It Wasn't the Apple that Newton Used to Discover Gravity

Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Camb] idge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for k...