As warden of the royal mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was treason, punishable by death by drawing and quartering. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task.
He gathered much of that evidence himself, disguised, while he hung out at bars and taverns. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority.
Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton later ordered all records of his interrogations to be destroyed. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed.
Newton's greatest triumph as the king's attorney was against William Chaloner. One of Chaloner's schemes was to set up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turn in the hapless conspirators whom he entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman.
Petitioning Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters (a charge also made by others). He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint's processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins. After being exposed by Newton, Chaloner was hanged, drawn and quartered on March 23, 1699.
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors - Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally - as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of Nature and Natural Law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.
It was Newton¹s conception of the universe based upon Natural and rationally understandable laws that became the seed for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of Natural Law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied Natural conceptions of psychology and self-interest to economic systems and the sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into Natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.
Newton's laws of motion and gravity provided a basis for predicting a wide variety of different scientific or engineering situations, especially the motion of celestial bodies. His calculus proved vitally important to the development of further scientific theories.
Finally, he unified many of the isolated physics facts that had been discovered earlier into a satisfying system of laws. Newton's conceptions of gravity and mechanics, though not as accurate as Einstein's Theory of Relativity or quantum mechanics, still represent an enormous step in the evolution of human understanding of the universe. For this reason, he is generally considered one of history's greatest scientists.
I n 1 7 1 7 , t h e K i n g d o m o f G r e a t B r i t a i n w e n t o n t o a n u n o f f i c i a l g o l d s t a n d a r d w h e n N e w t o n , t h e n M a s t e r o f t h e M i n t , e s t a b l i s hed a f i x e d p r i c e o f 4 4 ‡ g u i n e a s p e r s t a n d a r d ( 2 2 c a r a t ) t r o y p o u n d , e q u a l t o j u s t o v e r £ 4 0 s 4 d ( £ 4 . 0 1 7 ) p e r s t a n d a r d o u n c e o r j u s t u n d e r £ 4 7 s 8 d ( £ 4 . 3 8 3 ) p e r f i n e o u n c e . U n d e r t h e g o l d s t a n d a r d t h e v a l u e o f t h e p o u n d ( m e a s u r e d i n g o l d w e i g h t ) r e m a i n e d l a r g e l y c o n s t a n t u n t i l t h e b e g i n n i n g o f t h e 2 0 t h c e n t u r y .
Newton is reputed to have invented the cat flap. This was said to be done so that he would not have to disrupt his optical experiments, conducted in a darkened room, to let his cat in or out.
Newtonmas is a holiday celebrated by some scientists as an alternative to Christmas, taking advantage of the fact that Newton's birthday fell on 25 December in the Julian calendar in use at the time of his birth.
To this day, Newton's achievements have been immortalised in popular culture. Almost all schoolchildren are familiar with the apocryphal story of Newton's apple and his subsequent discovery of gravity; even the likeness of Newton holding an apple under a tree is a well-known image of science. English poet Alexander Pope was sufficiently moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:
Newton has also featured in conspiracy theories and fiction.
Newton has been identified as a "Grand Master of the Priory of Sion" from 1691-1727 in documents that have been dismissed as a hoax concocted by Pierre Plantard.
This information was incorporated into the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which was later one of the primary source books for the bestselling 2003 Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code.
The famous three laws of Newton are:
The question was not whether gravity existed, but whether it extended so far from Earth that it could also be the force holding the moon to its orbit. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it "universal gravitation".
A contemporary writer, William Stukeley, recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726, in which Newton recalled "when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth's centre." In similar terms, Voltaire wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree." These accounts are probably exaggerations of Newton's own tale about sitting by a window in his home (Woolsthorpe Manor) and watching an apple fall from a tree.
Various trees are claimed to be "the" apple tree which Newton describes, the King's School, Grantham, claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later, the staff of the [now] National Trust-owned Woolsthrope Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their gardens is the one described by Newton. It is also claimed that the tree was replanted in front of the council buildings in Grantham, which is unlikely, considering that they were built over 300 years after Newton's death. A clone of the original tree can be seen growing outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there.
Unpublished Papers Reveal Lesser-known, but Significant Research of Sir Issac Newton PhysOrg - September 11, 2006
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