The reason why I can succeed is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. That's the one who said

This sentence was said by the famous physicist Newton. This sentence appeared in Newton's letter to Hooke and has since been widely circulated in the world.

This sentence is actually what Newton said in his reply to Hooke in order to mock Hooke: "If I can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. "The subtext is, "My achievements have nothing to do with you, a hunchbacked dwarf like Hook!" This sentence is actually a sarcastic statement, but later it was often used as a humility. Extended answer:

Standing on the shoulders of giants is actually a kind of irony

When Newton was 18 years old, he was admitted to Trinity College of Cambridge University. From then on, Newton's life became completely different. But his difficult childhood and adolescence left an indelible mark on him, and he was extremely lonely throughout his life.

At that time, students at Cambridge University were divided into three categories: aristocratic students, ordinary students and reduced-fee students. The tuition for aristocratic students is very expensive, but they also enjoy many privileges, such as graduating from college in only 3 years; ordinary students pay normal tuition, and like today's college students, it takes 4 years to graduate from college; reduced fees Students paid almost no tuition, but they had to work as servants for professors and noble students to maintain a work-study life. Newton was a reduced-fee student and worked as a servant for three years before receiving a generous scholarship for his academic excellence.

It was at the meeting of the Royal Society that Newton met his biggest enemy. This man was the British physicist Robert Hooke.

At the age of 20, Hooke became an assistant to the British chemist Robert Boyle and soon established his own academic reputation. At the age of 25, he discovered the mechanical law that later became known as "Hooke's law". At the age of 28, he invented a high-resolution microscope, saw the cell wall of plant cells for the first time, and proposed the concept of "cell". Because of these contributions, Hooke was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society when he was less than 30 years old, and was known as the "Leonardo Da Vinci of London".

After becoming famous, Hook gradually became arrogant and began to suppress newcomers from time to time. In 1672, he set his sights on a newcomer, Newton, who was already famous.

At the invitation of the Royal Society, Newton went to London and gave a lecture on optics. In this lecture, Newton proposed that light is made up of individual particles. Unexpectedly, as soon as the speech was over, Hooke jumped out and made trouble, claiming that light is actually made of waves. Huygens, a foreign academician of the Royal Society and a Dutch physicist, also echoed the sentiment and criticized Newton's optical theory. This eventually sparked a big debate that lasted for a whole year: Is light a particle or a wave?

This controversy brought great harm to Newton. He once threatened to quit the Royal Society because of evocations of childhood bullying. Under the mediation of Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, the two parties finally reached a "reconciliation." But since then, Newton has begun to "live in seclusion" in Cambridge and no longer publishes his academic results.

But the bad relationship between Newton and Hooke did not end. In 1679, Hooke wrote a letter to Newton, saying that he had just been appointed secretary of the Royal Society and wanted to know about the recent scientific research of the academicians. After a series of discussions about mechanics, Hooke told Newton that he believed that there was a gravitational force between any two objects, and that this gravitational force was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects. This is the so-called inverse square law. But the problem is that Hooke only proposed such a conjecture, but he was completely unable to prove its correctness.

Decades ago, the Polish astronomer Kepler discovered the famous Kepler's three laws. According to Kepler's three laws, all planets in the solar system move around the sun in elliptical orbits. Therefore, some scientists speculate that there should be some connection between the inverse square law and Kepler's three laws. But the problem is that in order to prove the causal connection between the two, you must use a mathematical tool that did not exist at the time, and that was calculus.

And Newton was the inventor of calculus. In fact, it was to solve this mechanical problem that he invented calculus. In other words, Newton was truly the chosen one; no one else in the world had the ability to solve the most famous problem in the history of science.

In 1687, with the funding of the British astronomer Halley, Newton published the greatest work in the history of human science - "Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica), which is often referred to as "principle". In this book, Newton proposed the famous Newton's three laws of kinematics and the law of universal gravitation, and used the calculus he invented to prove that Kepler's three laws can be derived from the inverse square law of gravity. The publication of this book made Newton famous, or according to Halley's words, he became "the person closest to God in the world."

Hooke wrote to Newton again, asking Newton to revise "Principia" and admit that he was the discoverer of the inverse square law. This request completely angered Newton. He wrote back to Hooke, saying that this law was not proposed by Hooke at all, but a fact known to everyone; as early as 1645, the French astronomer Bouliot had proposed this law. So in response to Hooke's request, Newton directly deleted all references to Hooke in the Principia.

Not only that, in order to mock Hooke, Newton also said this in his reply: "If I can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Among them. The subtext is, "My achievements have nothing to do with you, a hunchbacked dwarf like Hook!" What's funny is that this curse word later became a famous saying used to describe Newton's humility!

Baidu Encyclopedia - Giant's Shoulders