He also stuck a needle in his own eye as part of his quest to understand how light and lenses work. He performed experiments to measure gravity’s pull, and then began shaping his most famous idea: universal gravitation, the theory that would connect every object in the cosmos to the flight of that famous apple from bough to ground. He created new physics as he used his mathematical discoveries to analyze motion through space and time.
He created major new insights across vital areas of mathematics-what became calculus, the mathematics of change, and analytical geometry. This much is true: during his nearly two years down on the farm, Newton produced an unbelievable number of exceptional results.
This is the popular fairy tale of genius: great ideas don’t require the tedious work of sustained attention and hard thinking they arrive in lightning bolts of inspiration, which in turn come only in the right circumstances, like enforced isolation during an epidemic. It’s easy to leap from that old man’s memory to the notion that the quiet of the countryside sparked the birth of whole new provinces of knowledge. He was contemplating his tree one day when he realized that the moon in its orbit and the apple on its bough were subject to the same forces in nature. Newton himself, very late in life, told the story. There really was an apple tree across the lane from Newton’s front door a little orchard still grows there.
The apple-falling-on-the-head element is part of the problem. But, more deeply, the idea that the plague woke the brilliance in Newton is both wrong and misleading as a measure of how well we apply ourselves during our own plague spring. Partly because none of us, along with almost everyone in human history, will ever approach his level of achievement. Shouldn’t we be able to organize our closets? If not, you’ve failed the take-home epidemic exam. Get that novel written, or that screenplay, and, if you don’t, you should at least refocus your life and find your purpose. This cheery piece in the Washington Post is typical of many articles circulating right now: “So if you’re working or studying from home over the next few weeks, perhaps remember the example Newton set.” Social media, naturally, has been more extreme. Now, with the spread of the coronavirus imposing its own isolation, Newton’s miracle year is being touted as a model. The plague created the conditions in which modern science could be created. Suitably distant from the nearest town, it was where, in near total solitude, he would invent calculus, create the science of motion, unravel gravity, and more. Newton’s home, a farm called Woolsthorpe, lay about sixty miles north of the university. Among those on the run: a young scholar of Trinity College named Isaac Newton. Almost at once, the townspeople raced to isolate themselves in the countryside.
Morley was the first known case and death from the disease in Cambridge that year: the signal that London’s outbreak that spring had advanced to the city. When town officials examined his corpse, they noted black spots on his chest, the unmistakable mark of the bubonic plague. On July 25, 1665, a five-year-old boy named John Morley, of the parish of the Holy Trinity in Cambridge, England, was found dead in his home.
ISAAC NEWTON APPLE TREE ARCHIVE
Illustration from Oxford Science Archive / Getty The idea that the bubonic plague woke the brilliance in Isaac Newton is both wrong and misleading.
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