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w关键词：Newton/牛顿，motion/运动，law/定律 |
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w目录：Somebody/人物 |
w话题：科技，执着 |
w类型：记叙文 |
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w难度级别：中级 |
w词汇要求：1000 |
w文章词数：430 |
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To myself I seem
to have been only like a boy,
playing on the seashore. |
The
life of Isaac Newton (II)
牛顿小传(下)
|
作者：Unknown |
来源：www.englishfree.com.cn |
|
日期：2008-4-6 |
责编：Emma |
In 1669 Newton became professor
of mathematics at Cambridge. Three years later he joined the
Royal Society. The Royal Society was a group of learned men from
all branches of science. Before long Newton began again to study
the problems of motion. He had already discovered the essential
ideas, but it still remained for him to solve the difficult
mathematical problems. 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 triumph of the
Scientific Revolution. The very title is significant. Newton had
found the mathematical principles, the scientific laws which
governed the movements of earth and heavens. The book completed
the working out of a new view of nature, a task begun by
Copernicus.
The result was an exact
mathematical world. Newton put forward three laws of motion in
the book.
The first law stated that bodies
will tend to move in a straight line with uniform motion unless
acted upon by a force. Thus, a bullet shot from a gun moves
straight ahead until it is stopped by a target or it slows and
falls as a result of the friction caused by moving through air.
The second law stated that the
force applied to a body is in proportion to the acceleration of
the body. Thus, the harder you throw a ball the faster it will
move.
The third law said that every
action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, when you hit a
punching bag, it bounces right back at you.
Newton also worked out a
mathematical expression for gravity. It applied equally to the
apple falling from the tree and the moon going around the earth.
Newton was soon recognized as the leader of English science. In
1703 he became president of the Royal Society.
Science was never quite the same
after Newton's discoveries. Little 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. 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 smooth
pebble of a pretty shell, while the great ocean of truth lay
undiscovered before me."
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