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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating, I didn’t realize Newton was into his 40s before he made any specific contributions that led to his larger widespread influence. I just assumed that, like most of the greatest scientists in history, he was in his 20s when he changed the world.

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He was ~ 23 years old in 1666 when he published on calculus, the dynamics of moving bodies, inverse-square universal gravitation, and optics (prisms).

Interesting, the article seems to suggest that he did not have much of an impact until he published a couple decades later.

He worked on some of those things in 1666 but did not publish anything. That is kind of the point of the article. Newton had a lot of reluctance around publication; he did not follow modern norms.

I wonder how much of those things he actually figured out in his 20s and just did not publish, versus thinking about them without drawing many conclusions or making significant progress until he actually published 20 years later?

We have his notebook from his 20s. So you can read it yourself and know what he was thinking then and compare it with what he published much later.

https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/03/annus-tran...

1666 was the year Newton spent an extended period at home when an outbreak of the plague forced Cambridge to close. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis

I like to imagine that someone somewhere is currently immersed in their own annus mirabilis and the fruits of those discoveries will be a silver lining to this terrible pandemic.

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