Laws of Motion
Year of Discovery: 1687
What Is It? The fundamental relationships of matter, force, and motion upon
which are built all physical science and engineering.
Who Discovered It? Isaac Newton
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Newton’s three laws of motion form the very the foundation of physics and engineering. They are the underlying theorems that our physical sciences are built upon, just as Euclid’s basic theorems form the foundation of our modern geometry. For the creation of these
laws, combined with his discovery of gravity and his creation of calculus, Newton is considered the preeminent scientific intellect of the last millennium.
How Was It Discovered?
Ever since Johannes Kepler’s 1609 discovery that planets travel in elliptical (not circular) orbits around the sun, scientists had been frantically trying to mathematically explain
these orbits. Robert Hooke and John Halley both tried. But neither could make the
mathematics work.
Born in 1642 in Lincolnshire, England, 60 miles from Cambridge, Isaac Newton was a
difficult child. His father died three months before Isaac’s birth. Isaac never liked his stepfather and was left to be raised by his grandparents. But Newton felt no affection toward
anyone—not his mother, not his grandparents, nor even his half-brother and sister. He often
threatened to hit them and to burn down the house. He was a discipline problem in school.
Only one man, William Ayscough, recognized Isaac’s brilliance and potential and arranged for Newton to study at Trinity College (part of Cambridge University). Being poor
and unable to pay the large tuition, Newton worked as a servant to other students to pay for
room and board. Newton was always solitary and secretive. Others said he was surly and
argumentative.
In 1665 Cambridge closed when the plague struck London. Newton retired to his sister’s country estate. There he felt frustrated by the isolation and by a lack of mathematical
tools to describe the changing forces and motions he wanted to understand. He was determined to master the forces that made things move (or not move).
Newton studied writings by Galileo and Aristotle as well as the more recent works by
Kepler and Halley. He gathered the scattered and often contradictory observations and theories developed since the time of the early Greeks. He studied and refined them, searching
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