Newton’s apple

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Abstract
The story of Newton and the apple was quick to strike the imagination of philosophers and has long been cherished as one of the most delightful as well as important anecdotes in the history of science. Human nature being what it is, however, and particularly among Fellows of the Royal Society, it was perhaps natural that the national and professional predilection for scepticism should sooner or later direct its shafts against it. It was by the publication of Sir David Brewster’s biographical studies on Newton that doubt arose about the validity of the tradition, if it may be so called, that Newton’s attention was directed to the possibility of there being a universal force of gravitation through meditation on the fall of an apple from a tree in the orchard at his home, Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, at some time during his enforced absence from Cambridge in the Plague years of 1665 and 1666.

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