Pepito, Romeca Karina Justine T.

IV Pedro Calungsod GALILEO GALILEI

August 24, 2012

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the oldest of seven children. His father was a musician and wool trader, who wanted his son to study medicine as there was more money in medicine. At age eleven, Galileo was sent off to study in a Jesuit monastery. Rerouted from Religon to Science After four years, Galileo had announced to his father that he wanted to be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind, so Galileo was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, as his father wished. Law of the Pendulum At age twenty, Galileo noticed a lamp swinging overhead while he was in a cathedral. Curious to find out how long it took the lamp to swing back and forth, he used his pulse to time large and small swings. Galileo discovered something that no one else had ever realized: the period of each swing was exactly the same. The law of the pendulum, which would eventually be used to regulate clocks, made Galileo Galilei instantly famous. Except for mathematics, Galileo Galilei was bored with university. Galileo's family was informed that their son was in danger of flunking out. A compromise was worked out, where Galileo would be tutored full-time in mathematics by the mathematician of the Tuscan court. Galileo's father was hardly overjoyed about this turn of events, since a mathematician's earning power was roughly around that of a musician, but it seemed that this might yet allow Galileo to successfully complete his college education. However, Galileo soon left the University of Pisa without a degree. Mathematics To earn a living, Galileo Galilei started tutoring students in mathematics. He did some experimenting with floating objects, developing a balance that could tell him that a piece of, say, gold was 19.3 times heavier than the same volume of water. He also started campaigning for his life's ambition: a position on the mathematics faculty at a major university. Although Galileo was clearly brilliant, he had offended many people in the field, who would choose other candidates for vacancies. Dante's Inferno Ironically, it was a lecture on literature that would turn Galileo's fortunes. The Academy of Florence had been arguing over a 100-year-old controversy: What were the location, shape, and dimensions of Dante's Inferno? Galileo Galilei wanted to seriously answer the question from the point of view of a scientist. Extrapolating from Dante's line that "[the giant Nimrod's] face was about as long/And just as wide as St. Peter's cone in Rome," Galileo deduced that Lucifer himself was 2,000 arm-length long. The audience was impressed, and within the year, Galileo had received a three-year appointment to the University of Pisa, the same university that never granted him a degree! The Leaning Tower of Pisa At the time that Galileo arrived at the University, some debate had started up on one of Aristotle's "laws" of nature, that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. Aristotle's word

had been accepted as gospel truth, and there had been few attempts to actually test Aristotle's conclusions by actually conducting an experiment! According to legend, Galileo decided to try. He needed to be able to drop the objects from a great height. The perfect building was right at hand--the Tower of Pisa, 54 meters tall. Galileo climbed up to the top of the building carrying a variety of balls of varying size and weight, and dumped them off of the top. They all landed at the base of the building at the same time (legend says that the demonstration was witnessed by a huge crowd of students and professors). Aristotle was wrong. However, Galileo Galilei continued to behave rudely to his colleagues, not a good move for a junior member of the faculty. "Men are like wine flasks," he once said to a group of students. "...look at....bottles with the handsome labels. When you taste them, they are full of air or perfume or rouge. These are bottles fit only to pee into!" Not surprisingly, the University of Pisa chose not to renew Galileo's contract. Necessity is the Mother of Invention Galileo Galilei moved on to the University of Padua. By 1593, he was desperate in need of additional cash. His father had died, so Galileo was the head of his family, and personally responsible for his family. Debts were pressing down on him, most notably, the dowry for one of his sisters, which was paid in installments over decades (a dowry could be thousands of crowns, and Galileo's annual salary was 180 crowns). Debtor's prison was a real threat if Galileo returned to Florence. What Galileo needed was to come up with some sort of device that could make him a tidy profit. A rudimentary thermometer (which, for the first time, allowed temperature variations to be measured) and an ingenious device to raise water from aquifers found no market. He found greater success in 1596 with a military compass that could be used to accurately aim cannonballs. A modified civilian version that could be used for land surveying came out in 1597, and ended up earning a fair amount of money for Galileo. It helped his profit margin that 1) the instruments were sold for three times the cost of manufacture, 2) he also offered classes on how to use the instrument, and 3) the actual toolmaker was paid dirt-poor wages. A good thing. Galileo needed the money to support his siblings, his mistress (a 21 year old with a reputation as a woman of easy habits), and his three children (two daughters and a boy). By 1602, Galileo's name was famous enough to help bring in students to the University, where Galileo was busily experimenting with magnets.

In Venice on a holiday in 1609, Galileo Galilei heard rumors that a Dutch spectacle-maker had invented a device that made distant objects seem near at hand (at first called the spyglass and later renamed the telescope). A patent had been requested, but not yet granted, and the methods were being kept secret, since it was obviously of tremendous military value for Holland. Spyglass Galileo Galilei was determined to attempt to construct his own spyglass. After a frantic 24 hours of experimentation, working only on instinct and bits of rumors, never having actually *seen* the Dutch spyglass, he built a 3-power telescope. After some refinement, he brought a 10-power telescope to Venice and demonstrated it to a highly impressed Senate. His salary was promptly raised, and he was honored with proclamations.

The Moon If he had stopped here, and become a man of wealth and leisure, Galileo Galilei might be a mere footnote in history. Instead, a revolution started when, one fall evening, the scientist trained his telescope on an object in the sky that all people at that time believed must be a perfect, smooth, polished heavenly body--the Moon. To his astonishment, Galileo Galilei viewed a surface that was uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences. Many people insisted that Galileo Galilei was wrong. Some of their arguments were very clever, like the mathematician who insisted that even if Galileo was seeing a rough surface on the Moon, that only meant that the entire moon had to be covered in invisible, transparent, smooth crystal. Jupiter Months passed, and his telescopes improved. On January 7, 1610, he turned his 30 power telescope towards Jupiter, and found three small, bright stars near the planet. One was off to the west, the other two were to the east, all three in a straight line. The following evening, Galileo once again took a look at Jupiter, and found that all three of the "stars" were now west of the planet, still in a straight line! Observations over the following weeks lead Galileo to the inescapable conclusion that these small "stars" were actually small satellites that were rotating about Jupiter. If there were satellites that didn't move around the Earth, wasn't it possible that the Earth was not the center of the universe? Couldn't the Copernican idea of the Sun at the center of the solar system be correct? The Starry Messenger Galileo Galilei published his findings--as a small book titled The Starry Messenger. 550 copies were published in March of 1610, to tremendous public acclaim and excitement. Saturn And there were more discoveries via the new telescope: the appearance of bumps next to the planet Saturn (Galileo thought they were companion stars; the "stars" were actually the edges of Saturn's rings), spots on the Sun's surface (though others had actually seen the spots before), and seeing Venus change from a full disk to a sliver of light. For Galileo Galilei, saying that the Earth went around the Sun changed everything since he was contradicting the teachings of the Church. While some of the Church's mathematicians wrote that his observations were clearly correct, many members of the Church believed that he must be wrong. In December of 1613, one of the scientist's friends told him how a powerful member of the nobility said that she could not see how his observations could be true, since they would contradict the Bible. The lady quoted a passage in Joshua where God causes the Sun to stand still and lengthen the day. How could this mean anything other than that the Sun went around the Earth? Heresy Charges Galileo Galilei was a religious man, and he agreed that the Bible could never be wrong. However, he said, the interpreters of the Bible could make mistakes, and it was a mistake to assume that the Bible had to be taken literally.

This might have been one of Galileo's major mistakes. At that time, only Church priests were allowed to interpret the Bible, or to define God's intentions. It was absolutely unthinkable for a mere member of the public to do so. And some of the Church clergy started responding, accusing him of heresy. Some credits went to the Inquisition, the Church court that investigated charges of heresy, and formally accused Galileo Galilei. This was a very serious matter. In 1600, a man named Giordano Bruno was convicted of being a heretic for believing that the earth moved about the Sun, and that there were many planets throughout the universe where life--living creations of God--existed. Bruno was burnt to death. However, Galileo was found innocent of all charges, and cautioned not to teach the Copernican system. 16 years later, all that would change. The Final Trial The following years saw Galileo move on to work on other projects. With his telescope he watched the movements of Jupiter's moons, wrote them up as a list, and then came up with a way to use these measurements as a navigation tool. There was even a contraption that would allow a ship captain to navigate with his hands on the wheel. That is, assuming the captain didn't mind wearing what looked like a horned helmet! As another amusement, Galileo started writing about ocean tides. Instead of writing his arguments as a scientific paper, he found that it was much more interesting to have an imaginary conversation, or dialogue, between three fictional characters. One character, who would support Galileo's side of the argument, was brilliant. Another character would be open to either side of the argument. The final character, named Simplicio, was dogmatic and foolish, representing all of Galileo's enemies who ignored any evidence that Galileo was right. Soon, he wrote up a similar dialogue called "Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World." This book talked about the Copernican system. "Dialogue" was an immediate hit with the public, but not, of course, with the Church. The pope suspected that he was the model for Simplicio. He ordered the book banned, and also ordered the scientist to appear before the Inquisition in Rome for the crime of teaching the Copernican theory after being ordered not to do so. Galileo Galilei was 68 years old and sick. Threatened with torture, he publicly confessed that he had been wrong to have said that the Earth moves around the Sun. Legend then has it that after his confession, Galileo quietly whispered "And yet, it moves." Unlike many less famous prisoners, he was allowed to live under house arrest in his house outside of Florence. He was near one of his daughters, a nun. Until his death in 1642, he continued to investigate other areas of science. Amazingly, he even published a book on force and motion although he had been blinded by an eye infection. The Story Continues... The Church eventually lifted the ban on Galileo's Dialogue in 1822--by that time, it was common knowledge that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Still later, there were statements by the Vatican Council in the early 1960's and in 1979 that implied that Galileo was pardoned, and that he had suffered at the hands of the Church. Finally, in 1992, three years after Galileo Galilei's namesake had been launched on its way to Jupiter, the Vatican formally and publicly cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing.

ARISTOTLE Aristotle of Stagirus (384 BCE 322BCE) was born in 384 BCE in Stagirus, a Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrase. His father, Nichomachus, was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia. The Macedonian Court would have a considerable influence on his life. Aristotle's father died while he was a child, and it was his guardian, Proxenus, who sent him to Athens at age 17. At the time, Athens was considered the intellectual center of the world, and here he joined the Academy to study under Plato. Aristotle attended Plato's lectures for twenty years, eventually lecturing himself, particularly on the subject of rhetoric. When Plato died in 347, Aristotle's ability and position in the Academy might have seen him take on leadership there, but the differences in his teachings from Plato's made this impossible, and it was Plato's nephew Seusippus who was chosen to take on leadership of the academy. Aristotle moved to the court of his friend Hermeas, the ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysea. It was during his three-year stay here that he married Pythias, Hermeas' niece. In 345 Hermeas was taken over by the Persians, and Aristotle moved to the island of Lesbos, at Mytilene. It is here that he met Theophrastus, his collaborator in scientific endeavors, and later his successor as head of the Lyceum in Athens. The observations of flora and fauna made by Aristotle in his writings on biology were made during his time in Mysea and Lesbos. In 343 Aristotle was invited back to Macedonia by the King to tutor the young Alexander. The differing ambitions of the two friends (teacher and student), made for an intense scholarly relationship. Aristotle was working on establishing a new philosophical world-view with Greece at its center, however Alexander was preparing to conquer an empire far exceeding the boundaries of the Greek world. Aristotle supported a nationalistic strategy, which would protect Greek culture from the "barbarians," whereas Alexander eventually supported the inclusion of non-Greek culture into his policies to ease his rule of the outer provinces. When Alexander succeeded King Philip and launched his first series of campaigns, extending his rule to India and Egypt, Aristotle returned to Athens for the first time since Plato's death. Platonism had become the dominant philosophy of Athens, and the Platonic school was running successfully under the leadership of Xenocrates. Aristotle decided to establish his own school at the Lyceum. For the next thirteen years he concentrated on teaching and writing the philosophical treatises, which would become his published works. In the morning at the Lyceum Aristotle would facilitate detailed discussions for his more advanced students, and in the afternoon he would lecture on popular topics of discourse for a general body of philosophers and students. His followers became known as "peripatetics," meaning "to walk about," referring to Aristotle's habit of walking back and forth while relating his lectures. In 323 Alexander the Great was killed while on campaign in the East, and anti-Macedonian sentiment reigned in Athens. In an attempt to free Greek city-states from Macedonian rule, the Athenian Assembly declared war against Antiipon, Alexander's successor. In a repetition of his experience in 347, Aristotle was considered pro-Macedonian and therefore anti-Athenian, and he was charged with "impiety." This is the same charge that had led to Socrates' execution in 399. To avoid Socrates' end, Aristotle went into voluntary exile to the city of Chalcis. Here he lived with his second wife, Herpyllis, who was also the mother of his son, Nichomachus. In 322 BCE, at age 63, Aristotle died of a digestive ailment. Aristotle wrote treatises covering a vast range of philosophical thought, from biology, physics, logic, science, and metaphysics to ethics, morality, aesthetics, and politics. He developed a non-Platonic theory of form, produced a system of deductive reasoning for both universal and existential statements, and theorized on the cosmos, life, matter and mind, and the "good life."

There are 150 philosophical treatises thought to have been written by Aristotle, 30 of which survive today. It is not certain how many of these treatises are actually unpolished lecture notes, and it is thought that some may be the work of students from the Lyceum instead of written by the hand of Aristotle. Theophrastus, Aristotle's friend and collaborator from Lesbos who inherited leadership of the school at Lyceum, is reported to have taken care of Aristotle's texts. This collection was in turn passed on to Theophrastus' pupil Neleus, and from him to his heirs, who protected the writings in a vault where they suffered from dampness and pests. The vault was discovered in 100 BCE by a book lover named Apellicon, who brought the rotting texts to Athens. They were moved to Rome in 86 BCE when Athens was captured by Sulla, and in Rome they were published in a new edition due to growing interest of local scholars. Aristotle's work and philosophy in general enjoyed a renaissance at this time, and it is this collection of writings that forms the basis of our studies of Aristotle today. Aristotle's work enjoyed another rediscovery in the later Middle Ages, when it was studied by medieval scholars. He was called "Ille Philosophus" (the philosopher) by his medieval followers, and his work was discussed as the eternal truth (barring any of his writings that may have contradicted the Bible). Known as Scholasticism, Aristotelian philosophy reconciled with Christian doctrine became the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. Scientific discoveries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance paid heed to Scholasticism, or suffered harsh criticism. Plato theorized that ultimate reality is only knowable through reason and reflection, and he located it in ideas or eternal forms. Aristotle differed from his teacher, theorizing that ultimate reality is knowable through experience, residing in physical objects, and his writings were often based on first-hand observation. Aristotle's objects (which include organisms) are comprised of form and matter, or their reality and their potential. For example, a block of wood (matter) has the potential to assume whatever form a carpenter chooses to give it, and a seed has the potential to grow into a living tree. Aristotle identifies the form in living creatures with the soul, and describes a hierarchy of souls where plants have the lowest kind, animals a higher kind because of their ability to feel, and humans the highest because of their ability to reason and rationalize. Change was cyclical to Aristotle, like the cycle of water through evaporation, rain, rivers, oceans and deserts. He imagined an eternal universe without beginning or end, and this is the most basic difference between his work and that of both medieval and modern thinkers. He believed that the overall conditions of the world would never change. SIR ISAAC NEWTON Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire, where he attended school, he entered Cambridge University in 1661; he was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He remained at the university, lecturing in most years, until 1696. Of these Cambridge years, in which Newton was at the height of his creative power, he singled out 1665-1666 (spent largely in Lincolnshire because of plague in Cambridge) as "the prime of my age for invention". During two to three years of intense mental effort he prepared Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as the Principia, although this was not published until 1687.

As a firm opponent of the attempt by King James II to make the universities into Catholic institutions, Newton was elected Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge to the Convention Parliament of 1689, and sat again in 1701-1702. Meanwhile, in 1696 he had moved to London as Warden of the Royal Mint. He became Master of the Mint in 1699, an office he retained to his death. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1671, and in 1703 he became President, being annually re-elected for the rest of his life. His major work,Opticks, appeared the next year; he was knighted in Cambridge in 1705. As Newtonian science became increasingly accepted on the Continent, and especially after a general peace was restored in 1714, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Newton became the most highly esteemed natural philosopher in Europe. His last decades were passed in revising his major works, polishing his studies of ancient history, and defending himself against critics, as well as carrying out his official duties. Newton was modest, diffident, and a man of simple tastes. He was angered by criticism or opposition, and harboured resentment; he was harsh towards enemies but generous to friends. In government, and at the Royal Society, he proved an able administrator. He never married and lived modestly, but was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey. Newton has been regarded for almost 300 years as the founding examplar of modern physical science, his achievements in experimental investigation being as innovative as those in mathematical research. With equal, if not greater, energy and originality he also plunged into chemistry, the early history of Western civilization, and theology; among his special studies was an investigation of the form and dimensions, as described in the Bible, of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In 1664, while still a student, Newton read recent work on optics and light by the English physicists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; he also studied both the mathematics and the physics of the French philosopher and scientist Ren Descartes. He investigated the refraction of light by a glass prism; developing over a few years a series of increasingly elaborate, refined, and exact experiments, Newton discovered measurable, mathematical patterns in the phenomenon of colour. He found white light to be a mixture of infinitely varied coloured rays (manifest in the rainbow and the spectrum), each ray definable by the angle through which it is refracted on entering or leaving a given transparent medium. He correlated this notion with his study of the interference colours of thin films (for example, of oil on water, or soap bubbles), using a simple technique of extreme acuity to measure the thickness of such films. He held that light consisted of streams of minute particles. From his experiments he could infer the magnitudes of the transparent "corpuscles" forming the surfaces of bodies, which, according to their dimensions, so interacted with white light as to reflect, selectively, the different observed colours of those surfaces. The roots of these unconventional ideas were with Newton by about 1668; when first expressed (tersely and partially) in public in 1672 and 1675, they provoked hostile criticism, mainly because colours were thought to be modified forms of homogeneous white light. Doubts, and Newton's rejoinders, were printed in the learned journals. Notably, the scepticism of Christian Huygens and the failure of the French physicist Edm Mariotte to duplicate Newton's refraction experiments in 1681 set scientists on the Continent against him for a generation. The publication of Opticks, largely written by 1692, was delayed by Newton until the critics were dead. The book was still imperfect: the colours of diffraction defeated Newton. Nevertheless, Opticks established itself, from about 1715, as a model of the interweaving of theory with quantitative experimentation.

In mathematics too, early brilliance appeared in Newton's student notes. He may have learnt geometry at school, though he always spoke of himself as self-taught; certainly he advanced through studying the writings of his compatriots William Oughtred and John Wallis, and of Descartes and the Dutch school. Newton made contributions to all branches of mathematics then studied, but is especially famous for his solutions to the contemporary problems in analytical geometry of drawing tangents to curves (differentiation) and defining areas bounded by curves (integration). Not only did Newton discover that these problems were inverse to each other, but he discovered general methods of resolving problems of curvature, embraced in his "method of fluxions" and "inverse method of fluxions", respectively equivalent to Leibniz's later differential and integral calculus. Newton used the term "fluxion" (from Latin meaning "flow") because he imagined a quantity "flowing" from one magnitude to another. Fluxions were expressed algebraically, as Leibniz's differentials were, but Newton made extensive use also (especially in thePrincipia) of analogous geometrical arguments. Late in life, Newton expressed regret for the algebraic style of recent mathematical progress, preferring the geometrical method of the Classical Greeks, which he regarded as clearer and more rigorous. Newton's work on pure mathematics was virtually hidden from all but his correspondents until 1704, when he published, with Opticks, a tract on the quadrature of curves (integration) and another on the classification of the cubic curves. His Cambridge lectures, delivered from about 1673 to 1683, were published in 1707. Newton had the essence of the methods of fluxions by 1666. The first to become known, privately, to other mathematicians, in 1668, was his method of integration by infinite series. In Paris in 1675 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently evolved the first ideas of his differential calculus, outlined to Newton in 1677. Newton had already described some of his mathematical discoveries to Leibniz, not including his method of fluxions. In 1684 Leibniz published his first paper on calculus; a small group of mathematicians took up his ideas. In the 1690s Newton's friends proclaimed the priority of Newton's methods of fluxions. Supporters of Leibniz asserted that he had communicated the differential method to Newton, although Leibniz had claimed no such thing. Newtonians then asserted, rightly, that Leibniz had seen papers of Newton's during a London visit in 1676; in reality, Leibniz had taken no notice of material on fluxions. A violent dispute sprang up, part public, part private, extended by Leibniz to attacks on Newton's theory of gravitation and his ideas about God and creation; it was not ended even by Leibniz's death in 1716. The dispute delayed the reception of Newtonian science on the Continent, and dissuaded British mathematicians from sharing the researches of Continental colleagues for a century. According to the well-known story, it was on seeing an apple fall in his orchard at some time during 1665 or 1666 that Newton conceived that the same force governed the motion of the Moon and the apple. He calculated the force needed to hold the Moon in its orbit, as compared with the force pulling an object to the ground. He also calculated the centripetal force needed to hold a stone in a sling, and the relation between the length of a pendulum and the time of its swing. These early explorations were not soon exploited by Newton, though he studied astronomy and the problems of planetary motion. Correspondence with Hooke (1679-1680) redirected Newton to the problem of the path of a body subjected to a centrally directed force that varies as the inverse square of the distance; he determined it to be an ellipse, so informing Edmond Halley in August 1684. Halley's interest led

Newton to demonstrate the relationship afresh, to compose a brief tract on mechanics, and finally to write the Principia. Book I of the Principia states the foundations of the science of mechanics, developing upon them the mathematics of orbital motion round centres of force. Newton identified gravitation as the fundamental force controlling the motions of the celestial bodies. He never found its cause. To contemporaries who found the idea of attractions across empty space unintelligible, he conceded that they might prove to be caused by the impacts of unseen particles. Book II inaugurates the theory of fluids: Newton solves problems of fluids in movement and of motion through fluids. From the density of air he calculated the speed of sound waves. Book III shows the law of gravitation at work in the universe: Newton demonstrates it from the revolutions of the six known planets, including the Earth, and their satellites. However, he could never quite perfect the difficult theory of the Moon's motion. Comets were shown to obey the same law; in later editions, Newton added conjectures on the possibility of their return. He calculated the relative masses of heavenly bodies from their gravitational forces, and the oblateness of Earth and Jupiter, already observed. He explained tidal ebb and flow and the precession of the equinoxes from the forces exerted by the Sun and Moon. All this was done by exact computation. Newton's work in mechanics was accepted at once in Britain, and universally after half a century. Since then it has been ranked among humanity's greatest achievements in abstract thought. It was extended and perfected by others, notably Pierre Simon de Laplace, without changing its basis and it survived into the late 19th century before it began to show signs of failing. Newton left a mass of manuscripts on the subjects of alchemy and chemistry, then closely related topics. Most of these were extracts from books, bibliographies, dictionaries, and so on, but a few are original. He began intensive experimentation in 1669, continuing till he left Cambridge, seeking to unravel the meaning that he hoped was hidden in alchemical obscurity and mysticism. He sought understanding of the nature and structure of all matter, formed from the "solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles" that he believed God had created. Most importantly in the "Queries" appended to "Opticks" and in the essay "On the Nature of Acids" (1710), Newton published an incomplete theory of chemical force, concealing his exploration of the alchemists, which became known a century after his death. Newton owned more books on humanistic learning than on mathematics and science; all his life he studied them deeply. His unpublished "classical scholia"explanatory notes intended for use in a future edition of the Principiareveal his knowledge of pre-Socratic philosophy; he read the Fathers of the Church even more deeply. Newton sought to reconcile Greek mythology and record with the Bible, considered the prime authority on the early history of mankind. In his work on chronology he undertook to make Jewish and pagan dates compatible, and to fix them absolutely from an astronomical argument about the earliest constellation figures devised by the Greeks. He put the fall of Troy at 904 BC, about 500 years later than other scholars; this was not well received. Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century:

but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature. Newton published an edition of Geographia generalis by the German geographer Varenius in 1672. His own letters on optics appeared in print from 1672 to 1676. Then he published nothing until the Principia (published in Latin in 1687; revised in 1713 and 1726; and translated into English in 1729). This was followed by Opticks in 1704; a revised edition in Latin appeared in 1706. Posthumously published writings include The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), The System of the World (1728), the first draft of Book III of the Principia, andObservations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John (1733).