Category Great Scientific Discoveries

The publication of Newton’s laws of motion proved to be greatly advantageous for scientists and engineers across the globe. His laws have found applications in everything with moving parts whether it is the design for machines and scientific equipment or clocks and wheeled devices. On the basis of these laws, it was possible to predict whether a machine would work even before it was built.

In the nineteenth century, British engineer lsambard Kingdom Brunel, built huge steamships and suspension bridges using Newton’s laws. James Watt couldn’t have made the first working steam engine without the laws of motion. We use these laws even today to solve the problems related to the construction of modern structures and tall buildings.

Newton’s laws of motion are still the basis of modern mechanical engineering. Its application is spread across different fields. Everyone from oil-well technicians to space engineers and car designers to satellite constructors utilise these laws.

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Newton presented the three laws on motion in 1687 in his book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The universal laws of motion describe the relationship between any object, the forces acting upon it and the resulting motion.

The first law of motion or the law of inertia states that if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed, it will continue in that state unless it is acted upon by an external force. This tendency of massive bodies to resist changes in their state of motion is called inertia.

Using this law of motion, we can explain why a car stops when it hits a wall but the human body in the car will keep moving at the earlier speed of the car until the body hits an external force, like a dashboard or airbag.

Similarly, an object thrown in space will continue infinitely in the same speed, on that path until it comes into contact with another object that exerts force to slow it down or change direction.

Newton’s second law of motion is F=ma or force equals mass times acceleration. For example, when you ride a bicycle, your pedalling creates the force necessary to accelerate. This law also explains why larger or heavier objects require more force to move and why hitting a small object with a cricket bat creates more damage than hitting a large object with the same bat.

The third law of motion is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is a simple symmetry to understand the world around us. When you sit in a chair, you are exerting force down upon the chair, but the chair is exerting an equal force to keep you upright.

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The universal law of gravitation was proposed by Newton in 1687. He used it to explain the observed motions of the planets and the Moon. Mass is a crucial quantity in Newton’s law of gravity.

According to the law, every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force. This force is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. It implies that the attractive force of gravity increases with the increase in mass and decreases with the increase in distance.

For example, if we transported an object of the mass ‘m’ to the surface of Neptune, the gravitational acceleration would change because both the radius and mass of Neptune differ from those of Earth. Thus, our object has mass ‘m’ both on the surface of Earth and on Neptune, but it will weigh much more on the surface of Neptune because the gravitational acceleration there is 11.15 m/s2. Thus, Newton was able to mathematically prove Kepler’s observations that the planets move in elliptical orbits.

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Isaac Newton was the first to connect gravity to planets other than Earth. He proposed that other planets and stars also have gravitational force. In fact, it was present everywhere in the universe. Planets including Earth remain in their orbits and rotate around the Sun due to the force of gravity exerted by the Sun. It is Earth’s gravitational force that keeps the Moon moving in its orbit. The pull of the Earth causes Moon to travel in a curved path. 

The same principle applies to satellites in orbit around Earth. If Earth had no gravity, the satellites would fly off into space. We can very well say that gravity is what binds the solar system together.

The planets also disturb each other’s orbits due to gravity. These disturbances are termed as ‘perturbations.’ Scientists discovered Neptune because of the unexpected perturbations observed in the orbit of Uranus.

The story commonly told is that Newton saw an apple falling from a tree and discovered gravity while thinking about the forces of nature. Another version says that the apple landed directly on his head. Either way, Newton realized that there must be some force acting upon all objects, causing them to fall.

He also considered the moon which should actually fly away from Earth in a straight-line tangent to its orbit if there hadn’t been a force binding it to Earth. He concluded that the moon is a projectile rotating around the Earth due to gravitational force.

Newton called this force ‘gravity’, something that pulls everything to the ground. The weight of an object is the measurement of the strength with which it is being pulled by gravity. Or in other words, gravity gives weight to physical objects. The reason we can keep our feet firmly on the ground and walk around is gravity. It is what stops objects from flying off into space.

Gravity is the force that had the effect of pushing on the planets and was equal to the pull of the sun. It is in fact responsible for many of the large-scale structures in the universe. Newton also explained the astronomical observations of Kepler using the concept of gravity.

Newton was famously slow in publishing his researches. His New Theory of Light and Colours appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society only in 1672. The publication resulted in a dispute with Robert Hooke who was a dominant figure in the Society.

Newton’s experiments with white light had many practical applications that benefited the common man. Spectacles were a luxury only affordable for the upper classes in the seventeenth century. Even then, the glasses were of poor quality. In the decades following the publication of Newton’s research, amazing advancements were made in the design and manufacture of lens and spectacles.

Similarly, Newton’s findings were also applied to create sophisticated microscopes. Though microscopes existed even during his time, they were basic models that produced blurred images. With the development of better microscopes came breakthroughs in medicine and biology.

However, the most resounding impact of Newton’s work was perhaps the creation of an entirely new science, the science of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is the study of light in relation to the length of the wave that has been emitted, reflected or shone through a solid, liquid, or gas.