I was just thinking about all the early scientists that we learned about when we were in school. Were these guys really “scientists” or did they just make some incredibly lucky guesses?
Legend has it that young Issac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling apple, and he suddenly came up with his law of gravity.
Newton, the son of a farmer, was born in 1642 near Grantham, England, and entered Cambridge University in 1661. The school temporarily closed in 1665 due to an outbreak of the bubonic plague and Newton moved back to his childhood home — Woolssthorpe Manor. He spent two years there before he returned to Cambridge in 1667. It was during that period (at Woolsthorpe) that he was in the orchard and witnessed an apple drop from a tree. There’s no evidence that the apple landed on his head, but Newton’s observation caused him to ponder why apples always fall straight to the ground (rather than sideways) and inspired him to eventually develop his law of universal gravitation.
In 1687, Newton published his 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.
Later, Newton shared the apple anecdote with William Stukeley, who included it in a biography, “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life” that was published in 1752.
Well, I kind of got off the subject, but it appears that the apple story is “kind of” true…. probably embellished a bit over the years, but at least has its roots in reality.
But I still wonder about all the other early “discoveries” and how much their stories have been embellished over time.
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