Final Paper
Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were both very influential figures concerning science. They both discovered ground breaking things in the physics world. Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity. This is one of the biggest parts of physics alongside with quantum mechanics. Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician who are commonly referred to as one of the most influential scientists of all time as well as a key figure in the scientific revolution.
Newton formulated the laws of motion and the universal gravitation that dominated scientists’ view of the physical universe for over the next three centuries. He also has demonstrated that the motion of objects on the Earth and that the celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. When he was deriving Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity, Newton removed any of the people’s last doubts about the validity of the model of the cosmos that was heliocentric.
Near the start of Albert Einstein’s career he was beginning to think that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. While he was doing this it led him to his special theory of relativity. Thus he realized that the principle of relativity could also be extended to the gravitational fields, and this sparked his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916 when he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 Einstein was visiting the United States and he decided it would be best for him not go back to Germany, where he was a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Thus this made him settle in the U.S., and he became an American citizen seven years later. It is thought that both of these men also had Asperger’s disease which if you do not know is a form of autism. Near the start of World War II he helped alert the President who was Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time that Germany could be working on an atomic weapon and advised him that the United States should begin similar research. This eventually would lead to the start of the Manhattan Project, while Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, he did not agree or approve of using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. This led him to sign the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, with British philosopher Bertrand Russell which was highlighting the danger of nuclear weapons. He was in Princeton, New Jersey until he died back in 1955. Back on the topic of Isaac Newton, he built the first practical reflecting telescope and then developed a theory of color based on the observation that when a prism decomposes white light into the many colors of the visible spectrum. He was also formulating and empirical law of cooling, and he was studying the speed of sound. While he was working on calculus, as a mathematician Newton was able to contribute to the study of power series, generalized the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, and came up with the idea for Newton’s method for approximating the roots of a function. Newton was a devout but unusual Christian and, oddly enough for a member of the Cambridge faculty he refused to take holy orders in the Church of England. This is different from Einstein because he did not believe in God where Newton did. During Newton’s later years in life he was named the president of the Royal Society. He also served as the Warden as well as Master of the Royal Mint for the British government. His work has been said “to distinctly advance every branch of mathematics then studied”. If I recall properly Newton invented calculus with Leibniz, and as we all know calculus is very important in many fields of study out there now such as: engineering, physics, as well as some others. We also all have to study and learn calculus at some point in our High School lives; I personally took calculus from 9th grade until I finished high school. Newton studied alchemy as well as all of the other things that I have listed in this paper. He put forth a great deal of time to it, I personally thought that it was just a hobby for him but after doing a little research on him I found out that it was not. On a more interesting note he was knighted by Queen Anne back in 1705 while he was visiting Trinity College. It is believed that this was more because of the political considerations that were somehow connected with the Parliamentary election in 1705, as opposed to what it should have been given to him for which was his work in Science or even as Master of the Mint. He was only the second scientist ever to be knighted, after Sir Francis Bacon. There is a very interesting poem about Isaac Newton by the poet Alexander Pope it goes like this. “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said “Let Newton be” and all was light”. I personally find this to be very fascinating. Also a weird fact is that a tooth that supposedly belonged to newton sold for $3,633 US dollars. It is now valued at around 35,000 US dollars and Einstein kept a picture on his study wall of Isaac Newton which I think was fantastic. When I think about Einstein and Newton, I wonder what it would have been like to see these guys meet. I mean the amount of brain power in that one room would be insane.
I hope that this essay has inspired anyone who may read it down the line, because it has inspired me knowing what some of these men when through. These men were both two of the most important men in the world of science and without them we would be a lot further behind in the science world than we are now. If we did not have these guys who really knows how long it would have taken us to realize some of these things that they figured out. I personally find Einstein to be a hero of mine knowing some of the things that he had to live through.