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Isaac Newton

(1642 – 1727) Full name: Sir Isaac Newton. An English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor, theologian and natural philosopher. He is often regarded as the most influential scientist in history and is most famous for discovering the Laws of Gravity. He made seminal contributions to optics and shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the invention of the infinitesimal calculus; built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. His book "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" laid the foundations for most of classical mechanics.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Christ comes as a thief in the night, & it is not for us to know the times & seasons which God hath put into his own breast.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I frame no hypotheses.

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses.