PRESS RELEASE - 7 October 1702
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Noble Prize in Physics for 1702 to
Isaac Newton
Cambridge University, Cambridge,
United Kingdom
“for the invention of a mathematical foundation in natural philosophy which led to the discovery of a universal force, gravity, which applies to all objects in all parts of the universe.”
This year’s Noble Laureate is rewarded for answering the question: how does a force make a body move ? This fundamental question covers every object in the Universe from cups on a table to the planets in the Heavens. Newton’s breakthrough was to develop a new mathematical approach: the calculus, that he successfully used to reason about the forces on a body and its resulting motion.
In his work Newton developed three laws of motion. The first states that a body will stay at rest, or remain in uniform motion in a straight line, unless a force acts upon it: a cannonball resting on the ground will remain stationary, however as it flies through the air both the forces of air resistance and gravity will bring it back to the earth. Newton also reasoned that the force applied to the object is equal to its mass times its acceleration, which is his second law of motion. For example, the force from the exploding gunpowder in a cannon accelerates the cannonball through the air. The greater the explosion the faster the cannon ball flies towards its target. Finally, when a cannon is fired, the cannon will be pushed backwards a yard or two. This action and reaction is described by Newton’s third law, which states that every action has an equal, and opposite reaction.
Newton’s work cumulated in an answer to the question of why objects fall to earth. Using the insights on the motion of bodies his answer identified a new force called gravity. He showed that gravity is an attractive force between bodies. The Earth, which is a very massive body, will exert a force on an apple, a relatively tiny body, as it hangs on a tree. The gravitational force is pulling the apple to the earth and the earth is being pulled towards apple ! Newton then reasoned that the same force is acting like a web on the planets, holding them in the Heavens, and stopping them from crashing into the Earth. He went on to develop a mathematical relationship for the gravitational force that involved the mass of the bodies and their distance apart from each other. Newton took this result and solved many outstanding problems, for example the deflection of the planet’s orbit around the sun by the pull of the its gravity, and the gravitational pull of the moon and sun to explain the ocean tides.
The Noble Committee agreed that the intellectual break through, and subsequent discoveries, made by Sir Issac Newton would benefit mankind for many years into the future.
Issac Newton, British citizen, Born 1642, England. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Life