Web viewIsaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas morning, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He was a tiny baby, given little chance of survival

Name: ________________________________ Date: __________________________ Period: ______

“And All Was Light” ___/45

Directions: (1) Use context clues, your background knowledge, the word bank, and the process of elimination to fill in the blanks below. (2) Answer the questions as they occur. (3) Complete the flow map below to make clear what happened after “Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas morning, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.” Use the underlined verbs and verb phrases as a guide. (4) Write a one paragraph summary of this reading.

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

- Alexander Pope

WORD married laws figure chaotic literatureBANK calculus laws Newton hard

Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas morning, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He was a tiny baby, given little chance of survival. The country he was born into was (1) _______________ and turbulent. England was being torn apart by civil war. Plague was an ever-present threat. Many believed the end of the world was imminent. But the hamlet of Woolsthorpe was a quiet community, little touched by either war or plague, which respected Puritan values of sobriety, simple worship, and (2) _______________ work.

3 How is the main idea of the paragraph above at odds with the illustration below?

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Newton’s father died before he was born. When Isaac was three, his mother left him with his grandmother and (4) _______________ a man from a nearby village. This turbulent start scarred Newton for life. He felt rejected by his family. He hated his stepfather and threatened to burn his house down. At Grantham school, Newton sought solace in books. He was unmoved by (5) _______________ and poetry but loved mechanics and technology, inventing a system of sundials which was accurate to the minute. While his mother hoped he would run the family

farm, his uncle and his headmaster realized (6) _______________ was destined for an intellectual life. Newton enrolled at Trinity College, in Cambridge. There he found a father (7) _______________ who set him on the road to important discoveries. Isaac Barrow, Cambridge’s first Professor of Mathematics, steered Newton away from the standard undergraduate texts and towards the big unsolved mathematical problems of the day, such as (8) _______________ - a way of describing how things change. Calculus would later be crucial for explaining the universe in mathematical terms. Newton also hunted out new works by men such as Descartes, who argued that the Universe was governed by mechanical (9) _______________.

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WORD now criticism discoveries period withdrawBANK home Royal needle light

When Cambridge University was closed because of the plague, Newton was forced to return home. This was the most productive (10) _______________ of his life. Newton was driven by the belief that the path to true knowledge lay in making observations rather than reading books. For example, rather than trust texts on optics, he experimented by sticking a bodkin - a blunt (11) _______________ in his eye - to see its effect. He laid the groundwork for his theories of calculus and laws of motion that would later

make him famous. But, naturally secretive, he kept his ideas to himself.

12 How is being secretive incongruous with the scientific method?

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Newton continued to experiment in his laboratory. This mix of theory and practice led him to many different kinds of (13) _______________. His theory

of optics made him reconsider the design of the telescope, which up until this point was a large, cumbersome instrument. By using mirrors instead of lenses, Newton was able to create a more powerful instrument, ten times smaller than traditional telescopes. When the (14) _______________ Society heard about Newton’s telescope they were impressed. This gave Newton the courage to tell them what he described as a ‘crucial experiment’ about light and colors.

The Royal Society was an elite group who met to share and critique each other’s work. They encouraged Newton to share his ideas. But Newton’s theories about (15) _______________ did not go down well. Other members of the Royal Society could not reproduce his results - partly because Newton had described his experiment in an obscure manner. Newton did not take the (16) _______________ well. When Robert Hooke challenged Newton’s letters on light and colors, he made a lifelong enemy. Newton had an ugly temper and an unshakable conviction that he was right. With his pride dented, he began to (17) _______________ from intellectual life.

Smarting from criticism, Newton isolated himself from other natural philosophers and dedicated himself to radical religious and alchemical work. With his mother on her deathbed, he returned (18) _______________ to Woolsthorpe and embarked on a period of solitary study. He became absorbed in alchemy, a secretive study of the nature of life and the medieval forerunner of chemistry. Some argue that these ideas, while not scientific in the sense that we understand them (19) _______________, helped him think radical thoughts that shaped his most important work, including his theories of gravity.

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WORD dead students culmination published singleBANK hero break feud Leibniz equations

When German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz published an important mathematical paper, it was the beginning of a life-long (20) _______________ between the two men. Leibniz, one of Europe’s most prominent philosophers, had set his mind to one of the trickiest problems in mathematics - the way(21) _______________ could describe the physical world. Like Newton, he created a new theory of calculus. However, Newton claimed he’d done the same work twenty years before and that Leibniz had stolen his ideas. But the secretive Newton hadn’t(22) _______________ his work and had to hastily return to his old notes so the world could see his workings. The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica took Newton two years to write. It was the (23) _______________ of more than twenty years of thinking. It outlined his own theory of calculus, the three laws of motion and the first rigorous account of his theory of universal gravitation. Together, this provided a revolutionary new mathematical description of the universe. The work cemented his reputation and contains much of what he is remembered for today. In mid-1693, Newton suffered a mental collapse when he suspected that his friends were conspiring against him. After working five nights in a row, Newtonsuffered what we might describe as a nervous breakdown. He later apologized to the philosopher John Locke and to Samuel Pepys, a Member of Parliament, for having wished them(24) _______________, though whether he actually wished this is unclear. Yet Newton’s fragile mental health did not dent his public reputation.

25-26 What are some of the symptoms of Newton’s mental health issues? Provide two examples.

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As the leading figure in British natural philosophy, Newton had completed his most important work. Now he set about securing his reputation. Newton was an imposing leader, obsessed by power. Though he continued to publish his own work, he also worked to make and (27) _______________ the reputations of other men. He tried to write Hooke out of history and began another bitter dispute with astronomer John Flamsteed by publishing Flamsteed’s catalogue of stars without his consent. Newton remained an influential figure, surrounded by a new generation of (28) _______________ brought up on his ideas. In 1713, the Royal Society formed a committee to decide once and for all who invented calculus. It found that Newton had beaten (29) _______________ by many years. However, the secret author of the Royal Society report was none other than Newton himself. Leibniz refused to concede defeat. Today, it is accepted that both men arrived at calculus independently.

Newton died aged 84, and was buried with full honors in Westminster Abbey. As a celebrated natural philosopher, he was a new kind of national (30) _______________. Newton laid the foundations for our scientific age. His laws of motion and theory of gravity underpin much of modern physics and engineering. Yet he believed he was put on Earth to decode the word of God, by studying both the scriptures and the book of nature. For him, theology and mathematics were part of one project to discover a (31) _______________ system of the world.

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Directions: Complete the flow map below to make clear what happened after “Isaac Newton was born prematurely on Christmas morning, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.” Use the underlined verbs and verb phrases as a guide. Be sure to keep your events in chronological order.

Directions: Summarize this reading in one full paragraph.

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“Isaac Newton was born

prematurely on Christmas

morning, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.”

2 3 4

“...Cambridge University was closed because of the plague...”

6 7 8

“...German philosopher

Gottfried Leibniz published an

important mathematical

paper...”

10 11 12