A Boy Playing on the Sea-Shore......

To Physicists and Mathematicians this title invokes images of one person. Isaac Newton. In a farm house in Colsterworth near Grantham in Lincolnshire the principles of natural philosophy were born. Newton's central problem was this: Given that the path of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse and that the radius vector from the Sun to the planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times, what must the law of attraction be? 

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I have only been like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me