LET US begin this morning with Guizot's account of the death of Oliver Cromwell. "It was September 3rd, his `fortunate day' as he had often called it, being the anniversaries of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester. By a singular coincidence the night which had just ended had been very stormy a violent tempest had caused many disasters both on land and sea. Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon, as he lay still unconscious, he heaved a deep sigh. The attendants drew near his bed he had just expired."
Meanwhile, on that very same day in 1658, young Isaac Newton was at school 100 miles or so away in Lincolnshire. He too, noticed the storm and made use of it to conduct what he was subsequently to recall as one of his first scientific experiments. He tried to' determine the strength of the gale by jumping first with the wind, and then jumping against it the great storm, he declared, was "a foot stronger" than any other wind that he had measured.
Newton was born in 1642 near the little village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. The seeds of his most famous work were sown in what he called his annus mirabilis the year 1666-67 which he spent in rural isolation while his alma mater, Cambridge university, was closed for a time by an outbreak of plague
Newton's achievements read almost like a litany. He was, for example, the first to notice that white light is a mixture of many single colours he formulated the theory of fluxions that we know today as differential calculus he explained the complex movement of the tides he constructed one of the first thermometers, using linseed oil as the expanding liquid and he dabbled in alchemy, astrology, and even in theology. Newton is best remembered, however, for his famous treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which was written in 1687 and which outlines tee famous Laws of Motion with which his name has been associated. These principles are still employed by meteorologists in the formulation of the mathematical models used for producing weather forecast by computer.
Personally, Isaac Newton was a quiet and sensitive man, although he disliked criticism and was involved in several bitter controversies with his fellow scientists. But he acknowledged their help and that of his predecessors. "If I have seen further," he wrote to a colleague, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He died 269 years ago today on March 20th, 1727.