One: Newton's three laws of motion
Although some historians doubt the story of Newton's family pet, there is no denying his influence on our understanding of modern physics. Just as he paid attention to the basic operation of gravity in the law of universal gravitation, in 1687, his three laws of motion also touched the essence of motion. These are the three laws:
1, an object is always at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed when it is not acted by external forces.
2. When an object is subjected to an external force, it will accelerate its motion (force = mass x acceleration).
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Two: reflecting telescope
Newton was born in a simple telescope era, even though a better model only used a set of glass lenses to enlarge the image. Through his color experiments, Newton knew that lenses with different angles could reflect different colors and create a blurred image for the audience. In order to improve, Newton proposed to replace the refractive lens with a mirror. This method can not only produce clearer images, but also make the telescope smaller. Although it was a Scottish mathematician who first put forward reflecting telescope's idea, Newton was actually the builder. Until today, almost all observatories are using the upgraded version originally designed by Newton.
Three: Newton's railgun
In order to describe the law of universal gravitation, Newton described a mountain that stretched out into the universe, and a giant gun was placed on the mountain. Newton did not intend to fire at the alien invaders. His railgun is just a thought experiment to explain how one object moves around another.
Fourth, Newton's cat hole
When he didn't imagine how the space cannon and the computational universe would merge, Newton applied his considerable intelligence to other problems-such as preventing cats from scratching at the door. The story goes like this: Newton's experiment at Cambridge University was interrupted by the cat scratching at the door of the office, so he summoned Newton and found a Cambridge carpenter to saw two holes in his door: one for the cat mother and the other for her child. Because the kitten just followed her mother through the big hole, the small hole has been useless. The story is still inconclusive. Newton may have invented one of the most popular cat accessories in the world-or just people in Cambridge like to drill holes at will.
Five: making rainbows
1704, Newton wrote a book about the refraction of light. This book called Optics has changed our understanding of light and color. Contemporary scientists know that raindrops form rainbows when light is refracted and reflected, but they don't know why rainbows are so colorful. When Newton started his research in Cambridge, the general theory was that water dyed sunlight in some way. Newton used a lamp and a prism to divide white light into rainbow colors. In any case, Newton reflected the light to another prism and then restored it to white light, which proved that color is the characteristic of light itself.