By the.truth on Skatehive
After his death, the original at Woolsthorpe was still known in the neighborhood as Sir Isaac’s tree. Every effort was made to preserve it as long as possible, until it finally collapsed in a windstorm in 1816. It rerooted itself and can still be seen at Woolsthorpe, while grafts from the tree have been used to propagate clones of Newton’s apples since the 1820s. But even if Newton watched the apple fall (and thought about gravity as it plummeted) it still took him decades to work out his ultimate theory. He used his newly gained mastery of the mathematics of circular motion to discover why things—including us—don’t simply fly off the surface of the earth, given the Copernican realization that the earth doesn’t sit still at the center of the cosmos but rather travels at an impressive speed, spinning on its axis as it tracks around its central sun. He calculated the strength of the so-called centrifugal force that should be hurling us into space. He put together that number with a rough