When was Newton’s Principia published and what does it contain?

When was Newton’s Principia published and what does it contain?

The Black Death in London resulted in the shutting down of Cambridge University in year. Isaac Newton, a young mathematician working as a fellow in Trinity College there retired to Lincolnshire where he could work at leisure.


Newton worked on optics, demonstrating that white light was made up of many colours. However, he is most famous for his work on gravitation. He believed that the laws of gravity could be extended even to celestial objects. The story of the apple falling is well known, but it is probably only a legend. Using the calculus, one of his inventions, he showed mathematically that the moon was held in its orbit by gravity, otherwise it could move in a straight line, at a tangent to its orbit.


Newton’s theory of universal gravitation said that every body attracts another which a force which depends on their masses and decreases with the square of their distances from each other. He used this theory to explain the shape of the earth, tides and even the shape of the universe. He put these ideas down in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, universally known as Principia which is perhaps one of the most influential scientific books ever written.