Isa Newton's Story of the Apple Tree

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Isa newton has example. He retreated to his country cottage, which by now is about an hour by car away from cambridge. And that's when he supposedly sat beneath a tree in the garden and watched an apple fall to the ground and conceived the theory of gravity. We can never know whether that happened, but it was a story that he only ated telling about five years before he died. So it sounds as though he was creating a mythological version of scientific creativity. The story was unknown for decades. It was only really in the nineteenth century that the story of the apple tree came back. Now, of course, it's as though he were a secular saint. He...

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career, details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution after his famous (though perhaps mythological) discovery under the apple tree. Her work emphasizes science as a long, continuous process composed of incremental contributions–in which women throughout history have taken a crucial part–rather than the sole province of a few monolithic innovators.

Patricia joined Tyler to discuss why Newton left Cambridge to run The Royal Mint, why he was so productive during the Great Plague, why the “Scientific Revolution” should instead be understood as a gradual process, what the Antikythera device tells us about science in the ancient world, the influence of Erasmus Darwin on his grandson, why more people should know Dorothy Hodgkin, how George Eliot inspired her to commit unhistoric acts, why she opposes any kind of sex-segregated schooling, her early experience in a startup, what modern students of science can learn from studying Renaissance art, the reasons she considers Madame Lavoisier to be the greatest female science illustrator, the unusual work habit brought to her attention by house guests, the book of caricatures she’d like to write next, and more.

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Recorded January 15th, 2021 Other ways to connect

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