In search of a cipher that can open a cryptex, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu find themselves in London. Here they find themselves in Westminster Skos Abbey, where the tomb of Isaac Newton, the first British scientist to be awarded a knighthood, is located.
Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 Julian (January 4, 1643 Gregorian) in Woolsthorpe. His father died before he was born, and the first three years of his life, Isaac was brought up by his mother alone, Hannah Newton. In 1646, she married Barnabas Smith and left her son in the care of her parents. This continued until Hannah was again widowed after eight years of her second marriage. She returned to her son with three children whom she had borne by Smith, Soon after his mother's return, when Isaac was twelve years old, he was sent to study in Lincolnshire, at the Kingscool educational institution, located in Grantham. Since the school was far from his native places and the boy could not return home from there every day, he settled in the family of a local pharmacist named Clark.
Newton's diary entries of those years testify to the deep interest that the young Isaac showed then to pharmacology and which he retained for many years. The headmaster of the school, Henry Strokes, immediately noticed the extraordinary abilities of the young Isaac, despite the fact that the young man initially did not particularly stand out among his peers. He became furious when his mother soon took her sixteen-year-old son out of school. Isaac returned home, but life on the farm seemed tedious and boring to him. Influenced by Strokes and his Cambridge-educated maternal uncle, William Ascoe, it was decided that Isaac would return to school again to prepare for Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1661, Newton's studies at Cambridge began. He soon became a fellow, but he had to work to support himself while at university. Despite the fact that Hannah Newton was a wealthy widow, she, apparently, did not particularly try to make it easier for her son to spend on gaining academic knowledge. Isaac Newton received his bachelor's degree in 1665, after which he returned to his parents' house in Woolsthorpe. Here he spent the next year and a half.
The reason for his absence from university for such a long time was the plague epidemic, which claimed many lives. At Woolsthorpe, Newton continued his education, independently studying mathematics. Two years of his life - 1665 and 1666 - Newton's biographers call "wonderful years" - anni mirabiles.
The process of calculating the sum of arcs of a curve - a method used in integral and differential calculus, made it possible to lay the foundation for the study of the motion of planets in orbits. The study of the forces acting on the planets led in the future to the discovery by Newton of the laws of universal gravitation.
The plague, which forced the people to disperse to different places, subsided, and in 1667 the university resumed its work. Newton was awarded the title of Fellow of the Scientific Society of Trinity College; he also earned a master's degree and received the right to life teaching at the university. In 1669, Isaac Newton became a teacher of mathematics and began his ascent to the heights of scientific discoveries.
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The Anglican Church was the main pillar of social and scientific life, to which Newton needed to adapt. Religiously, Newton was a Puritan and therefore focused all his efforts on scientific research in order to avoid the temptations that could distract his attention. In 1674, it took the intervention of a friend of his, the royal chaplain, to relieve the scholar of the duty of ordaining.
The main subject of Newton's scientific interest was the nature of light. He suggested that white light is not a pure color, which was considered the defining and only opinion since the time of Aristotle, but consists of a whole spectrum of colors. Newton experimented with various prisms and presented his invention to the scientific Royal Society of London - a reflector telescope, which in 1672 became the reason for his acceptance by a member of the named society.
Newton substantiated the laws of motion of material bodies and the effect of centrifugal force on objects moving in a circular orbit. He also developed differential and integral equations and, with the help of special calculations, discovered the law of universal gravitation. In his book "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" ("Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica"), he explained the reasons for the deviation of the lunar orbit and the earth's tides, as well as the precession of the earth's axis. This work was published in 1687 and is recognized as the greatest scientific study of all time.
For a man who developed scientific principles that remain relevant today, Newton was a man with unorthodox interests: he was extremely interested in alchemy - the mystical art of turning metals into gold. These studies took up a considerable share of the great scientist's time, and he left behind extensive records of his alchemical experiments, although he did not publish a single work on this topic.
Newton's belief in alchemy was based on the descriptions of the four elements inherited from Aristotle, which, in combination with certain conditions and materials, can be transformed into one another, provided that the proportions of the materials themselves and external conditions are correctly observed. As early as the 4th century, the opinion that all metals consist of various combinations of mercury and sulfur was firmly rooted in the minds of alchemists. From this it followed that any metal, for example lead, can be turned into another metal - say, into gold, as a result of a change in the ratio of sulfur and mercury in it. The Corpus Hermeticum, which dates from around the 2nd-3rd centuries and is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, largely inspired the development of alchemy in Europe.
Newton's first experiments were an attempt to obtain a philosopher's stone, which, according to alchemists, was a kind of catalyst that promoted the transformation of metals in the above-mentioned manner. The scientist managed to obtain a type of antimony, the so-called star regulus. It is referred to in a letter dated 1672 as material for creating a telescope mirror. This is another confirmation of the relationship between Newton's scientific discoveries in the field of the theory of light, universal gravitation and mathematics, on the one hand, and alchemy, which also occupied him during his years in Cambridge, on the other.
After thirty-five years at Cambridge, Isaac Newton moved to London in 1696, where he took up the position of caretaker of the Mint, an important post of national importance. This did not interfere with his scientific research, and in 1703 Newton was elected president of the Royal Society of London - the scientific society of Great Britain. In 1704, another famous scientific work of his - "Optics" was published. Shortly before that, Queen Anne had awarded the knighthood.
Isaac Newton died in 1727 and was buried with honors at Westminster Abbey at public expense. The coffin with the ashes of the great scientist was carried by the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, two dukes and three earls. In honor of this outstanding person, a monument was erected.
Records of alchemy, left by Newton, were acquired in 1936 by the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes, who said at the jubilee of the great mathematician and physicist on the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great mathematician and physicist: "He considered the universe to be a cryptogram composed by the Almighty himself."
Simon Cox