MODULI INTERDISCIPLINARI LICEO SCIENTIFICO DIAZ CASERTA - 2014

1. ISAAC NEWTON
• Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, natural philosopher, astronomer, alchemist,
and theologian.
• When he lost his father he went to live with his maternal grandparents. In 1652, when Isaac was ten
years old, his stepfather died, leaving him a huge inheritance with which he could pay for his education
at King's School, in Grantham. At the end of 1658, his mother forced him to leave school and called him
at home to take care of the fields, but turned out to be a bad farmer. After a while his teacher persuaded
his mother to let him continue his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he moved in 1661. At
that time the teachings of the College were based on Aristotle, but he preferred most modern
philosophers such as Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler . When in 1665 the college was closed
because of the plague he continued his studies independently and started to formulate his first thesis.
• In particular, he developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Leibniz , ten years before him,
although he published the study years later for fear of being mocked. From 1670 to 1672 he took charge
of optics. In particular, he discovered the corpuscular theory of light. According to this theory, the light is
formed by microscopic particles called photons, which are propagated by the light sources in all
directions at a high speed. He studied the behavior of a beam of light through a glass prism: it was
broken down into the seven colors of the rainbow. Repeating the same experiment by placing a second
prism in front of the seven colors, he observed that these came together again to form the beam of white
light. Newton also observed that if a colorful ray was isolated and passed inside the prism it remained
unchanged. Through these experiments he concluded that the colors are not present in the properties of
bodies, but in the light itself, thus reversing all previous theories about it. Since 1679 he began to work
on mechanics, in particular his studies were focused on gravity and planetary motion. Encouraged by his
friend Edmund Halley, he published the manuscript containing the three laws on the motions. During the
last period of his life he suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1696, to raise him again from this crisis,
Charles Montague offered him a place at the Royal Mint. In 1703 Newton became president of the Royal
Society and an associate of the Académie des Sciences. He died in Kensington, London, March 20, 1727
at age 84 and eight days later, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

2. •
We can say that Newton’s studies on light were
a confirmation of the hypotheses advanced by
Lucretius in his work "De Rerum Natura".
Lucretius was a Latin poet who lived in the first
half of the first century BC. The aforementioned
"De Rerum Natura" is a didactic poem which
deals with different topics regarding science and
philosophy.
In particular, some verses of the second book
partially anticipate the solution to the problem
of the nature of light, discovered by Newton in
1666 with the famous experiments of the prism.
The topics covered in vv. 772-783 relate to the
composition of the corpuscular light: the poet
speculates that the matter -in this case the sea- is
composed of semi-cerulean particles able to
change shade depending on the light, thereby
generating the different colors. These are
perceived by the human eye in a different way,
and in particular, he explains in vv. 810-816, if
the light is strong enough to reach the white or
the black, the perception of the object is limited
to its shape.