Isaac Newton (1642, 1727) was a famous British physicist, astronomer, and founder of modern mechanics. Remember the most famous apple in the world? This "great" Apple inspired our great scientists to eventually discover a principle that shocked the world with the law of ten thousand gravitations. It can be said that Newton's life was a life full of wisdom and creativity, and had a very great contribution to the human world, and it was such a great man full of wisdom who suddenly went insane at the age of 50 and did not improve until two years later. At that time and in the years since, numerous scientists have tried to find a plausible explanation, but no consensus has been finally reached.
One of the many views is shared by most people. They believe that this is due to Newton's extremely intense work and long-term brain overuse, resulting in autonomic nerve dysfunction. The reason why Newton had such a high degree of scientific achievement was on the one hand because he had a very high degree of dedication and a very clever mind, and on the other hand, he had a strong desire for truth, and he often worked to the point of sleeping and forgetting to eat. In July 1687, he successfully published his monumental work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which is arguably the most important work of his life, and he was only 4S years old when he was published. Based on Newton's three laws of motion and gravity, the book establishes a perfect mechanical theory system. In order to do this work, Newton concentrated on research in the laboratory day and night, and he rarely slept before two or three o'clock in the night, sometimes until five or six o'clock in the morning. After the publication of The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the desire for truth led him to turn to the study of optics. His thirst for truth was respectable, but in fact it was already an overdraft of physical health, and the intensity of his work gave him signs of ill health when he was about thirty years old, and he had to have white hair when he was a child. But many scholars disagree with this speculation, and they have come up with another explanation for Newton's mental disorder. They believe that the main reason why Newton is insane is due to the long-term formation of psychological dysfunction caused by external factors stimulated by psychological abnormalities, in other words, by the external stimulus.
Newton entered the University of Cambridge at the age of 18 and soon emerged in the scientific community, and he was appreciated by many predecessors in the scientific community with his outstanding talent, and his outstanding talent made him smooth sailing on the road of science. However, in 1677, his mentor Barrow and the Royal Society officer Bager, who had always loved him, died one after another, and the deaths of these two very important figures caused him great pain, which interrupted the work of proving the law of universal gravitation. In 1689, he was elected to the British Parliament, and after coming to the modern city of Lunjiao, he found that life there was incompatible with the ivory tag of his long life, facing the drunkenness and socializing of high society. Newton began to have a different sense of money and status, and finally, unable to bear the environment, he had no choice but to return to Cambridge University. Between 1691 and 1692, two more major events had a negative impact on his spirit. One was the death of his mother, the departure of his loved ones who left him in grief and pain for a long time. Another manuscript of his work was burned. One morning, shortly after returning to Cambridge after his mother's funeral, when he returned from prayer at church, he found that the candles on his desk had burned manuscripts on optics and chemistry and other papers to ashes. Optics is the most important work of his life after The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, and Chemistry is the result of nearly two decades of painstaking research, which is a scientific masterpiece. Newton was remorseful about this, and almost a month of restless rearranging. In the face of successive blows, it is not surprising that Newton is insane.
Two other scholars who studied Newton's life acquired a few strands of hair that Newton had left behind. Through advanced means such as modern neutron activation and neutron diffraction, they found that Newton's hair contained a high concentration of toxic trace metal elements, and its content was many times higher than normal, especially mercury, and the amount of accumulation in his body exceeded the allowable value by 20 times. Some scholars have concluded that because the cattle collar has been subjected to physical and chemical experiments for a long time, it is often exposed to some toxic metal vapors, especially long-term exposure to mercury and eventually leads to mercury poisoning, and they speculate that mercury poisoning caused Newton's mental disorder. However, some scholars represented by the American scientist Disbeen believe that this speculation is impossible, first of all, there is no way to prove that the hair here is before the period of Newtonian mental disorder, and the hair in different periods, the types and quantities of trace metal elements contained in the hair are very different, secondly, the trace elements contained in the hair will be affected by different environmental factors and change, and The newton's hair here is preserved in different regions and environments, after hundreds of years. It is inevitable to suffer from the interference and influence of various foreign environmental factors, and may also absorb other toxic substances in the outside world and change, so its accuracy is debatable, and finally, according to scholars, even during Newton's illness, there are no typical signs of mercury poisoning such as tooth loss and finger trembling. Moreover, according to some expert statistics, Newton's annual exposure to mercury will not exceed 100 hours, which is not a form of mercury poisoning. Therefore, they believe that the cause of Newton's mental disorder is not mercury poisoning, but should be psychological rather than physiological.
To this day, there is no authoritative explanation for the main cause of Newton's insanity at the age of 50. It is incomprehensible that a generation of godfather-level figures in the scientific community, with a "god-like" brain, can be inexplicably insane!