Newton's apple: Myth vs reality

Newton's Apple: Myth vs. Reality

185 years. The city of London has already been attacked. Running towards Cambridge too. Meanwhile, the death of a 5-year-old boy shook the Cambridge administration. The city defense committee did not walk the path of lockdown at this time. On the contrary, just as the Bangladesh government declared the closure of offices and courts across the country, including Dhaka, on the eve of Corona, and people from different walks of life began to leave Dhaka and return to their villages, the same thing happened in Cambridge. Frightened by the plague, people left the city in groups. Educational institutions, offices and courts were closed. Holidays are announced at the university. The students of Cambridge therefore left the city and returned to their homes. That team included Isaac Newton, a talented young man of 22 years.

The village is in his Ulstrope in Lincolnshire. But his reluctance to go home. Children of rich peasant families. Abundant property, lack of people to look after the farm. Mother Hannah Newton wanted to be a farmer without education. But Newton no longer wanted to grow up as the son of ten rich peasants, so he saw education as the best way to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, to do justice to his merits, without looking at it as a job tool. Despite the opposition of his mother and uncle, he wanted to continue his studies on his own. Hannah Newton spread thorns in that path. He used to send very little money to the boy than he needed. Unlike in Bangladesh, there was no opportunity to continue tuition at Cambridge. So Newton had to take a job as a sub-inspector. It is also wrong to say job. University members had to work as servants at home, even cleaning their shoes and feces. In the old days, Newton's mother earned more than seven hundred pounds a year from land and farming. Hannah's income can be compared to the millionaires of the time. But he used to send only 10 pounds a year as the cost of his son's education. So it goes without saying that he did not like the company of his mother and the village.

That Newton was forced to go to the village by the plague. And that is what happened to Newton. The opportunity to meditate in solitude for all the great deeds of his life comes when he goes to that village.

He went to the village, but his mother could not force him to farm. The stubborn Newton was walking like himself.

There is no mind in farming, day and night cannot be spent at home. There is a big apple tree in the garden next to the house. Newton go there to eat air or sweet sunshine. Went that day too. But that day was not like ten days. That is a timeless day. Newton pondered under the apple tree. Suddenly a ripe apple fell from the tree on Newton's head. Then Newton's body rolled and fell to the ground. Newton's eyes widened at the sight of the apple. Not in greed. To unravel the entanglement of thought. Newton picked up the apple from the ground. Thousands of volts of electricity sparkled in the neurons of his brain. Why did the apple fall to the ground, why did it not rise?

We think we are intelligent, so such a simple question will not come to our minds. The events that are happening in front of our eyes every day, the things that seem so normal, intelligent, why waste time thinking about them? On the contrary, if anyone asks a question about it, just thinking it is crazy, I will ignore it and at the end I will pour water on the fire of his question. But talented people are not as intelligent as us. In their minds with great intelligence. So Newton can think, why did the apple fall to the ground? Why not go up to the sky?

Newton thought for a moment, then shouted 'Eureka' like Archimedes in his mind. Then he went back home. He wrote down the most effective formula of nature with notebooks and pens. Gravity is the name of the world!

Facts

Dear reader, almost all of the above story is true. There is no reason to disbelieve. Some might say that the apple did not fall on Newton's head, it fell on the ground in front of him. This difference does not detract from the flavor of history mixed into the story. But if you are a thoughtful reader, what is the last line of the story, not raising questions in your mind? Is the birth of a timeless theory in such a hurry?

This is the difference between myth and fact. The last two lines have turned history into a myth, the one who has never trampled on science, he also ruled in a hurry, Newton discovered the law of gravitation because the apple fell.

But that is not the case. What Newton thought when he saw the apple read was the age of the question but a few thousand years. When the modern civilization was in the hands of the Greeks, the question was asked: Why do people throw something up and come back down? Or why the fruit of the tree falls down? And the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was considered omniscient in those days, answered these questions. His answer was that if you throw things that are not heavenly, you throw them up and they come back down. There is a love of the world with these objects. On the other hand, the things that are heavenly, with which the earth has a pleasant home, they leave the earth as soon as they get a chance and cross the path to heaven. Aristotle considered volatile matter, such as smoke and water vapor, to be celestial objects.

If the law of gravity had been born suddenly from the reading of the apple, then the theory of gravity would have been discovered long ago by Aristotle's law of thought.

Science progressed on the path of the law of gravitation through the research of the German scientist Copernicus. He was the first to oppose Aristotle in modern times, saying that the planets and stars revolve not around the earth, but around the sun. He also showed some logical evidence. But the Christian clergy could not agree, for the Bible's words matched those of Aristotle. Copernicus' views are therefore called biblical. The clergy tried to burn his books.

Giordano Bruno, a young clergyman, later copied Copernicus. He was burnt to death for that crime. But two contemporary scientists, the pioneers of experimental science, Galileo and Kepler, began research. 1

In 1810, Hans Lippershe, a spectacle seller in the Netherlands, invented an amazing device. The device looks like a tube, with two lenses mounted on each end. And when you look through it, far away things come very close! Galileo got a chance to see the machine move anyway. He was working on various subjects of science at that time, he was also experimenting with them. His work was also going on with the movement of the stars in the sky. At that time, the tube with the lens became a blessing for him. But the device is not exactly suitable. He thought that if he tried, he would be able to make better instruments. In fact, in a few days he made a telescope suitable for observing the sky. He saw the movement of the planets and stars, he discovered the four moons of Jupiter!

The telescope made by Galileo somehow reached Kepler's hands. Jean-Pierre Lumin, author of the novel Galileo's Eye (Bengali translation), claims that Kepler corresponded with Galileo regularly, and that Galileo sent him a telescope as a gift to a friend he had never met. And this incident turned the tide in the history of space exploration. Kepler observed the sky with that telescope. Observing the motion of the planets, he came to some conclusions. Those decisions later turned into a single formula. And those were the ancient forms of the law of gravitation.

The Earth-centered universe, or the heliocentric universe of Copernicus, was thought to be circular in understanding the orbits of the planets. But Kepler observed that the orbits of the planets were not round at all, but elliptical. Again, the sun is not in the middle of the ellipse. That is, the planets form an orbit by placing the sun in a focus on one side of the ellipse.

While studying at Cambridge, Newton was drawn to the works of some of Europe's best scientists - Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Newton was not unaware of the extensive research on optics by Arab scientists or Roger Bacon. Newton kept thinking about Kepler's theories. Those thoughts later matched the stalks during the plague, in the village of Ulstrop. Newton proved Kepler's formulas mathematically. Kepler's answer was not why the planets revolve around the sun. Newton discovered that answer. The idea of ​​an attraction ball comes to Newton's head. At that time people only knew about magnetism. Just as a magnet can attract magnetic matter, so do planets and stars. However, Newton elaborated on the concept of attraction. He is convinced that the gravitational pull of the earth causes the apple of the tree to fall to the ground. And Newton's whim was to shape everything into a mathematical structure. This tendency laid the foundation of modern physics. He also sought a mathematical structure of the law of gravitation.

Now let's come to the words of Apple. Another scientist, David Beauster, wrote Newton's first biography. But the story of Apple was not in that biography. However, Bouster did not believe the incident. It has been avoided by thinking it is just a Gazakh story.

So how did this story match the stalks? Did Newton tell this story to anyone?

Said, probably to his niece Kuhuite. There is no strong evidence for this. But from the book The Budget of Paradox by the mathematician August the Morgan. It is also known that the story spread from Kuhit's mouth. Interestingly, Newton told this story to Kuhwit 50 years after the plague. Why did you say after so many years, Newton?

People love fantasy, that's why superhero series are so appreciated. Rickshaw puller's love type movies with the daughter of a big man were released in the market in the nineties under different names in different flavors and scenes. Mercury crowded the halls to watch all those movies. Ordinary people look for such fantasies even among the heroes of reality, so some people claim that the poor inventor Nikola Tesla is a bigger scientist than Einstein, they love to think that Faraday went from a prison worker to a scientist.

Newton is the son of a rich family. Yes, he worked as a servant in someone else's house and paid for his education. Fantasy could have been created with this, but the fanatics have bigger materials to enjoy the fantasy. It is only natural that fantasy lovers would be thrilled to think that one of the best theories of all time has been discovered through the incident of an apple falling to the ground in a hurry. Newton's niece also wanted to hear such a fantasy from Mama's mouth, Mama also understood her niece's attitude and told the story.

If Apple's story is true, then why did Newton go to hear his niece fifty years later? Newton had an extraordinary ability to hold any words or research in his stomach. So Newton did not tell anyone about his research in the 180s, especially the law of gravitation. Hold on for about twenty years. In the 180's, dear friend Edmund Haley, named after Haley's comet, first leaked the law of gravity to him. In particular, Haley was then researching a special comet, which would return every six years. In order to find his explanation, Halley needs to know more about the orbits, movements, etc. of the planets. Kepler's formulas also attracted Haley, but the mysteries were not clear to Haley, so he took refuge in Newton. Newton surprised him by saying that he had solved Kepler's formulas twenty years ago with a single formula.

The article is part of Newton's Apple and Other Science Myths to be published at the 2021 Book Fair

Newton's closest friend is Haley. If the Apple Reading incident is true then why not tell this story when you are talking to Haley about the law of gravity? The point is clear, Newton is a scientist, Halio is a scientist. When talking to another scientist, talk about causation, not fantasy, that's normal. In other words, the phenomenon of reading apples in gravitational studies is not the main context.

So how did this myth or story spread?

When even a historian becomes a fantasy lover, the stalks of history must be distorted. An unnamed historian named The Israeli took the apple reading a step further. He was the first to write that Newton was able to discover the law of gravity because an apple fell on his head. Before it was turned on, the apple fell in front of or next to Newton. Voltaire, a French writer and historian, made Newton's apple reading popular around the world, not Israeli. He made the story of reading an apple almost real in a story or article.

Many people think that the incident of reading apples happened. And that apple fell not on Newton's head, but on the front. However, this phenomenon is not the main controller behind the discovery of the theory of gravitation. So if Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo's efforts were in vain. Newton did not need to go to their research.