A few workweek ago I wrote aboutfamous scientific discipline urban legends . I leave behind one out , because I thought it was too obviously a myth to be deserving commit on the list . turn out , it really happened .
https://gizmodo.com/10-urban-legends-about-famous-scientists-834494406
What ’s the most simple - minded science urban legend you could ever come up with ? Here ’s a hint , it ’s been parody in cartoons and repeated in elementary shoal schoolroom .
It ’s the apple falling on Newton ’s foreland , right ? That ’s the hokey child ’s story we all get tell apart to explain why a virtuoso first investigated the problem of things falling towards the primer coat . It ’s a cute , simple story , but it ca n’t be true . It has to be one of those odd fruit - tree have-to doe with stories that the 1700s seemed , unaccountably , to spawn — like George Washington not lie about chopping down the cherry tree .
Except , it appear that it actually is truthful . We get the true statement of it from no less a source than Newton himself . During an interview with his biographer , he did say that watching an apple fall out of a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was the thing that first get him wondering about gravity . In fact , he assure the story to anyone who would listen . There are disc of many of these re - recounting , include one pinning down the accurate date of the heaven-sent apple . It happened in 1666 , when Newton had fly the pest in Cambridge and sat thinking in his mother ’s garden , he wondered if the same violence that made an apple decline also apply to the Moon , and everything else in the sky . He decided to investigate if some exclusive power could explain all of their movement .
Today , we aggrandize the report , say that an Malus pumila fell on Newton ’s head . No historical records mention that — although Newton was a prickly fellow and probably would n’t confess if it did happen . But the basic write up ? That ’s honest .
ViaMad Science
Isaac NewtonPhysicsScience
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