The true story of Newton, the apple and gravity

When we speak of gravity, comes to mind the image of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree thinking about life or about the Universe, probably. When suddenly an apple falls from that tree and hits his head, then he quickly links what has happened to his previous studies and an idea emerges that he will later analyze much more thoroughly with new research and will bring about a revolution in thought, an elegant theory capable of better explaining the behavior of the world and the Universe: gravity.

However, we do not have the certainty that it happened in such a way. Who says it was that way? Actually, Newton did not leave any writing to prove it - or at least not so beautiful and surprising. However, the Royal Society of London is working on digitizing the original writing to make it available to the public and then we will realize for ourselves that there was not an apple falling on its head. He says that in fact, in 1666, an apple fell off a tree in his mother's house, to be more exact. Seeing her fall was when she began to take an interest in gravity, or rather, to perfect her studies of it.

Going a little further back in time, Newton moved from Cambridge to Grantham, to his mother's house, since he had become obsessed with the orbit of the Moon around the Earth and at home he could not study it perfectly. Right there, after seeing the apple fall, he associated it with mathematics and began the studies that would culminate in the approach of the Law of Universal Gravitation. However, Newton never claimed that his studies followed with apples, this idea was born from a particular story written later by an archeologist friend of Newton, named William Stukeley who also wrote the biography of the scientist.

Stukeley became friends with Newton because of the admiration he had for him, following him like a true fan until he managed to get dinner with him. Hence the myth of the apple could be derived, since the man tells that after dinner, they went for a walk and had tea under a huge apple tree. While there, they talked about Newton's thoughts when looking at an apple above them, the scientist brought up gravity and then asked the young man "Why does that apple always descend perpendicularly to the earth?" He answered himself, saying that surely there was a power of attraction between the matter and the center of the Earth, therefore, «this apple falls perpendicularly or towards the center. If matter attracts matter, it must be the proportional one, therefore, the apple draws the Earth, just as the Earth draws the apple, it is reciprocal ».

That story is the closest to the apple and its relationship to Newton and its laws; however, there were other times in Newton's life when the fruit of discord was the protagonist. It is said that one time he had to entertain his niece's husband so he told him a story in which he described that an apple had fallen on his head and then his studies made sense, he told this when he saw an apple on the table and so, his assumptions about gravity came back in a casual conversation.

50 years later, Newton remembered you loved anecdotes and asked himself if it had really happened or if it was the product of his invention and the need to entertain his friends. Well, maybe it happened, but certainly, the full story or as we know it, was an invention of the scientist, according to Keith Moore, the archives chief of the Royal Society. In addition, history was also related to the biblical story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, why? Newton had very extreme views regarding religion, therefore the relationship between his studies and his "fixation" with apples has more than one derivation.

Thus, the story of the apple that explains that an object similar to the Earth that is attracted to the center of it, is possibly one of the fiction stories most counted in the world as a real fact. Although not so far from what actually happened, Newton put his own touch of interest to tell the truth, it is much more entertaining and interesting than the simple fact of seeing an apple fall in the distance.