Any article with a paragraph that starts with “Fortunately for the future of science…” has got to be awesome.

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Happy Birthday, Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Physicist.

Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was one of the most influential figures of the scientific revolution. He made significant contributions to the mathematical discipline of calculus and his theories on motion and gravitational forces laid the foundation for the field of modern physics.

Early Days

Although his birth was recorded as occurring on Christmas Day, an adjustment to the new calendar in the 17th century makes his birthday January 4, 1643. Newton’s father died three months before he was born, and his mother quickly remarried a wealthy man. A byproduct of her nuptials was that she left her young son with his grandmother in Woolsthorpe, England and moved to a neighboring town, where she raised three children with her new husband. Biography.com notes the belief that Newton’s childhood abandonment produced the neurosis and insecurity that plagued him throughout his life. Eventually, his mother was widowed again and she returned to her eldest son, seeking his help in managing the estate she had inherited. {Read on}

You mean the Sun is NOT made of bananas?!!? My Dad is going to pay for this!

Image by Emily via Flickr

We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users. The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics {Read on}