Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit, a 17th-century “aha moment” that prompted him to suddenly come up with his law of gravity. In reality, things didn’t go down quite like that. Newton, the son of a farmer, was born in 1642 near Grantham, England, and entered Cambridge University in 1661. Four years later, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the school temporarily closed, forcing Newton to move back to his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was during this period at Woolsthorpe (Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667) that he was in the orchard there and witnessed an apple drop from a tree. There’s no evidence to suggest the fruit actually landed on his head, but Newton’s observation caused him to ponder why apples always fall straight to the ground (rather than sideways or upward) and helped inspired him to eventually develop his law of universal gravitation. In 1687, Newton first published this principle, which states that every body in the universe is attracted to every other body with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, in his landmark work the “Principia,” which also features his three laws of motion.
In 1726, Newton shared the apple anecdote with William Stukeley, who included it in a biography, “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life,” published in 1752. According to Stukeley, “After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some apple trees… he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind…. occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.”
The esteemed mathematician and physicist died in 1727 and was buried at Westminster Abbey. His famous apple tree continues to grow at Woolsthorpe Manor.
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Newton’s apple: The real story
We’ve all heard the story. A young Isaac Newton is sitting beneath an apple tree contemplating the mysterious universe. Suddenly – boink! -an apple hits him on the head. “Aha!” he shouts, or perhaps, “Eureka!” In a flash he understands that the very same force that brought the apple crashing toward the ground also keeps the moon falling toward the Earth and the Earth falling toward the sun: gravity.
Or something like that. The apocryphal story is one of the most famous in the history of science and now you can see for yourself what Newton actually said. Squirreled away in the archives of London’s Royal Society was a manuscript containing the truth about the apple.
It is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Lifewritten by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton’s first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”
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The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website at royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages. The digital release is occurring on the same day as the publication of Seeing Further (HarperPress, £25), an illustrated history of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson, which marks the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary this year.
So it turns out the apple story is true – for the most part. The apple may not have hit Newton in the head, but I’ll still picture it that way. Meanwhile, three and a half centuries and an Albert Einstein later, physicists still don’t really understand gravity. We’re gonna need a bigger apple.
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Английские анекдоты
Physics Teacher: Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head and he discovered gravity. Isn’t that wonderful?
Student: Yes sir, if he had been sitting in class looking at books like us, he wouldn’t have discovered anything.
Учитель физики: Однажды Исаак Ньютон сидел под деревом, как вдруг, ему на голову упало яблоко. Так он открыл гравитацию. Удивительно, не правда ли?
Ученик: Вы правы, сэр. Если бы он постоянно сидел в классе и смотрел в учебники, как мы, точно ничего бы не открыл!
Mom: What did you do at school today?
Tom: We did a guessing game.
Mom: But I thought you were having a math exam.
Tom: That’s right!
Мама: Что вы делали сегодня в школе?
Том: Играли в «Угадайку».
Мама: Но я думала, что у вас был экзамен по математике.
Kate: Why was school easier for cave people?
Kate: Because there was no history to study!
Кейт: Почему пещерным людям было легче учиться в школе?
Кейт: Потому что у них не было уроков истории!
Father: Tell me how school went today. How do you like it?
Billy: It’s hard to like a place that’s haunted, dad.
Father: Haunted?! What do you mean?
Billy: It’s that new teacher of mine. she keeps talking about the school spirit.
Папа: Сынок, скажи мне, как прошел день в школе. Тебе все понравилось?
Билли: Нет, мне не нравится этот дом с привидениями, папа.
Папа: С приведениями?! О чем ты?
Билли: Это все наша новая учительница, она постоянно говорит о каком-то школьном духе.
A girl came home after school and showed her mum your test score.
Mum: Why is your test score so low?
Daughter: Because of absence.
Mum: You were absent?
Daughter: No, the girl next to me was.
Девочка пришла домой после школы и показала своей маме оценку за экзамен.
Мама: Почему у тебя такая низкая оценка?
Дочка: По причине отсутствия.
Мама: Ты не явилась?
Дочка: Нет, отсутствовала девочка, которая сидит рядом со мной.
At the chemistry lesson the teacher asks:
Tom, what is the chemical formula for water?
Teacher: What are you talking about?
Tom: At last lesson you said it’s H to O!
На уроке химии учитель спрашивает: «Том, какова химическая формула воды?»
Учитель: «О чем ты сейчас говоришь?»
Том: «На прошлом уроке вы сказали, что она с H по O!» («H2O» звучит так же как «H to O»)
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Sometimes, scientists know what they . looking for and they find it. At other times, things . discovered by accident. Two famous examples of this are gravity and penicillin.
Isaac Newton, . first used maths to describe gravity, was sitting . his garden when he saw . apple fall — some say it fell on his head! This made him think about why, and he realised he . explain it using maths.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, . was the first antibiotic. It completely changed medicine. He was working . his laboratory when he saw that something . started growing on one of his experiments. He analysed it and realised that it . be very useful in fighting disease. Sometimes luck can be a big help!
Sometimes, scientists know what they .are.. looking for and they find it. At other times, things .are.. discovered by accident. Two famous examples of this are gravity and penicillin.
Isaac Newton, .who.. first used maths to describe gravity, was sitting .in.. his garden when he saw .an.. apple fall — some say it fell on his head! This made him think about why, and he realised he .could.. explain it using maths.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, .which.. was the first antibiotic. It completely changed medicine. He was working .in.. his laboratory when he saw that something .had.. started growing on one of his experiments. He analysed it and realised that it ..might.. be very useful in fighting disease. Sometimes luck can be a big help!
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Isaac Newton: Who He Was, Why Apples Are Falling
Sir Isaac Newton was born especially tiny but grew into a massive intellect and still looms large, thanks to his findings on gravity, light, motion, mathematics, and more.
Isaac Newton Kneller Painting
Far more than just discovering the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was also responsible for working out many of the principles of visible light and the laws of motion, and contributing to calculus.
Photograph of Sir Godfrey Kneller painting by Science Source
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By Kate Ravilious
Thursday, March 12, 2020
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Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward.
«He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits,» said Martin Rees, a former president of Britain’s Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself.
«His theory of gravity wouldn’t have got us global positioning satellites,» said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K.-based Open University. «But it was enough to develop space travel.»
Isaac Newton, Underachiever?
Born two to three months prematurely on January 4, 1643, in a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, Isaac Newton was a tiny baby who, according to his mother, could have fit inside a quart mug. A practical child, he enjoyed constructing models, including a tiny mill that actually ground flour—powered by a mouse running in a wheel.
Admitted to the University of Cambridge on 1661, Newton at first failed to shine as a student.
In 1665 the school temporarily closed because of a bubonic plague epidemic and Newton returned home to Lincolnshire for two years. It was then that the apple-falling brainstorm occurred, and he described his years on hiatus as «the prime of my age for invention.»
Despite his apparent affinity for private study, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and served as a mathematics professor and in other capacities until 1696.
Isaac Newton: More than Master of Gravity
Decoding gravity was only part of Newton’s contribution to mathematics and science. His other major mathematical preoccupation was calculus, and along with German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, Newton developed differentiation and integration—techniques that remain fundamental to mathematicians and scientists.
Meanwhile, his interest in optics led him to propose, correctly, that white light is actually the combination of light of all the colors of the rainbow. This, in turn, made plain the cause of chromatic aberration—inaccurate color reproduction—in the telescopes of the day.
To solve the problem, Newton designed a telescope that used mirrors rather than just glass lenses, which allowed the new apparatus to focus all the colors on a single point—resulting in a crisper, more accurate image. To this day, reflecting telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, are mainstays of astronomy.
Following his apple insight, Newton developed the three laws of motion, which are, in his own words:
- Newton’s Law of Inertia: Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
- Newton’s Law of Acceleration: Force is equal to the change in momentum (mV) per change in time. For a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration [expressed in the famous equation F = ma].
- Newton’s Law of Action and Reaction: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton published his findings in 1687 in a book called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) commonly known as the Principia.
«Newton’s Principia made him famous—few people read it, and even fewer understood it, but everyone knew that it was a great work, rather like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity over two hundred years later,» writes mathematician Robert Wilson of the Open University in an article on a university website.
Isaac Newton’s «Unattractive Personality»
Despite his wealth of discoveries, Isaac Newton wasn’t well liked, particularly in old age, when he served as the head of Britain’s Royal Mint, served in Parliament, and wrote on religion, among other things.
«As a personality, Newton was unattractive—solitary and reclusive when young, vain and vindictive in his later years, when he tyrannized the Royal Society and vigorously sabotaged his rivals,» the Royal Society’s Rees said.
Sir David Wallace, director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, U.K., added, «He was a complex character, who also pursued alchemy»—the search for a method to turn base metals into gold—»and, as Master of the Mint, showed no clemency towards coiners [counterfeiters] sentenced to death.»
In 1727, at 84, Sir Isaac Newton died in his sleep and was buried with pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey in London.
Photograph of Sir Godfrey Kneller painting by Science Source
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