Talk:Early life of Isaac Newton

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2021 and 25 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ober101.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 16 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): BoomerSooner1101.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 19:58, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Notes post-serialization
See Long_article_layout for philosophy behind refactoring into long, divided article (without named subarticles). +sj+ 19:28, 2004 Apr 28 (UTC)

Note on sources and editing
Text in this article is based on the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Unfortunately the text in the online version of that encyclopaedia was incomplete, and so there are a number of topics missing from these four subpages. I hope to obtain a copy of this material from elsewhere. The text was edited in accordance with the guidelines in 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, with an additional comment from me occasionally.

The OCR software messed up virtually everything in the article which was in italics. I had to reconstruct many Latin titles using resources elsewhere on the web. I can’t guarantee that I did this perfectly in every case.

I have edited direct quotations from Newton, to produce an article more accessible to modern readers. Specifically, I have: Punctation may have changed slightly, mostly due to OCR errors. Note that this kind of editing was also done by the 1911 authors, so the quotes in this document come to the reader “third hand”, so to speak.
 * Modernised usage of capital letters
 * Replaced archaic words in a minimal way (e.g. reflecteth -> reflects)
 * Modernised spelling (e.g. divers -> diverse)

-- Tim Starling
 * He formulated the three laws of motion:

What then was the work of the giants? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.23.66.170 (talk) 13:57, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

sir isaac newton was a scientific scientist go isaac!!!!!

The following subpages discuss the sources and style of this article. This article was originally composed of four subpages in the main namespace, and the discussion subpages reflect that fact. -- Cyan


 * /Early life and achievements
 * /The first 15 years as Lucasian professor
 * /Authoring Principia
 * /Later life -- the Mint and the Royal Society

The subpages can probably be merged now that we have section editing. There seems to be a general sentiment that the 32 KB limit is dead. What do you reckon, Cyan? I think they come to about 100 KB altogether. Also, those four subpages are identical AFAIK. I'll repeat the text at the top of this page for convenience. -- Tim Starling 02:32, Sep 11, 2003 (UTC)


 * Okay, I'll take that as a yes. -- Tim Starling 02:37, Sep 11, 2003 (UTC)


 * Uh, yeah. I figured if anyone had a problem with it, they could take matters into their own hands.-- Cyan 02:51, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I haven't heard anyone saying that they want articles longer than 31 KB! There was a debate on the Wikipedia-l mailing list in May 2003 which was partly about optimal lengths of articles (see the "Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?" thread here). Erik (Eloquence) said that 20,000 to 30,000 characters seemed a good length. I and a few other people argued for shorter articles, but I don't recall anyone arguing for longer ones. I think it makes sense to have separate, shorter articles for in-depth discussion of sub-topics. If we're not going to, then all the content should go into Isaac Newton; it doesn't really make sense to have two separate articles which are both complete biographies. Perhaps I should take matters into my own hands, but the task looks quite daunting, so I'll just put it on my mental "things to do" list for now... -- Oliver P. 22:51, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I didn't attempt to merge the Britannica material into the main article from the start, because I think 82 KB is far too long for most readers. Most readers will be satisfied with a few pages, and only a few will have an attention-span long enough to go diving into the in-depth material. Without a decent summary, you end up with the situation where many readers are unable to extract the important facts because they are hidden amongst 60 KB of trivia. I think this style of article (a summary plus in-depth subpages) is the way many of our articles should be aiming for. History of Brazil is a nice example. Perhaps we could follow its lead and create Isaac Newton (1642-1670), Isaac Newton (1670-1685), Isaac Newton (1685-1690) and Isaac Newton (1690-1727). Or some similar format which doesn't look quite so much like birth and death dates. -- Tim Starling 02:52, Sep 14, 2003 (UTC)


 * I agree that 82 KB is too long, and I think it would be preferable to split it back up again. But we want something that doesn't look so much like birth and death dates, yes... Perhaps something like "Early life and achievements", "The first 15 years as Lucasian professor", "Authoring Principia", and "Later life -- the Mint and the Royal Society"...? :) Splitting his life up according to dates wouldn't mean anything to most people. Most people wouldn't know Newton's years of birth and death, let alone what he did during which years. So I think splitting by years is out of the question. Was there a problem with the divisions as they were before the merging? -- Oliver P. 17:28, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Was there a problem with them? Just the presence of the slash character I guess. Maybe if it was a colon or a dash or something, no-one would mind. Say, Isaac Newton: Later life -- the Mint and the Royal Society. The difference between slashes and colons seems pretty arbitrary to me, but for some reason slashes seem to annoy people. -- Tim Starling 01:32, Sep 15, 2003 (UTC)

Should this be here?
The whole thing is really long and is somewhat out of place in Wikipedia. I think it should be moved to WikiBooks and made perfect there. It could also be nice if somebody edited it down to 5000-6000 words for inclusion here, but that might be duplicating the purpose of Isaac Newton. Zocky 17:08, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * it's mostly taken from EBritannica1911 .. it's not book length, it is an actual encyclopedic entry.. however I could see the argument made that it is somewhat out of character for Wikipedia .. if you or someone wants to create a new article I would suggest renameing this one "Isaac Newton (extended)" or somthing along those lines and linking to it from the summary article.Stbalbach 23:49, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Homosexuality?
In Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, he more-than-hints that Newton was a homosexual. Is there any justification for this? RickK 23:47, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)


 * Probably not. I can't remember where I read it, but I read somewhere that he probably died a virgin, he had some kind of severe reaction to physical intimacy. Perhaps this led to rumours about his sexuality. here is one discussion about it or google newton+virgin. Stbalbach 02:10, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Theory of Color
No offense to the 1911 Britannica, but this section is hard to read and harder to understand. It would be a great improvement, imo, if we could find a secondary source that talks about this, instead of taking it straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. Given the relative scarcity of scholars from the seventeenth century on Wikipedia, it's somewhat unfair that they should be the only ones to understand this section ^_^ Tenebrous 02:30, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

"Of this marriage there was issue..."
What is meant by "Of this marriage there was issue, Benjamin, Mary and Hannah Smith, and to their children Sir Isaac Newton subsequently left most of his property."? This is unclear and I'm not sure what's meant. Icemuon 17:54, 25 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It means the couple had children and those were their names. Can you be more specific about what you find unclear? Michael Hardy 03:21, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

circular orbits?

 * Newton, by calculating from Kepler's laws, and supposing the orbits of the planets to be circles round the sun in the centre, had already proved that the force of the sun acting upon the different planets must vary as the inverse square of the distances of the planets from the sun.

To me it seems implausible that Newton would have assumed circles rather than ellipses. Can anyone support this further? Michael Hardy 03:22, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Edouard Lucas
The publication of these discoveries led to a series of controversies which lasted for several years, in which Newton had to contend with the eminent English physicist Robert Hooke, Edouard Lucas (mathematical professor at the University of Liège)... In this context, link to François Édouard Anatole Lucas seems to be misleading, as a 19th c. mathematician could hardly contend with Newton. Yet there is no information of any other Edouard Lucas on French Wikipedia, too. --Oop (talk) 22:14, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Flagging for cleanup, essay and expert needed
Hi Folks. Did a run through this article and found some issues to be addressed. I realize Newton is a very important historical figure, and from reviewing the talk page, some (or perhaps a great deal) of this article is sourced from a much earlier encyclopedia. That's great. The problem is the way it reads, and it's glaring lack of supportive reliable sources. Here's a quick breakdown:


 * 1) Many statements where the text implies a certain synthesis of information, an analysis if you will, but no sources are cited for this analysis. I've flagged those I could find with According to Whom or By Whom
 * 2) Along these lines, opinions given throughout the text as though the Wiki article itself has a viewpoint. This indicates a non-neutral point of view.
 * 3) An equal or greater number of statements which simply are not cited at all. Problematic in an encyclopedia.
 * 4) Direct quotes which are given no attribution, or attribution only to a name, but no documented source.
 * 5) There's also a very long, multiple paragraph quote which is not properly attributed, or formatted.

Original Research/NPOV Examples:
 * It was fortunate that these disputes did not damp Newton's ardour as much as he feared.
 * It is supposed that it was at Woolsthorpe in the summer of 1666 that Newton's thoughts were directed to the subject of gravity.
 * They are said to have been inspired by Newton's seeing an apple fall from a tree on his mother's farm, a version for which there is reasonable historical evidence.
 * The fact that heavy bodies have always a tendency to fall to the Earth, no matter at what height they are placed above the Earth's surface, seems to have led Newton to conjecture that it was possible that the same tendency to fall to the Earth was the cause by which the Moon was retained in its orbit round the Earth.
 * Newton, by calculating from Kepler's laws, and supposing the orbits of the planets to be circles with the sun at the centre, had already proved that the force of the Sun acting upon the different planets must vary as the inverse square of the distances of the planets from the Sun.
 * He was therefore led to inquire whether, if the Earth's attraction extended to the Moon, the force at that distance would be of the exact magnitude necessary to retain the Moon in its orbit.
 * In January 1684, Sir Christopher Wren, Halley and Hooke were led to discuss the law of gravity, and although they probably all agreed on the truth of the inverse square law, yet this truth was not looked upon as established.
 * It appears that Hooke professed to have a solution of the problem of the path of a body moving round a centre of force attracting as the inverse square of the distance
 * This treatise De Motu was the starting point of the Principia, and was meant to be a short account of what that work was intended to embrace.

About these statements...says who? It's fine that these views are expressed, if they are documented as independent from Wikipedia itself.

Before more copyediting work is done on this article, it needs to be cleaned up to be more factually sound and encyclopedic.


 * The Wikipedia article about Sir Isaac is said to be based on that in the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Checking that work online, I see that it was written by Henry Martyn Taylor, who died in 1927. Consequently he is unable to answer the querulous reader who has peppered this Wikipedia article with annotations. I doubt that condensing Britannica articles to 1/4 or less of the original length can make them "more factually sound and encyclopaedic." As a fellow of Newton's old college, and an FRS himself, Taylor was probably an expert in this field, but that was over a century ago, and many scholars have spent much of their lives studying Newton since then. Will any of them revise this article, where anyone and his dog can hack them about as they please? NRPanikker (talk) 20:46, 9 October 2023 (UTC)