Talk:Isaac Newton

FYI: New file on commons: page from Isaac Newton alchemical manuscript

If there's interest in adding this to the Newton page, it's at

Isaac Newton alchemical manuscript page, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Quart to liter conversion is not correct

Text claims that the new born Newton could fit in a quart mug, then says a quart is equal to 1.1 liters. In fact, a quart is smaller than a liter, about 0.946353 of a liter.

http://www.metric-conversions.org/volume/us-liquid-quarts-to-liters.htm?val=1

Rich Dunsheath

```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.197.187.97 (talk) 02:37, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

US quarts differ from British ones. 78.145.115.12 (talk) 09:00, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Having posted that, it occurred to me that the quart of 1642/3 wouldn't necessarily have been the same size as the current imperial measure, so I looked at what the quart and gallon articles had to say about it. Bit of a can of worms, as it turns out there are several historical values listed for the size of the gallon (and hence the quart), and no indication of which one is actually applicable here - but the ones that seem to relate to measures of ale (as opposed to corn, wine and so on) do all appear to be roughly the same. So we're probably OK with "≈ 1.1 litres".

PS I hope no one is tempted to "improve" the precision of the above value as a result of reading this... 78.145.115.12 (talk) 11:16, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Please note that Newton was born several centuries before the Weights and Measures act of 1824; before then, the British quart was closer in size to the current US quart. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.147.210.162 (talk) 07:23, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

Factual error - invention of infinitesimal calculus

I would like to indicate a factual error, the inventor of infinitesimal calculus is Bhaskaracharya, the 12th century Indian mathematician. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skuman (talk • contribs) 16:44, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Personal life section

Why is there a "personal life" section after the "life" section? It seems a little redundant to me. Would anyone mind if I tried to merge it into the "life" section? --gdfusion (talk|contrib) 19:29, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 July 2014

Please add more details on his "Personal life", namely his relationships with people who are close to him. The excerpt and the source are as follows: "Just how friendly was he with John Wickins (his room-mate at Trinity College, Cambridge for 20 years) and Nicholas Fatio de Duillier (a Swiss mathematician 22 years younger than Newton)? Was he a suppressed homosexual? What about his relationship with his beautiful, gregarious, intelligent, excitable and flirtatious half-niece Catherine Barton? How could such a devout puritan like Newton condone the fact that his afore-mentioned niece (and housekeeper in London) and his best friend (Charles Montague, Baron Halifax) were lovers?"

Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/156180.article Mpang2000 (talk) 03:28, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. Sam Sailor <sup>Sing</sup> 06:17, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Some considerations

• The article doesn't mention that Newton was a great experimentalist.

Search for experiment in this article, and you will only find: 1) "Does Newton feign an hypothesis?, Early Modern Experimental Philosophy" 2) "Shamos, Morris H. (1959). Great Experiments in Physics." 3) The category "Experimental physicists".

This doesn't do justice to Newton, who was a superb experimental physicist and instrument maker.

• This excerpt: "In 1816 a tooth said to have belonged to Isaac Newton was sold for £730[81] (us$3,633) in London to an aristocrat who passed to have it set in a ring.[82] The Guinness World Records 2002 classified it as the most valuable tooth, which would value approximately £25,000 (us$35,700) in late 2001's terms.[82] Who has bought it and to whom it currently pertains are mysteries." is totally irrelevant for the purposes of the main article about Newton, and should be better moved to another article to give space here for more important matters...

• This article should also talk a bit more about Newton's self taught studies in mathematics. It should talk more about Barrow's influence on him, about his late reading of Pappus...

• It talks too little about his ideas in mathematics and physics, and how he reached them: What was his starting point? What was his approach? It doesn't talk much about who influenced him, how these ideas were later developed...

For example, his queries on the Opticks reveal a lot about his attitude in physics, and they are not even mentioned!

There are many important things missing... If they were added, this article would become much more interesting... For example, the texts https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Polya/07468342.di020729.02p0067y.pdf http://stephenhuggett.com/Newton.pdf http://fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm#Newton are written in such a manner that reveals more about his ideas and progress, and contain some important informations that are not in this article. There are many great references that were not used to write this article, but could be used to improve it greatly.

I don't feel comfortable writing in English, otherwise I would try to help more than just pointing what I see as faults. Anyway, I hope there is something here that can be useful to those interested in editing this article.

Chen10k2 (talk) 23:50, 26 July 2014 (UTC)