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?
-         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.
-         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?
-         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.
-         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?
-         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.”
-         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”?
-         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.”
-         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...

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 20, 2018 at 11:13 AM

    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.

    Those 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 ;-)

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