Has Isaac Newton ever been proven wrong about anything and if so who proved him wrong?

Answer 1

Newton used prisms to show that sunlight was made up of all the colors of the rainbow. This proved that the ancient Greeks' ideas about light were wrong.

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We all know the story that SIr Isaac newton was hit by an apple on the head which led him to formulate gravity. Now Kepler had developed a theory that about planetary motions:-

1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
3. The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

Newton derived the third law from his gravitational theory and thus helped in modelling the solar system.

Answer 2

Lots have people have proved that Newton was wrong about this or that.

One example is John Dollond.

In 1752 he became involved in a controversy over the question of whether Isaac Newton had been correct in asserting that it was not possible to combine two lenses of different materials to obtain an achromatic lens (a lens that focuses all colors of light equally). When he did experiments with prisms of different materials he proved Newton wrong by demonstrating that a prism combination could be found that gave refraction without dispersion.

On a more sweeping scale, pretty much all of quantum physics consists of "Newton was wrong" or, more accurately, that Newton's equations don't apply in situations outside our normal everyday experience, like when dealing in the realm of the very small. If you need a few names to associate with quantum physics, some good ones would be Max Planck and Erwin Schrödginger.

Relativity is, again, that Newton's equations don't apply when dealing with objects moving very fast. The name in relativity is Albert Einstein.... lots of others (Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Schwarzchild) have contributed too, but Big Al worked out a very large part of it on his own.

There are some people who think that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is "wrong", or that it only applies on "small" (around the size of the solar system) scales, and that for very large systems like galaxies the equations are different. This one is, so far, unproven, but if it turns out to be right, Fritz Zwicky, Jacob Bekenstein, and Mordehai Milgrom would become names to conjure with.

More trivially, Newton dabbled in alchemy (definitely proven wrong) and weird philosophies (not exactly proven wrong because it's next to impossible to "prove" anything in philosophy, but not demonstrably RIGHT either).