Mathematicians and Apples
As part of the way
to make kids comfortable with speaking in front of an audience, my daughter’s
school has these periodic sessions where every kid has to speak for about a
minute to the entire class holding a placard on the topic.
Recently, the
topic was any mathematician of their choice. Huh?
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How
does a kid in 2nd standard know about any mathematician (or
“mathematic” as my daughter calls it)?! The only mathematician I know who did
anything that a kid could understand was Gauss… as a kid, he found a smart way
to add all the numbers from 1 to 100, an assignment his teacher had given.
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And
what can one draw on a placard about a mathematician? Equations?
Given the placard
problem, I picked Alan Turing as the guy she could talk about. Come to think of
it, all the points she used for her talk were about his work around computing,
not maths!
1)
He was
a mathematician and a computer scientist;
2)
The machine
he created to decode the famous Enigma code of the Nazis;
3)
The
Turing test he devised as a check for machine intelligence;
4)
The
last point was just interesting trivia: Turing “suicided himself” by eating a
poisoned apple (apparently, her teacher doesn’t want kids to say “killed” and
“died”, so my kid insisted on using the word “suicide”)…
The last point on
the apple reminds me of the other mathematician on whom I was reading a book
around the same time: Newton. Yes, Newton was a scientist and a mathematician. He was also an alchemist, part of the British
finance ministry, a Biblical scholar who didn’t agree with the Church on the
Holy Trinity… the list goes on, as Tom King wrote is his superbly written
hourly-read book, Isaac
Newton. The book even has an entire chapter on “the apple myth”:
Did an apple falling really inspire the theory of gravitation?
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Newton
promoted this only in later life. Further, the detail of the apple hitting
Newton is a recent addition, not part of the original incident that Newton told
his friends.
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All of
which leads many to point out that:
“Newton cleverly honed this anecdote over
time… it got better with the telling.”
But
why? Did Newton just like the idea that something simple could bring on a
sudden flash of genius?
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Did
the Biblical quality appeal to him, given that he was a Biblical scholar?
“Humanity “fell” out of God’s graces when
humans ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which has commonly be
represented as an apple.”
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Or is
it the case that the story has stuck in the public consciousness because of the Biblical connection,
“even if this was happening on a purely subconscious level”?
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Or did
Newton concoct and promote this story to hide the true origins of the theory of
gravity lieing in some of the alchemical experiments he was doing? If you’re
wondering why he’d want to hide any such alchemy association, here’s the
reason:
“In 1404, making gold or silver without
government approval was made into a crime in England.”
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Or did
the true origin lie in something that would have offended the church, something
they might even consider Satanic? Newton knew he had to be careful since he did
not subscribe to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
Regardless of what
the truth is, the apple-on-his-head story is one of the most recognizable
stories in science, on par with Archimedes and his bathtub, and Benjamin
Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm...
Possibly Archimedes did get his inspiration about the physics of immersed objects' apparent weight loss while in the bath tub. Possibly Benjamin did the kite flying to detect electricity in the thunderstorm clouds. The incidents and the scientific truths are somewhat worthwhile. But why should Newton need an apple to fall, and that too squarely on his head, in order to inspire him about the truth of gravitation? It is absurd! "Things fall" was always known to everyone in the world, ages before Newton was even born. We can be sure that apple did nothing in the inspiring physics of gravitational physics by Newton.
ReplyDeleteThose who know about the physics history will also know that Newton was trying to work out the solution of the orbital motion of planets, since he was aware of the work of Copernicus and Kepler. He knew the elliptic path mathematics was good but the physics was still lacking. He wished to address that part, while not losing ground on one of his "laws of motion" proposal, namely (in layman's language), "every object sticks to its velocity, unless confronted by a force making it not to do so". Newton's proposal of gravitation had the genius element more when we look at how he addressed the heavenly bodies motion, rather than the relatively simple, gravitational pull of earth is the reason why things fall. From this point of view too, the apple falling on his idea doesn't jell. If we want to spin out a more convincing story behind Newton's inspiration, we would be better off whip up a meteorite and not an apple to fall on Newton's head! :-) "How could he survive it" would require another fairy tale! :-0 ;-)