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Isaac Newton

1643–1727 · Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, Optics
English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and alchemist, one of the most influential scientists in history. He formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, laying the foundations of classical mechanics. He made enormous contributions to optics, proving that white light consists of a spectrum of colors. He developed differential and integral calculus simultaneously with Leibniz.

Biography

Born in Woolsthorpe, England. Graduated from Cambridge University (Trinity College). Professor of mathematics at Cambridge, later president of the Royal Society. Author of “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” and “Optics”. Buried in Westminster Abbey.

Key discoveries

💡 Newton was a passionate alchemist and spent decades searching for the philosopher's stone, which was long concealed to avoid damaging his reputation.
"Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Concepts
cometgravityspectroscopy
Laws
Kepler's third lawlaw of conservation of momentumNewton's first lawNewton's second lawNewton's third lawlaw of conservation of angular momentum
Scientists
Robert HookeJacob BekensteinJohann Jakob BalmerJocelyn Bell BurnellArno PenziasCharles TownesJames Clerk MaxwellErwin Schrödinger

Related articles

physics.data-an2008-05-222 minarXiv:0805.3464
Hidden Rhythms of El Niño: What Daily Data Reveal
A barometer on the island of Tahiti and a barometer in the Australian city of Darwin show different pressures. Subtract one from the other, and you get a number that climatologists call the Southern Oscillation Index. It changes every day, but within these daily jumps hide steady rhythms, just as the beats of a metronome hide within the noise of an orchestra.
Filippo Petroni·Marcel Ausloos
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2008-12-283 minarXiv:0812.4846
Climate seesaws that get stuck
A seesaw with two children rarely balances perfectly. It tips either left or right, pausing at the extremes for a moment before swinging back. The tropical Pacific behaves similarly: it either warms up off the coast of Peru (El Niño) or cools down (La Niña), and these states can last for months, sometimes over a year.
Tian Ma·Shouhong Wang
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Math Physics2009-03-122 minarXiv:0903.2106
An Air Pendulum Over the Pacific
In the 1920s, British meteorologist Gilbert Walker, trying to forecast monsoons in India, noticed a strange connection: when air pressure rises over the eastern Pacific, it falls over the western Pacific, and vice versa. It was as if a giant air pendulum were swinging along the equator.
Tian Ma·Shouhong Wang
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2010-02-042 minarXiv:1002.1024
The Swing That Ignores the Push: Why the Annual Rhythm Produces a Three-Year Cycle
A swing builds up when you push it in time. But sometimes the person on the swing responds not to every push but to every third one, and the amplitude grows slowly yet inexorably.
A. Bershadskii
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemsharmonic oscillator
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2010-02-262 minarXiv:1003.0028
El Niño's Seasonal Pulse: How Delayed Ocean Waves Lock the Phase
The ocean is like a pendulum with a memory. A push from seasonal winds returns not immediately but months later, when a wave crosses the Pacific. This delay, the authors argue, is what makes El Niño and La Niña repeatedly peak at the same time of year.
Ilya Zaliapin·Michael Ghil
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Dynamical Systems2011-09-132 minarXiv:1109.2818
Climate as a Road Map: Bifurcations and Resonances of El Niño
The Pacific Ocean does not breathe evenly but in bursts. Every few years, its warm waters stir, and then Australia suffocates from drought while Peru is flooded with rain. This phenomenon is called El Niño, and it resembles a traveler wandering along an invisible road map.
Bernd Krauskopf·Jan Sieber
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Chaotic Dynamics2012-01-233 minarXiv:1201.4679
One-Third Resonance: Why Climate and the Sun Swing in Sync
A swing pushed once per second usually oscillates once per second. But if you push it harder and at the right rhythm, it can swing three times slower: one full swing for every three pushes. Physicists call this subharmonic resonance, and it seems to govern the most prominent climate and solar oscillations.
A. Bershadskii
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemsharmonic oscillator
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2012-06-252 minarXiv:1206.5828
El Niño as Conductor: How Climate Ties Together Earth's Rotation and Carbon Dioxide
A vast tongue of warm water rises to the surface of the tropical Pacific, and the entire climate system begins to resonate in unison. This is El Niño, the most powerful natural climate oscillation, affecting weather from Australia to Alaska.
A. Mazzarella·A. Giuliacci·N. Scafetta
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2014-11-042 minarXiv:1411.0815
Ocean Sloshing as a Clock: An El Niño Model via the Mathieu Equation
In 1981, the ocean off the coast of Peru behaved strangely. The warm current that usually arrives every few years changed its rhythm, and scientists still argue about what exactly shifted. A new study offers a simple answer: the ocean sloshes like water in a bowl that is rocked by tides and Earth's rotation.
Paul R. Pukite
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Dynamical Systems2014-11-182 minarXiv:1411.5069
Forecasting Without a Model: Nonparametric Prediction of Chaos and Climate
A translator learns not from a dictionary but from speech. They listen to native speakers and pick up rules that are written in no textbook. Similarly, a new method for forecasting complex systems such as climate or turbulence does not require knowing their equations. Instead, it looks at data and learns to predict their behavior.
Tyrus Berry·Dimitrios Giannakis·John Harlim
Henri PoincaréPeter ShorIsaac NewtonDiffusion Modelschaos theoryStochastic modelingstochastic processesdifferential equation
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2015-01-262 minarXiv:1501.06265
The Coast as Rain Conductor
The coast works like a conductor: it doesn't create the music, but it sets the rhythm and direction. Every morning, the sun heats the land faster than the sea, and warm air rises over the sand, pulling in a moist breeze from the ocean. By evening, the land cools and the wind reverses. This daily pendulum lines up clouds along the water's edge, like musicians following the baton.
Martin Bergemann·Christian Jakob·Todd P. Lane
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemscontrol theoryprobability theory
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Instrumentation2015-04-233 minarXiv:1504.06033
The Andean Geostationary Sentinel: How a Satellite Finds Windows in the Clouds
Every night, an invisible sentinel hangs over the Andes. The GOES-12 satellite, and later its successor GOES-13, watches Earth from an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, recording how the mountains breathe clouds. For five straight years, it tracked where the sky stayed clear and where it got wrapped in cotton.
G. Pinzón·D. González·J. Hernández
Albert EinsteinCecilia Payne-GaposchkinDavid Charbonneauexoplanet atmospherephotometry
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Dynamical Systems2015-06-022 minarXiv:1506.00756
Rhythm Thrown Off by Wind: How Noise Blurs Oscillations
A pendulum swings steadily until gusts of wind disturb it. Each push shifts the rhythm slightly, and soon the beats no longer match the metronome. Natural oscillators live the same way: the heart, populations, climate cycles—they all oscillate, but randomness constantly interferes.
Stilianos Louca
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemsharmonic oscillatornonlinear dynamicschaos theory
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Dynamical Systems2015-11-233 minarXiv:1511.07472
The Pacific Pendulum: Why El Niño Erupts Once a Decade
The Pacific pendulum swings irregularly. Sometimes it barely trembles near the bottom, and sometimes it suddenly makes a giant sweep that disrupts weather across the planet. El Niño, the warm current in the equatorial Pacific, recurs every few years, but truly strong events happen once every 10–20 years, and until now no one could explain why they appear so irregularly.
Andrew Roberts·Esther Widiasih·Axel Timmermann·Christopher K. R. T. Jones·John Guckenheimer
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Instrumentation2016-01-313 minarXiv:1602.00319
Quiet Dryness over Armazones: Six Years of Celestial Chronicle
Every clear night, a telescope in the Chilean desert records light from distant stars, and in those recordings, like old ship logs, traces of weather remain. The thin dark bands in the spectrum are imprints of water vapor that hung over the observatory at the moment of observation.
Masha Lakicevic·Stefan Kimeswenger·Stefan Noll·Wolfgang Kausch·Stefanie Unterguggenberger·Florian Kerber
Albert EinsteinCecilia Payne-GaposchkinDavid Charbonneauexoplanet atmosphereWater
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Geophysics2016-04-063 minarXiv:1604.01742
The Ocean Conducts Its Own Orchestra: How Nonlinear Analysis Reveals Hidden Rhythms of the Indo-Pacific
An orchestra without a conductor: the instruments set their own rhythm. That is how one might describe the climate system of the Indo-Pacific region, where sea surface temperatures oscillate across many time scales, from seasonal to multi-decadal. Previously, to hear a single instrument, you had to pre-tune filters, cutting off everything else.
Joanna Slawinska·Dimitrios Giannakis
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Biological Physics2016-08-173 minarXiv:1608.04824
Noise That Works for Us
An old aviation instrument sometimes sticks: the needle catches on the scale and doesn't move, even though the plane is already changing altitude. Engineers found a simple solution: add a slight vibration. The shaking doesn't hinder; on the contrary, it helps the needle break free and show the truth.
Steven Weinstein·Theodore P. Pavlic
Isaac NewtonLeonhard EulerJoseph FourierDiffusion ModelsFilteringsignal processingwavelet transformion channel noise
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2016-09-023 minarXiv:1609.00547
Climate Network: How El Niño Tightens Its Grip and Strikes with Precision
A warm tongue of water stretches along the equatorial Pacific, and within weeks, Peru sees torrential rains while Australia's pastures dry out. That is how El Niño begins: a natural conductor that, at critical moments, makes only a few orchestra members play, but much louder.
Jingfang Fan·Jun Meng·Yosef Ashkenazy·Shlomo Havlin
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2016-09-293 minarXiv:1609.09185
An Orchestra Without a Conductor: How the Ocean and Atmosphere Strike a Deal
In 1972, anchovies vanished off the coast of Peru. Fishermen were left empty-handed, and the world learned the word El Niño. Since then, scientists have been searching for ways to predict when that warm current will once again upend the planet's weather.
Dimitrios Giannakis·Joanna Slawinska
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Geophysics2016-11-242 minarXiv:1611.09167
The River That Refuses to Speed Up
The Paglia River behaves like a pendulum that resists being pushed. If a sudden influx of water pours in, the river does not keep gaining strength but quickly swings back to its usual level. This behavior is called antipersistence, and it was found in a twenty-two-year record of half-hourly discharge measurements near the Italian town of Orvieto.
Marcel Ausloos·Roy Cerqueti·Claudio Lupi
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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stat.ME2016-12-193 minarXiv:1612.06303
The Ocean's Long Reach: Accounting for Teleconnections in Spatial Models
In the mountains of Colorado, snowfall varies from winter to winter, and the reason is not always local weather. Thousands of kilometers away, in the tropical Pacific Ocean, water warms and cools, and this pulsation extends an invisible hand that alters precipitation in the Rockies.
Joshua Hewitt·Jennifer A. Hoeting·James Done·Erin Towler
Albert EinsteinCecilia Payne-GaposchkinDavid Charbonneauexoplanet atmosphere
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Fluid Dynamics2017-05-173 minarXiv:1705.06207
An Orchestra Without a Conductor: Slow Rossby Waves Set the Climate's Rhythm
Over the tropical Pacific, air pressure breathes with periods from two to fourteen years. The barometer on Tahiti rises while it falls in Darwin, Australia, and the entire planet's climate shudders: El Niño arrives. Meteorologists call this the Southern Oscillation and have tracked it for 138 years, but until now they couldn't answer a simple question: where do such periods come from?
T. Elperin·N. Kleeorin·I. Rogachevskii
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Stellar2017-06-282 minarXiv:1706.09105
The Sun's Two Pendulums: How Coupled Oscillations Create a 90-Year Rhythm
Place two pendulums side by side and give one a gentle push; the other will soon pick up the rhythm. This behavior isn't limited to clocks on a shared shelf; it also applies to the plasma inside the Sun. In the star's convection zone, two huge ring-shaped flows circulate: one closer to the surface, the other deeper. Each oscillates with its own period—12.05 and 9.52 years.
Yasushi Muraki
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemssolar cycle
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Chaotic Dynamics2017-07-282 minarXiv:1707.09853
Two Ocean Pendulums Sing in Unison
Two pendulums hang from the same wall, with a spring stretched between them. Each on its own can swing or stay still, but connect them and a shared dance begins: one nudges the other, and oscillations spread through the whole setup. That's how the Pacific Ocean works, where two neighboring regions exchange heat through waves.
Chandrakala Meena·Elena Surovyatkina·Sudeshna Sinha
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemschaos theory
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2017-09-083 minarXiv:1709.02606
A Trail in the Sand: How 135 Years of Weather Yielded the El Niño Equation
A trail in the sand stretches across the entire beach. The animal passed here at night, and from its footprints you can reconstruct not only its size but also its gait: where it sped up, where it slowed down, how it shifted its weight. That is essentially what researchers did with El Niño.
Shivsai Ajit Dixit·B N Goswami
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
SimplePopularAdvanced
physics.gen-ph2017-09-212 minarXiv:1709.07146
An Ocean Thermometer Instead of a Barometer: A New Take on Climate Indices
For a century, climatologists have measured the ocean's pulse with a barometer. Indices like El Niño or the North Atlantic Oscillation are built on atmospheric pressure differences between two points, and then we wonder why rivers don't obey.
Jishi Zhang·Jingrong Lu·Haidong Huang·Xiaoning Liu·Yafeng Zhao·Zhiyang Wang·Jinlei Mo
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2018-03-232 minarXiv:1803.08909
El Niño and the Indian Monsoon: A Connection Under Pressure
The dance between two partners, the ocean and the sky, has been going on for thousands of years. El Niño warms the Pacific, and usually at the same time seasonal rains over India weaken. But in recent decades, the rhythm seems off: rains don't always respond to the warm current.
Mátyás Herein·Gábor Drótos·Tamás Bódai·Frank Lunkeit·Valerio Lucarini
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Applied Statistics2018-04-054 minarXiv:1804.01809
A Council of a Hundred Short Experts Predicts El Niño's Whims
The barometer in the port of Papeete on Tahiti and the one in Darwin, Australia, are separated by 7,400 kilometers. When one shows high pressure, the other often shows low, and this difference, called the Southern Oscillation, drives rainfall from India to Brazil. Predicting it even a month ahead is a problem with a century-long history.
Sean van der Merwe
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2018-05-152 minarXiv:1805.05525
The Cold Dance Around Antarctica: A Wave That Never Stands Still
It takes eight years for a wave to circle Antarctica. It carries warmth and cold in turn, and sea ice advances and retreats with its crests. Previously, researchers caught this wave using different methods and saw either a propagating signal or a frozen dipole. Now it's clear: the dipole is just a snapshot of the wave when it stretches between two oceans.
Xinyang Wang·Dimitrios Giannakis·Joanna Slawinska
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Instrumentation2018-05-233 minarXiv:1805.09058
The Forest That Sometimes Falls Silent, Sometimes Sings: The Dynamics of the Drake Equation
The Galaxy is a forest where birds don't start singing right away. First, trees must grow — stars, around which planets eventually appear. The Drake equation counts how many birds might be singing in this forest right now, but it implicitly assumes that their number doesn't change: as many as there are, that's how many there have always been.
A. D. Panov
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Machine Learning2019-02-262 minarXiv:1902.10697
A City as a Single Organism: Water and Electricity Breathe in Unison
Every morning in six American cities, from Chicago to Minneapolis, faucets open at the same time coffee makers switch on. Water and electricity flow through pipes and wires like two connected vessels in the city's body. In the past, utilities monitored these flows separately, as if the organism had no common circulatory system.
Renee Obringer·Rohini Kumar·Roshanak Nateghi
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical SystemsWater
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Dynamical Systems2019-04-263 minarXiv:1904.11744
Noise Smooths the Devil's Staircase
The devil's staircase is what mathematicians call a graph that looks like steps leading upward, but the steps are infinitely thin and packed without gaps.
L. Marangio·J. Sedro·S. Galatolo·A. Di Garbo·M. Ghil
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2019-09-032 minarXiv:1909.05096
Seasonal Climate Seesaw: How El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole Are Linked
On a playground, two swings stand side by side. One child pumps on their own, while the other barely moves until the first gives a push with their foot. Something similar happens in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans, except instead of children, there are warm and cold masses of water.
Woosok Moon·John S. Wettlaufer
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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Dynamical Systems2019-11-272 minarXiv:1911.12144
The Noise That Conducts the Ocean
Every few years, the Pacific Ocean rearranges itself: warm water from the east flows toward the coasts of South America, and weather goes haywire for six months. This is El Niño, and its arrivals cannot be predicted precisely, even though there is a rhythm to them. A model with 930 variables shows that noise is to blame—random gusts of wind acting like an invisible conductor.
Alexis Tantet·Mickaël Chekroun·J. David Neelin·Henk Dijkstra
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systemschaos theoryharmonic oscillator
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2020-01-152 minarXiv:2001.09757
Three Oceanic Conductors Control Iran's Rains
In 2019, northern and southwestern Iran received 50% more rainfall than usual, and rivers overflowed their banks. A year earlier, in 2018, rainfall was 53% below normal, and fields cracked under drought. Such swings are not random; they are responses to three distant oceanic pulses that set the rhythm for Iran's rains.
Majid Dehghani·Somayeh Salehi·Amir Mosavi·Narjes Nabipour·Shahaboddin Shamshirband·Pedram Ghamisi
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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stat.ME2020-07-013 minarXiv:2007.00267
Causality That Flips Sign: How Regimes Shape Connections
In a tropical forest, the dry season gives way to the rainy season, and with the weather, the rules of life change: some animals go into hibernation, while others come out of hiding. Likewise, in complex systems, from climate to economics, the links between processes are not set in stone. They depend on a hidden "regime" that itself switches from time to time.
Elena Saggioro·Jana de Wiljes·Marlene Kretschmer·Jakob Runge
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical SystemsMarkov chainMarkov chains
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2020-07-233 minarXiv:2007.15637
El Niño vs. Solar Panels
Over the Pacific Ocean, giant seesaws swing back and forth. Warm water pushes against the coasts of South America, and El Niño begins; a few years later, the ocean surface cools, and the seesaw tips the other way, into La Niña. These oscillations last for years and reshape cloud cover, rainfall, and wind across an entire continent.
Thiago B. Murari·Aloisio S. Nascimento Filho·Marcelo A. Moret·Sergio Pitombo·Alex A. B. Santos
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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cs.SI2020-08-113 minarXiv:2008.04887
A City's Pulse After a Natural Disaster
In February 2017, Lima, a city of over ten million people, was hit by El Niño: the warm current off Peru's coast brought torrential rains, floods, and landslides. More than a hundred people died, thousands of homes were destroyed, and roads turned into rivers. The city's economy, like a living organism, fell out of rhythm: shoppers visited stores less often, and their spending patterns shifted almost overnight.
Hugo Alatrista-Salas·Vincent Gauthier·Miguel Nunez-del-Prado·Monique Becker
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2020-09-043 minarXiv:2009.02155
A Unevenly Woven Thread: The El Niño–Monsoon Link Strengthens Nonlinearly
In 1982, a warm current off the coast of Peru grew so large that it altered weather across the entire planet. That year, India saw drought, Australia wildfires, and California torrential rains. The world learned that ocean and sky are linked by invisible threads: an event in one hemisphere echoes as rainfall in another.
Tamás Bódai·Gábor Drótos·Kyung-Ja Ha·June-Yi Lee·Tímea Haszpra·Eui-Seok Chung
Henri PoincaréJohn von NeumannIsaac Newtonnonlinear dynamics
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Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics2020-09-142 minarXiv:2009.09902
The Climate House of Cards: Where Does the Stability Limit Lie?
Imagine a house of cards where each card supports the others. One wobbles, and the neighbors start to lean. Earth's climate system works similarly: ice sheets, ocean currents, tropical forests, all are connected. If one element crosses a threshold, it can drag the rest down with it.
Nico Wunderling·Maximilian Gelbrecht·Ricarda Winkelmann·Jürgen Kurths·Jonathan Donges
Emmy NoetherHenri PoincaréJohn von NeumannDynamical Systems
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