ISAAC NEWTON (The Greatest Scientist Ever Lived) By Baba Ali Mustapha

                This research is the concluding part of the research work that was posted on the internet on Friday 10th November 2017, under the title 'MUHAMMAD (PBUH) THE GREATEST, where Michael H. Hart chose Muhammed to lead the list of the world's most influential persons in history in his book, but what surprise many is that he listed ISAAC NEWTON second, in series below Muhammad, but above even his Prophet Jesus Christ who is third in the series and Moses who is in No. 16 in his book. So who is that Isaac Newton.

                I here by privileged to present to you the entire chapter of Isaac Newton, from the second Michael Hart's book THE 100 A RANKING OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSON IN HISTORY. After that i will list the remaining 98 names of most influential people in history.

2. ISAAC NEWTON 1642-1727

                Isaac Newton, the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived, was born in Woolsthope, England, on Christmas day, 1642, the same year that Galilio died, like Muhammad he was born after the death of his father. As a child, he showed considerable mechanical aptitude, and was very clever with his hands. although, a bright child, he was inattentive in school and did not attract much attention. When he was a teenager, his mother took him out of school, hoping that he would become a successful farmer fortunately she was persuaded that his principal talents lay elsewhere, and at eighteen, he entered Cambridge University. There he rapidly absorbed what was then known of Science and Mathematic, and soon move on his independent research. Between his twenty-first and twenty-seventh years, he laid the foundations for the scientific theories that sequently revolutionized the world.

                The middle of the seventeenth century was a period of great scientific ferment. The invention of the telescope near the beginning of the century had revolutionized the entire study of astronomy. The English Francis Bacon and the French Philosopher Rene Descartes had both urged scientists throughout Europe to cease relying on the authority of Aristotle and to experiment and observe for themselves. What Bacon and Descartes had preached, the great Galilio had practiced. His astronomical observations, using the newly invented telescope, had revolutionized the study of astronomy and his mechanical experiments had established what is known as Newton's First Law of motion.

                Other great scientists, such as William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, and Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws describing the motions of the planets around the sun, were bringing new basic information to the scientific community. Still, pure science was largely a play thing of intellectual’s and as yet there was no proof that when applied to technology, science could revolutionize the whole mode of human life, as Francis a Bacon has predicted.

                Although Copernicus and Galileo had swept aside some of the misconceptions of ancient science and contributed to a greater understanding of the universe, no set of Principles had been formulated that could turn this collection of seemingly unrelated fact into a unified theory with which to make scientific predictions. It was Isaac Newton who supplied that unified theory and set Modern science on the course which it has followed ever since.

                Newton was always reluctant to publish his results, and although he had formulated the basic ideas behind most of his work by 1669, many of his theories were not made public until much later. The first of his discoveries to be published was his ground breaking work on the nature of light. In a series of careful experiments, Newton had discovered that ordinary white light is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. He had also made a careful analysis of the consequences of the laws of the reflection and refraction of light. Using these laws, he had in 1668 designed and actually built the first reflection telescope, the type of telescope that is used in most major astronomical observations today. These discoveries together with the results of many other optical experiments which he performed, were presented by Newton before the British Royal Society when he was twenty-nine years old.

                Newton's achievements in the optics alone would probably entitle him to a place on this list; however, they considerably less important than his accomplishments in pure mathematics and mechanics. His major mathematical contribution was his invention of integral calculus, which he probably devised when he was twenty-three or twenty four years old. That modern mathematics, is not merely the seed out of which of modern mathematical theory has grown, it is also the essential tool without which most of the subsequent progress in modern science would have been impossible. Had Newton done nothing else, the invention of integral calculus by itself would have entitled him to a fairly high place on this list.

                Newton's most important discoveries however, were in the field of mechanics, the science of how material object move. Galileo had discovered the first law of motion, which describes the motion of objects if they are not subjected to any exterior forces. In practice, of course, all objects are subjected to exterior forces, and the most in important question in mechanics is how subject move under such circumstances. This problem was solved by Newton in his famous second law of motion, which may rightly be considered the most fundamental law of classical physics. The second law (described mathematically by the equation F=Ma) states that the acceleration of an object (i.e. the rate at which its velocity changes (is equal to the net force on the object divided by the object mass. To these first two laws, Newton added his famous third law of motion (which states that for each action-i.e, physical force-there is an equal and opposite reaction), and the most famous of his scientific laws, the law of universal gravitation. This set of four laws, taken conjointly, from a unified system by means of which virtually all macroscopic mechanical systems, form the swinging of a pendulum to the motion of the planets in the orbit  around the sun, may be investigated and their behaviour-predicted. Newton did not merely state these laws of mechanics; have himself using the Mathematical tools of the calculus, showed how these fundamental laws could be applied to the solution of actual problems.

                Newton's laws can be and have been applied to an extremely broad range of scientific and engineering problems. During his lifetime, the most dramatic application of his laws was made in the field of astronomy. In this area, too Newton led the way. In 1687, he published his greatest work, the mathematical principle of natural philosophy (usually referred to simple, as Principles) , in which he presented his law of gravitation and laws of motion. Newton showed how these laws could be used to predict precisely the motions of the planets around the sun. The principal problem of dynamical astronomy that is, the problem of predicting exactly the positions and motion s of the stars and planets was thereby completely solved by Newton in one magnificent sweep. For this reason, Newton often considered the greatest of all astronomers.

                What then is our assessment Newton scientific importance? if one look at the index of encyclopedia of science, one will find more references(perhaps two or three times as many) to Newton and to Vis law and discoveries than any other individual scientist. Furthermore, one should consider what other great scientists have said about Newton. Leibniz, no friend of Sir Isaac's, and a man with whom he engaged in bitter dispute wrote " Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he has done is much better part. Te great French scientist Uplale wrote: The principia is pre-eminent above any other production of human genius", Lagrange frequently stated that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived while Ernst Mach, writing in 1901 said, "All that has been accomplished in mathematics since Vies day Vas been a deductive, formal and mathematical development of mechanics on the basis of Newton’s laws", this perhaps is the crux of Newton's great accomplishment; he found science a Vadgepodge of isolated facts, and laws, capable of describing some phenomenal but of predicting only a few, he left us, a unified system of laws, which were capable of application to an enormous range of physical phenomena and which could be used to make exact predictions.

                In a brief summary like this, it is not possible to detail all of Newton's discoveries, consequently, many of the lesser one have been omitted, although they were important achievements in their own right. Newton made significant contributions to thermodynamic (the study of heat) and to acoustic (the study of sound); he enunciated the extremely important physical principles of conservation of angular momentums; he discovered the binomial theorem on mathematics and he gave the first cogent explanation of the origin of the stars.

                Now, one might grant that Newton  was by far the greatest most influential scientist who ever lived but still ask why he should be ranked higher than such major political figure as Alexander the great or George Washington, and ahead of such major religious figures as Jesus and Gautama Buddha. My own view is that even the political changes are of significance, it is fair to say that most people in the world were living the same way 500 years after Alexander's death as their forebears had lived five centuries, before his time. Similarly, in most of their daily activities, the majority of human beings were living the same way in 1500 A.D. as human beings shad been living in 1500 B.C. In the last five centuries however with the rise of modern science, the everyday life of most human being has been completely revolutionized. We dress differently, eat completely different food, work at different jobs and spend our leisure time a great deal differently than people did in 1500 A.D. Scientific discoveries have not only revolutionized technology and economic, they have also completely changed politics, religious thinking, art and philosophy. Few aspect of human activity have remained unchanged by this scientific revolution, and it is for this reason that so many scientists and inventors are to be found on this list, Newton was not only the brilliant of all scientists, he was also the most influential figure in the development of scientific theory, and therefore well merits a position at or near the top of any list of world's most influential persons.

                Newton died in 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first scientist to be accorded that honor.

                This is tve end of the chapter on Isaac Newton from the book "THE 100 A RANKING OF MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY by Michael H. Hart in which he ranked Isaac Newton as the second most influential person in the history, above both Jesus Christ and Moses.

                HERE IS COMPLETE LIST OF NAMES OF MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY by Michael H. Hart; serially:

1. Muhammad

2. Isaac Newton

3. Jesus Christ

4. Buddha

5. Confucius

6. St. Paul

7. Ts'ai Lun

8. Johann Gutenberg

9. Christopher Columbus

10. Albert Einstein

11. Karl Max

12. Lois Pasteur

13. Galileo Galilei

14. Aristotle

15. Lenin

16. Moses

17. Charles Darwin

18. Shih Huang Ti

19. Augustus Caesar

24. Niclous Copernicus

25. James Watt

26. Constantine The Great

27. George Washington

28. Michael Faraday

29. James Clerk Maxwell

30. Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright

31. Antione Laurent Laveisier

32. Sigmund Frend

33. Alexander The Great

34. Napoleon Banaparte

35. Adolf Hitler

36. William Shakespeare

37. Adam Smith

38. Thomas Edison

39. Anthony Van Leeuwenheak

40. Plato

41. Guglielmo Marconi

42. Ludwig Van Beethoven

43. Werner Heisenberg

44. Alexander Fleing

45. Alexander Grahambell

46. Simon Boliver

47. Oliver Cromwell

48. John Locke

49. Michelangelo

50. Pope Urben II

51. Umar Ibn al Khattab

52. Asoka

53. St. Augustine

54. Max Planck

55. John Caluin

56. William T.G. Morton

57. William Harvey

58. Antoine Henri Beequerel

59. Gregor Mendel

60. Joseph Lister

61. Nikolaus sAugust Otto

62. Louis Daguerre

63. Joseph Stalin

64. Rene Descartes

65. Julius Caesar

66. Francisco Pizarro

67. Hernando Cartes

68. Queen Isabella I

69. William The Conqueror

70. Thomas Jefferson

71. Jean Jacques Rousseau

72. Edward Jenner

73. Wihelm Conrad Rontgen

74. Johann Sebastian Bach

75. Lao Tzu

76. Enrico Fermi

77. Thomas Malthus

78. Francis Bacon

79. Voltaire

80. John F. Kennedy

81. Gregory Pincus

82. Sus Wen Ti

83. Mani

84. Vasco da Gama

85. Charlemagne

86. Cyrus The Great

87. Leohard Euler

88. Niccolo Machiarelli

89. Zoroaster

90. Menes

91. Peter The Great

92. Mencius

93. John Dalton

94. Homer

95. Queen Elizabeth

96. Justinian I

97. Johannes Kepler

98. Pablo Picasso

99. Mahavira

100. Niels Bohr

                Baba Ali Mustapha is of Ngranam Ward, Bolori II, Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria.

Reference:

1. For the chapter on each of these personalities, you look for the book " THE 100 A RANKING OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY by Michael H. Hart published in United State of America (USA).

2. Locally in Nigeria Sarumedi @08039090800 has published a book with the same title containing most of the notable personalities with chapters.