Newton’s Apple Tree

On a warm evening in 1666, just after dinner, the soon to be famous Issaac Newton sat down beneath this tree outside of Trinity to mull over his thoughts, when all of a sudden he was struck on the top of his head by a large, red apple. ‘Eureka’, he cried, and Gravity was discovered. As entertaining as this tale is, Newton was not struck on the head by an apple and he was not underneath this tree. In fact, no such tree existed in Cambridge at the time. But in just half a century, this grand myth was woven by his admirers from its original simple story.  This tree is a grafted descendant of the original one at the home of Sir Isaac Newton's mother in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. On a visit to his mother's garden during his Cambridge days in the late 1660s, he observed a green apple fall from a tree and only then began to consider the mechanism that drove what is now termed Gravity. However a tree can be found at Trinity College, the college he attended, to commemorate Newton’s famous discovery. 

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