Gravity via Art

Abstract

Behind the phenomenon of gravity exists the following story of the falling apple demonstrated in Figure 1 with the portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), mathematician and physicist, one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. Newton was taking tea under the apple trees in the family gardens at Woolsthorpe-England one summer’s afternoon in 1665 when an apple fell from an overhanging branch on the head, and immediately provided the inspiration for his law of gravitation. It may indeed have happened that way, but no one knows for certain. The story of Newton’s apple first appears in Voltaire’s Elements de la Philosophie de Newton, published in 1738, long after the great English mathematician had died and 73 years from the time the disputed apple fell. His only source for the apple story was Sir Isaac’s niece Catherine Barton (1679-1739). She and her husband, who lived with and kept house for Newton in his declining years, believed Newton’s story to be true. Another bit of evidence is Rev. William Stukeley’s (1687-1765) biography of Newton written in 1752. Stukeley, a physician, cleric and prominent antiquarian, wrote that he was once enjoying afternoon tea with Sir Isaac amid the Woolsthorpe apple trees when the mathematician reminisced that “he was just in the same situation as, when, formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind”.