Newton for Beginners

by William Rankin

Published 1 June 1993
The rainbow, the moon, a spinning top, a comet, the ebb and flood of the oceans, a falling apple...There is only one known universe and it fell to Isaac Newton to discover its secrets. Newton was arguably the greatest scientific genius of all time and yet he remains a mysterious figure - a secret heretic, a mystic, an alchemist, and what is often forgotten, the scourge of forgers as England's Master of the Royal Mint. This book explains the extraordinary ideas of a man who sifted through the accumulated knowledge of centuries, tossed out mistaken beliefs, and single-handedly made enormous advances in mathematics, mechanics and optics. By the age of 25, entirely self-taught, he had sketched out a system of the world. Einstein's theories are unthinkable without Newton's founding system.