This practical side would influence his later scientific work in physics and alchemy as he voraciously devoured knowledge. As a child, he displayed an aptitude for mechanics, constantly tinkering and creating machines and devices, and constructing elaborate windmills, sundials and waterclocks. Isaac Newton really was a man who sprang from humble beginnings, as a child of an illiterate farmer, who died three months before Newton was born, but his inborn intelligence and intuition would soon see him rise out of this way of life. The Early Life of Isaac Newton – From Humble Beginnings Sprang an Intellectual Giant While most of us remember Newton as the discoverer of gravity, his research included mathematics, optics and philosophy in a revisiting of the great polymaths of old, a body of research that led him to create his great opus.
This physical model would survive until the coming of Poincare, Einstein and General Relativity, and Newton’s methods are still widely used and are taught in schools around the world.
However, during this shift in thought, one of the largest in human history, Newton followed on from Aristotle, Avicenna, Galileo, and Francis Bacon in shaping the scientific method and creating a model that dictated how the universe worked. While Newton was a religious man, his research, theories, and philosophy caused a subtle shift in thought and the shaping of modern science, as we know it, although the wider picture is a little more complicated the Reformation the rise of the New World and increased mobility of people and ideas also contributed.