DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From "Average" Student" to "Father of Physics"
Imagine This: You're twenty-two years old, and you're sitting beneath a tree in your mother's orchard. You have already been trying to understand what keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth and the planets in their courses around the sun, but after an apple falls on your head, you begin to search even more seriously for the answers to your questions.
You're born prematurely just after midnight on Christmas Day 1642 (the same year that Galileo died) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, England, and you're not expected to survive. Your father, a fairly prosperous farmer, has died three months earlier, leaving your mother, Hannah, to raise you by herself.
Your mother remarries when you're three years old, but her new husband, a wealthy clergyman, insists that you remain with your grandmother at Woolsthorpe. Your stepfather dies when you're ten, and your mother then returns to Woolsthorpe with the three children from her second marriage.
Your childhood is a lonely time. You make few friends and keep to yourself, often spending the day in your room making models, kites, sundials, and little mechanical devices.
You're considered only an average student by your teachers and antisocial by your classmates. You admit later that you ignored your studies and spent most of your time making models and carrying out your own experiments.
When provoked by a school bully much larger than you and who also happens to be first academically as well, you fight back and end up winning the fight. After your victory, you decide that if you can beat the bully physically, then maybe you can also match him academically. You begin to pay more attention to your studies and you become an intellectual leader, gaining the respect of both your teachers and your classmates. Before the fight, you were near the bottom of your class. After the fight, you work your way up to becoming the top student at your school.
You're admitted to Cambridge University when you're eighteen, but your mother refuses to pay your tuition because she wants you back home to help run the family farm. You remain at Cambridge anyway and earn your keep by cleaning the rooms of the paying students, serving meals, and doing menial jobs.
At Cambridge you read everything you can by the great mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers of the time and graduate in 1664. You then remain at Cambridge for further graduate study.
In 1664 you begin your experiments with light and discover that when white light is shone through a prism, it splits into a rainbow which you call the spectrum–the light ranging from violet at the top to red at the bottom.
Once an experiment is devised, you repeat it many times in order to eliminate errors or any possibility of chance. You also keep impeccable records of your findings.
You call 1666 your "Miraculous Year" because it's there in the solitude of Woolsthorpe that you begin to make incredible breakthroughs in mathematics and physics. You even find the answer to a problem that has eluded the most gifted mathematicians for years, the binomial theorem
It's also in 1666 at Woolsthorpe where an apple falls on your head while you're napping in the orchard. You wonder why the apple always fall downward and conclude that the apple falling and the moon orbiting are governed by the same force: gravity–or what you later refer to as the Law of Universal Gravitation.
The work you do during "The Miraculous Year" becomes the basis of mathenatics and physics for the next 300 years, and you are considered by many to be one of the greatest scientists of all time.
You die a painful death on March 20, 1727, at age eighty-four from gout, lung inflammation, and kidney stones, and you're buried among Britain's kings and queens in London's Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to be so honored.
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey
For More about
Giving Back: In addition to his scientific work, Newton devoted an enormous amount of his time and energy to the study of the Bible and wrote over a million words of notes regarding his study of it.
Did You Know that Newton's discoveries about light and movement of planets were used to make the first flights to the moon possible?
Something to Think about: Why do you think winning the fight with the bully was so important to Newton?
Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week's true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!
