Failed Shepherd – Famous Physicist

Perhaps Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was referring to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo when he said, ‘If I have seen further than other men, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants’. Newton's prodigious achievements were the results of a ravenous appetite for knowledge, of perseverance and inventive discoveries.

Good at almost everything except sheep watching (family circumstances nearly launched him into a bucolic career) and personal relationships, his intellect grazed on fields of enquiry unthinkable in the context of today's specialisation.

He was, among other things, the first great experimentalist and a keen theologian. He invented differential calculus, which changed mathematics more than any other single contribution since Aristotle. The forces known about in Newton's day were electricity, magnetism and gravity. Arguably the most important of his brilliant insights was his work on gravity.

Several centuries on from Newton we believe we can strip the world down to its basic parts. If we do this today, we can say that all matter is made of atoms (this view was not held by Newton), and that four forces act on these atoms. Between the basic units and the forces everything is accounted for, the rest (movies in the afternoon, mozzarella and mongeese) is just details. Some scientists would say that biology reduces to chemistry, chemistry reduces to physics and physics is the final frontier.