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"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid at night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light"- Alexander Pope
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Last Sunday I visited none other than Sir Isaac Newton's birthplae, which is at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham. Newton lived in this house during the early period of his life before he went to study at the Cambridge University.
But the Woolsthorpe Manor holds more profound value in history because during the outbreak of the Great Pleague of London, 1665-1666, Newton was forced to return to Woolsthorpe Manor. And during this period Newton invented Gravity, Calculus and Optics.
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Some background of Woolsthorpe Manor:The house is built in small plain limestone, nad it was Newton's grandfather who had taken possession of Woolsthorpe Manor in 1623 and Isaac was born premature and sickly on Christmas Day in 1642. Isaac's father, a prosperous Lincolnshire farmer, had had died two months before his son's birth. His mother went on to raise a second family nearby but Isaac remained at Woolsthorpe and spent an introverted and isolated childhood in the care of his grandmothers.
Woolsthorpe, with its simple T-shaped plan and mullioned windows, is a typical early-17th century manor house. The house, suitable for a well-to-do gentleman farmer of James I's reign, was built on the site of an earlier building sometime after 1623. The plain rooms have been furnished by the National Trust to reflect the lifestyle of a prosperous yeoman family. On some plaster walls of the passages and rooms mathematical diagrams and other figures may be identified. These may well have been scratched by Newton who as a boy was known to use any surface within reach.
The most important feature of the house is that as you go on the first floor of the house there are rooms on the either side of the staircase. The left hand room is a bedroom where Newton was born and they have preserved the old bed. The right hand room is more significant because this was Newton's study during the period of 1665-1666. And they have still preserved the first telescope made by Newton, the prism he used to do work on Optics, and also equally importantly, there is a show case where they have a third edition of
"Principia Mathematica", which is Newton's major work on Differential Calculus.
Also in front of the house there is an apple orchard, and which still has the gnarled apple tree underneath which according to a legend Newton when he was in a contemplative mood struck with the Law of Gravity.
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Newton's 1st Law:
"An object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion continues with a constant velocity in a straight line unless an external force is applied to either object."Newton's 2nd Law:
"The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it, while being inversely proportional to its mass."Newton's 3rd Law:
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Cheers
Dnyanesh
