My Science School

Isaac Newton was the first to connect gravity to planets other than Earth. He proposed that other planets and stars also have gravitational force. In fact, it was present everywhere in the universe. Planets including Earth remain in their orbits and rotate around the Sun due to the force of gravity exerted by the Sun. It is Earth’s gravitational force that keeps the Moon moving in its orbit. The pull of the Earth causes Moon to travel in a curved path. 

The same principle applies to satellites in orbit around Earth. If Earth had no gravity, the satellites would fly off into space. We can very well say that gravity is what binds the solar system together.

The planets also disturb each other’s orbits due to gravity. These disturbances are termed as ‘perturbations.’ Scientists discovered Neptune because of the unexpected perturbations observed in the orbit of Uranus.

The story commonly told is that Newton saw an apple falling from a tree and discovered gravity while thinking about the forces of nature. Another version says that the apple landed directly on his head. Either way, Newton realized that there must be some force acting upon all objects, causing them to fall.

He also considered the moon which should actually fly away from Earth in a straight-line tangent to its orbit if there hadn’t been a force binding it to Earth. He concluded that the moon is a projectile rotating around the Earth due to gravitational force.

Newton called this force ‘gravity’, something that pulls everything to the ground. The weight of an object is the measurement of the strength with which it is being pulled by gravity. Or in other words, gravity gives weight to physical objects. The reason we can keep our feet firmly on the ground and walk around is gravity. It is what stops objects from flying off into space.

Gravity is the force that had the effect of pushing on the planets and was equal to the pull of the sun. It is in fact responsible for many of the large-scale structures in the universe. Newton also explained the astronomical observations of Kepler using the concept of gravity.

Newton was famously slow in publishing his researches. His New Theory of Light and Colours appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society only in 1672. The publication resulted in a dispute with Robert Hooke who was a dominant figure in the Society.

Newton’s experiments with white light had many practical applications that benefited the common man. Spectacles were a luxury only affordable for the upper classes in the seventeenth century. Even then, the glasses were of poor quality. In the decades following the publication of Newton’s research, amazing advancements were made in the design and manufacture of lens and spectacles.

Similarly, Newton’s findings were also applied to create sophisticated microscopes. Though microscopes existed even during his time, they were basic models that produced blurred images. With the development of better microscopes came breakthroughs in medicine and biology.

However, the most resounding impact of Newton’s work was perhaps the creation of an entirely new science, the science of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is the study of light in relation to the length of the wave that has been emitted, reflected or shone through a solid, liquid, or gas.

Newton’s discoveries revolutionized our understanding of the most common aspects of nature such as light. Prisms were seen as trivial toys used for fun in laboratories until Newton came across them. He conducted a series of experiments with sunlight and prisms after getting a prism at a fair in 1664.

Newton made the astonishing discovery that clear white light was composed of seven visible colours. The visible spectrum, the seven colours of the rainbow, was scientifically established by Newton. This discovery opened new vistas in optics, physics, chemistry, and the study of the colours in nature.

One bright sunny day, Newton darkened his room and made a hole in his window shutter, allowing just one beam of sunlight to enter the room. He then took a glass prism and placed it in the sunbeam. The result was a spectacular multi-coloured band of light just like a rainbow.

Newton believed that all the colours he saw were in the sunlight shining into his room. He thought he then should be able to combine the colours of the spectrum and make the light white again. To test this, he placed another prism upside-down in front of the first prism. He was right. The band of colours combined again into white sunlight. Newton was the first to prove that white light is made up of all the colours that we can see.

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We may remember Newton mostly in association with the theory of gravity and the story of the apple tree. But he was also a great mathematician on par with legendary figures like Archimedes and Gauss. Newton’s contributions paved the path for numerous mathematical developments in the succeeding years.

Until Newton, algebraic problems where the answer was not a whole number posed a problem for mathematicians. The formula published by Newton in 1676 called ‘binomial theorem’ effectively resolved this issue. It has been said that through Newton’s works, there was remarkable advancement in every branch of mathematics at the time.

Newton (along with mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz) is credited with developing the essential theories of calculus. He developed the theory of calculus upon the earlier works by British mathematicians John Wallis and Isaac Barrow, and prominent mathematicians Rene Descartes, Pierre de Fermat, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Johann van Waveren Hudde and Gilles Personne de Roberval.

While Greek geometry was static, calculus allowed mathematicians and engineers to make sense of the dynamic world around them. They could now make sense of motion such as the orbits of planets and the flow of fluids.

Many modern historians believe calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz, using different mathematical notations. Leibniz was however, the first to publish his results.

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With the outbreak of the bubonic plague, Cambridge University closed its doors in 1665. As a result, Newton was forced to return home to Woolsthorpe Manor where he ended up staying with his mother for over a year. In the peaceful countryside, he concentrated on the scientific problems about which he had wondered during his post graduate years.

Some of his greatest discoveries such as the laws of gravity, laws of motion, and the components of white light had their origin during this time.

It is said that Newton was sitting in the orchard when he saw an apple falling from a tree. Contrary to popular versions of this event, there is no evidence to suggest that the apple had fallen on his head. Pondering upon what he saw, Newton wondered why apples fall straight to the ground rather than going upwards or sideways. Following this line of thought, he finally formulated the law of universal gravitation.

This was the account of his discovery given by Newton himself to his acquaintances including the French philosopher Voltaire; his assistant at the Royal Mint, John Conduitt who was the husband of his niece Catherine Barton; his friend William Stewkeley; and Christopher Dawson who was a student at Cambridge. The note on Newton’s life collected by John Conduitt in 1726 contains the first written account.

The year he spent in Woolsthorpe later came to be called his annus mirabilis (year of wonders). Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667.

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Isaac Newton’s grandmother and mother taught him reading and writing. He enrolled in The King’s School, Grantham, at the age of twelve, where he learned the classics but no science or mathematics. Once, young Isaac was bullied by a boy who ranked above him in class. After fighting with the bully, Isaac was driven by the desire to perform better than the other boy.

He worked harder and became the top student in school. His years at Grantham were some of the best years of his life. Unfortunately, when Newton was 17, his mother asked him to leave school to be a farmer. However, it was a blessing for science that he had neither the aptitude nor interest in farming.

Two people persuaded Newton’s mother to reconsider her decision. Hannah’s brother who had received an M.A. from Cambridge and Henry Stokes, the headmaster of Grantham School. Stokes convinced Hannah to send Newton back to school.

Stokes who had been immensely impressed by Newton’s performance at school considered him to be the best student he had ever had. After completing his years at Grantham, Newton joined Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661.

Newton enrolled in Cambridge University’s Trinity College as a law student at the age of 18. To earn his way, he made money by working as a personal servant for wealthier students. By the time he was a third-year student, Newton was engrossed in studying mathematics and natural philosophy (now called physics). He also had an interest in alchemy, which is now considered a pseudoscience.

The teachings in college were based on Aristotle. To this, Newton added the findings of later philosophers such as Descartes, and astronomers such as Galileo, Copernicus and Thomas Street, through whom he learnt about Kepler.

Newton was fascinated by Galileo’s experimental methods. Newton was also practising science on his own at this time.

Fascinated by celestial phenomena he began tracking comets. He observed the first in December 1664. Another appeared in early April 1665, causing him to wonder how these brilliant objects could move with such incredible speed.

He started a new set of notes titled Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae (‘Certain Philosophical Questions’) sometime in 1664. His notes took over the unused pages of a notebook meant for traditional scholastic exercises.

Under the title he entered the slogan “Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas” (“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth”). This marked the beginning of Newton’s scientific career. His years at Cambridge played a crucial role in his scientific life.

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Newton was not on good terms with his stepfather Barnabas Smith who was a wealthy clergy-man. Smith was the Rector at the village of South Witham, located a few kilometres away from Woolsthorpe. Smith entered Newton’s life at an impressionable age.

He decided that Hannah should leave young Newton to the care of Grandmother Margery Ayscough and move to South Witham to look after Smith and his children. Years later, Newton confessed to his close friends how he felt jealousy and hatred for Smith.

Newton’s hatred for his stepfather did not dim over time. As a rather religious young teenager, he once wrote a list of the sins he had committed. Among the other harmless sins in the list, a few such as “threatening my father and mother to burn them and the house over them” and “wishing death and hoping it to some,” showed the depth of his feelings.

Newton’s hot temper is well known. He was said to hold grudges, often waiting for years to exact revenge on those who wronged him. Decades later, even as an old man, Newton often dreamt of killing his stepfather and saving his mother from the ‘beast’.

The separation from his mother after her re-marriage was very painful to Newton. It accounted for his sad disposition and emotional upsets in later life.

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Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are two of the most prominent figures in the development of modern science. Newton’s contributions to science establish him as one of the greatest scientists of all time. Many of the theories and scientific principles we study today were developed by Newton.

He proposed the theory of gravity and calculus, discovered the components of white light and made breakthroughs in optics with the reflecting telescope. His Laws of Motion are the basis for physics.

Newton’s binomial theorem tells us how expressions in the form (a+b)n should be expanded. His work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) (1687) is considered to be a seminal piece of literature in the history of modern science. He has also written another book, titled Opticks, about light.

Newton’s discoveries have applications in everyday technology from toys and television to lasers and life-changing medical devices. Everything from high-rise buildings to Formula One racing cars utilizes the ideas proposed by Isaac Newton.

Calculus and binomial theorems proposed by Newton are used by space engineers to send a rocket to the moon, more than 3,84,400 km away, and ensure its safe return. In the same way, economists predict the fluctuation of currencies using these very same branches of mathematics!

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Newton was born on 4 January 1643 in the village of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire in England. He belonged to a prosperous family engaged in farming for generations.

There was no tradition of giving formal education in his family. Though Newton’s relatives on his mother’s side were educated, both his father and grandfather were illiterate. His father, also named Isaac Newton, passed away three months before his son was born.

Since he was born premature, the doctor who attended his birth was not sure the child would survive. Though they were an affluent family who lived in the comforts of a country house, Newton’s mother must have found it difficult to raise a sickly child by herself.

Within two years, his mother Hannah Ayscough remarried a well-to-do minister named Barnabas Smith and moved to another village. Young Isaac was left behind to the care of his grandmother. The mother and son reunited after the death of Smith when Newton was 12 years old. Newton had three step-siblings (Mary, Benjamin and Hannah) from his mother’s second marriage.

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• One of the youngest mountaineers to climb Mount Everest.


• A black belt in karate.


• A former member of the Territorial Army Reservist for the Special Air Service.


• And, an acclaimed television anchor.

That’s Bear Grylls for you. The adventurist, who hosts the popular television series Man vs Wild possesses an impressive curriculum vitae – dare-devilish and courageous!

But before we get going, here’s one disclaimer – his actual name is Edward Michael Grylls. When he was just one week old, his elder sister named him ‘Bear’, which over the years became a household name.

A dream called Mount Everest

Hailing from a cricketing family – his great grandfather, James-Augustus Ford and grandfather Neville Ford were first-class cricketers – Grylls was interested in sports right from his childhood. And that eventually kindled his interest in the world of adventure.

When he was eight-years old, his father had given him a poster of the mountain for his bedroom wall and ever since, he wanted to climb it someday. But it was not an easy task.

While studying at the Eton College, London, the U.K., he founded a mountaineering club, and at 23, he climbed the Mount Everest, becoming one of the youngest mountaineers to do so. Pursuing a childhood dream, Grylls battled the odds to reach the peak just 18 months after breaking three vertebrae in a parachuting accident.

This, by his own admission, was a life-changing experience.

To ensure that he was acclimatised to the higher altitudes in the Himalayas, Grylls climbed the Ama Dablam – peak once described by Sir Edmund Hillary as ‘unclimbable’ in 1997.

That was the beginning of his adventures.

Air, there, everywhere

There are many folds to Grylls’ story. If scaling mountains is one aspect, traversing the globe is another. He led a team to circumnavigate the British Isles on jet skis in 2000. It took him around 30 days, but he did it to raise money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNU). In 2003, when Grylls set sail for the North Atlantic in an inflatable boat, along with three other crew, not many thought he would be able to complete the journey. But in three weeks time, the team completed 3,500 miles to achieve the incredible feat.

The journeys have never been easy, but with passion and fearlessness, Grylls has made them look like child’s play.

Following his favourite line – remember, courage and kindness and never give up – Grylls embarked on a record-setting para-jet para-motor expedition in the Himalayas near Mount Everest in 2007. This not only helped him attain great heights in his career, but also set the tone for his Guinness Book of World Records feat. Along with the double amputee, Al Hodgson and Freddy MacDonald, Grylls undertook the longest continuous indoor freeball. The previous record was 1 hour 36 minutes by a U.S. team, but Grylls and his men, surpassed the record by a few seconds.

Grylls says that the journeys to the Amazon, the Sahara and the Arctic have been hair-rising moments for him. And these are the memories that keep him going…

Alps, here we come!

So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Gyrlls’ idea of a perfect holiday is skiing and paragliding trips to the Alps. For someone who hops around the steepest of the mountains, paragliding in the Alps does look like an easy affair. After all, it’s the call of the wild that beckons him.

Lights, camera, action…

At 45, Grylls has written quite a few books chronicling his adventures. But he became a household name with his television series, Man vs Wild. The series featured him dropping into forbidding places, showing viewers how to survive. While it became immensely popular across the globe, Grylls travelled to India last year to shoot an episode with Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The two spent days at the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand and the episode was aired in more than 180 countries. Recently, he also shot with superstar Rajinikanth, at the Bandipur National Park in Karnataka. Grylls’ heroics have earned him a huge fan base in India.

Grylls’ adventures have helped him fulfill his childhood dreams. But Grylls is always on the lookout for his next adventure!

 

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This author with a particularly unique name – Pika Nani – says that her childhood dream of becoming a writer was forgotten when she stepped into the world of higher education and went on to study Psychology. But writing beckoned her once more after her daughter was born. “She really became my inspiration,” says Pika, who was born in Bengaluru and brought up in Mumbai. “When I was a kid, as young as four or five, I used to write small poems. My father was my first inspiration as he would write poems and plays in Kannada. I remember I wrote my first short story in front of the class.” Pika loved to read, Enid Blytons mostly, and along the way, many authors such as R.K. Narayan, O. Henry, Jane Austen, Agatha Conan Doyle have also inspired her.

Writing like Pika Nani

Pika feels that being a good listener and observer is the key to good, emphatic writing and realistic characterization. Here are some tips from her armoury!

• First, even before you begin writing, learn to observe your surroundings and people. Be a good listener, develop empathy. This will help you create realistic characters and settings.


• Ideas for a book can come from anywhere, even when you are on vacation, so always stay ready to jot them down. A good way to get ideas is to ask the question “What if? Like, in my case, a question popped up – ‘What if Sherlock Holmes was a teenage detective from Mumbai?’ It led to my Shrilok Homeless books!


• Start by setting small goals such as writing a diary or short stories. Contribute your writings to the school magazine or blogs. This will give you the confidence to write a book.


• Before you start writing your book, prepare a cover page. Write the title of your book (in large font) and your name below it. You can even add illustrations! Every time you write or type your story, you will see the cover page first and it will motivate you to complete the book. “This worked for me for my first book ‘Little Indians’,” says the author.

Books by Pika Nani

Little Indians: Stories from across the country

The Adventures of Shrilok Homeless

Shrilock Homeless: The Ultimate Adventures Volume 2

The writer’s routine

Pika says that she is, what she calls, a “visual writer”. “I imagine the scene and write what I see,” she explains. “I write in the mornings and afternoons. But if a deadline is near, then I am at my laptop till late night as well. I usually like to get the ideas on paper, from a general outline of the story and protect from there.”

Bet you didn’t know that Pika Nani is not really a pen name, though it has eventually become hers! (The writer’s name is Deepika Murthy.) When she was about two or three years old and people would ask her name, she would end up saying ‘Pika Nani’ when she actually meant to say Deepika Rani, a title she had given herself after hearing all the Raja Rani stories, she thinks! She writes a poem once in a while, when the inspiration strikes.

 

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Siddhartha was born Guwahati in Assam and he lived for the first 18 years of his life on the campus of Gauhati University. He started writing for publication when he was seven – first in school magazines and then for newspapers. “Before that, I used to write small stories for myself, or tell them to whoever was interested. I started reading chapter books around the same time. So I really can’t tell if reading stories got me to start writing, or I liked reading because I responded to stories and to telling them,” says the writer.

Writing the Siddhartha Sarma

Siddhartha insists there is no single way to being a writer, and what works for one kind of person might not work for another. However, he has put down what he has learnt over these years. According to him, there are three things a good writer needs.

Read: “First, you need to read. At this stage in your life, when your mind is fresh and memory sharp, you need to read as much as possible. I remember almost everything that I read till I was 18. You can afford to be indiscriminate. You can read across genres. You can read good writing and bad, because it is only when you have read enough bad writing will you know what to avoid. Afterwards, when you are older and have less time, you can specialize in genres or writers. For how, just read every single printed word you can find. Don’t count the number of books you have read. It’s being rude to your mind. Don’t set targets. Don’t read for other people. Just read.”

Write: “Good writing is also about craft. All the books you read will not help you become a good writer unless you have done a lot of practice and discovered what your strengths and weaknesses are. Before writing about the world, you should explore every corner of your mind, and writing practice helps you do that. There is no fixed ration of reading to writing that I can recommend but at this stage in your life, give some time to writing just for yourself. Publication can wait.

Live: “This one is super important and very difficult. Go out, explore the world, study humans, animals, systems, structures, ideas. Experience the complexities of the human condition. The best writers always write about things that matter to humans even when they are writing about dragons and aliens and robots. The best writers have a profound understanding of what it means to be human. And the best way to discover it is to live, make mistakes. Learn. Watch other humans (that gives you templates for your characters).”

Siddhartha Sarma’s books

1. Year of the Weeds


2. 103 Historical Mysteries, Puzzles, Conundrums and Stuff


3. 103 Journeys, Voyages, Trip and Stuff


4. The Grasshopper’s Run

Inspiration from the real world is of essence to him, “When I write, I go into a small place in my head, which is very precious for me. The place where I grew up was beautiful, wooded, full of ponds and small creatures. The small place in my head is my personal copy of this real place. I go there because it gives me a sense of peace, quiet and focus. So you could say that I am inspired by the world, and by my childhood.”

The writer’s routine

He says he tries to write in a simple manner and lets the characters drive the story. “I don’t like using big words or long sentences, adverbs or exclamation marks, he says. “My favourite time is at night, preferably between midnight and four in the morning. That’s when I write. I think about what I am going to write during the rest of the day, I have no standard process. But sometimes, while writing a novel, I write scenes from different points in the story, and then put things together later, like shooting a film.” He confesses he doesn’t usually make a storyboard but he might just begin to.

Bet you did not know that Siddhartha is a trained swordmaker and marksman. That he thinks he is rather boring, in spite of his hobby of collecting comic books, classic die-cast car models and swords. “These aren’t really uncommon things to do,” he says.

 

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To the art world, the works of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher – mathematically-inspired woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints – seemed like bizarre optical illusions. However, to mathematicians and scientists he was a genius, and to the hippies of the 1960s he was a pioneer of psychedelic art!

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, Holland. He was the youngest of five sons. He was more interested in carpentry and music and failed all his final exams except for mathematics.

Escher enrolled at architecture school in Haarlem but left to try his hand at graphic art. He was a great success. By the end of the 1920s, he was exhibiting his work regularly in Holland. In 1934, he won his first American exhibition prize.

In 1936, Escher visited the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. Its geometric tiling provided a further creative impetus to his work from then on.

Two of his best works are Ascending and Descending (1960), with its ranks of human figures trudging forever upwards and eternally downwards on an impossible four-sided staircase and Drawing Hands (1948), the image of two hands each drawing the other with a pencil.

The artist created some of the most memorable images of the 20th Century, but it was not until two years before his death in 1972, that the first full retrospective of his works was held in his native Holland.

 

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