4. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. From the very first Newton was very much interested in the mysteries of nature. Why did objects move? Why could we see that stones rolled down hills, wind blew leaves along the ground, and heavy objects fell to the earth when dropped?
At the age of twenty-three, Isaac Newton moved from Cambridge to his country home. There, his thoughts turned to the problems of motion (运动定律). As Newton himself later told the story, he was sitting in the garden one evening, thinking, when he noticed a falling apple. The apple set him to wondering about the movement of falling objects.
It occurred to him that the force which caused fruit to fall from trees worked as well at greater distances from the center of the earth — on top of buildings or even on top of mountains. Perhaps, thought Newton, this same force reached out much farther still, even to the moon. Newton began to search for a mathematical expression of his idea.
In 1669, Newton became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Three years later, he joined the Royal Society. Before long, Newton began again to study the problems of motion. At last, he seemed to have solved the main difficulties, but he did not publish his findings at once.
Only in 1687 did he at last publish his new theory. Newton's great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, marked the success of the Scientific Revolution. Newton put the famous three laws of motion in it. Newton was soon recognized as the leader of English science. In 1703, he became the president of the Royal Society.
Science was never quite the same after Newton's discoveries. No wonder that the eighteenth﹣century poet Pope, looking back at Newton's work, wrote:Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;God said, Let Newton be!—And all was light.
Newton, however, never rested on his fame (名望). He continued to work and study. In his last years, he once said to a friend, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and now and then finding a smoother pebble (鹅卵石) or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. "