Annotation #1

1. The Miraculous Year. Sir Isaac Newton. Oct/14/08

2. When most people think of him, they think that he invented and discovered all these theories and principles by himself. Take calculus for example. Credit went to a number of mathematicians, especially the German Gottfried von Leibniz. However, Newton did give important contributions to the field. In 1666, he discovered how to find the slope of a curve at any point, by a process he called "fluxions."

Newton's work in optics, the study of light, was equally significant. For decades people have been debating the nature of light. He used a prism to find that white light is a combination of differently colored rays. Up to that point, everyone thought that colors were slight modifications of white light, not components of it. Although he changed people's perspective at his time, the greatness of his discovery would not be recognized until the 20th century. He allowed scientists to learn that different substances radiate different colors in he spectrum when they burn. They've been able to determine the chemical composition of stars by observing which colors they produce.

The innovations of calculus and optics would have made the year 1666 famous enough, but it was also the year when he would conceive his greatest idea: the concept of gravity. Gravitation, the invisible force exerted between objects, was by no means original to him. Minds like Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, had speculated on the attraction of interstellar bodies. But Newton did not publish the idea immediately. He did not publish any of his great discoveries right away. His "fluxions" didn't come out until four decades later; his work in optics waited six years to be published.