just stay where it was.
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He realised that because the Earth was so big, it had a force called gravity that pulled other objects towards it. The apple fell because gravity was
pulling towards the centre of the Earth. Isaac worked out that gravity was strong enough to keep the moon in orbit.
He created a formula that means you can work out how
quickly an object is accelerating by knowing how heavy it is and how hard it
was pushed.
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CalculusIsaac invented a new type of maths to help him with complicated
calculations he had to make when studying gravity.
He called it fluxions but it is now known as calculus and lots of mathematicians still use it today.
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This meant that people could see the planets and stars in more detail so they could learn more
about them.
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Reflecting Telescope
Isaac made a new telescope for looking at the planets and stars. Older telescopes just had lenses (circles of glass) to focus the view, but these made the picture fuzzy.
Isaac put in curved mirrors instead of lenses which gave a much clearer picture.
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Even though Isaac had discovered and invented some amazing things in the ten years since he started at university, he hadn't really told
anyone about them. He had problems talking to and trusting people since his mother had abandoned him for her second husband when he
was a little boy.
Why do you think it was important for him to tell people
about his discoveries?
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