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Chapter Newton’s Early Years 1 By the fall of 1665, the Great Plague of London was at its peak. Over 7,000 bodies were being thrown into mass graves every week. The Plague began to spread into the area east of London, including the university town of Cambridge. The colleges in Cambridge were ordered to close, and soon emptied of students and teachers. At night the town was bathed in the glow of fires of charcoal, tar, and brimstone, which were kept burning in hopes that they would kill the “poison” of the Plague. Among those forced to seek refuge in the countryside was a young scholar from Trinity College named Isaac Newton. He went to his mother’s farm at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. Except for short visits to Cambridge, Newton spent nearly two years there. His teachers at the college had believed Newton showed great promise as a scholar. But they could not have guessed what he was to discover in those two years, shut away most of the time in a lonely village. Newton made some of history’s greatest scientific discoveries. His work was to give a firm basis to a new kind of science, that replaced the ancient structure of knowledge that had stood for two thousand years. One of Newton’s discoveries was that white light was really made up of rays of different colors. Another was his method of “fluxions,” or calculus , as it is now known, which is a very powerful mathematical tool. The third, and perhaps the greatest, was to lead to the Law of Universal Gravitation that ruled the fall of an apple to the Earth as well as the motions of the planets around the sun.

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