Introduction: The roots
of this absurd fiction lie in a Malayalam poem titled Apple and
Newton: an absurd poem, written by Veeraankutty in Mathrubhumi
weekly dated 28 July 2024.
When the apple fell, it was the theory of gravitation
that actually fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Or was it Newton that fell into the
theory? Nothing is absolutely certain when we come to Newton’s and such
people’s levels of thinking. That uncertainty was discovered much later, of
course, by Werner Heisenberg. A little before Heisenberg discovered the
uncertainty of science, Albert Einstein won nothing less than the Nobel Prize
for his Relativity Theory. Newton’s laws of motion were not absolute, Einstein
told us. For example, they don’t apply to love. It was Einstein who declared
that “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
Most probably it was not just any
ordinary apple that fell on Newton’s head. There was no apple tree anywhere in
the vicinity, in the first place. The apple fell from heaven. It had two
bite-marks. Yes, Isaac Newton realised that the apple fell from Paradise. It
was the fruit of knowledge that the first pair of lovers had bitten into. The
forbidden fruit. It had traversed countless light years just to teach the law
of gravitation to Isaac Newton, though Albert Einstein wouldn’t accept that exegesis.
In one of Einstein’s thought
experiments, he saw what actually happened. One priest of the Roman Church saw
Newton with the forbidden fruit and was irate. How can anyone dare to hold the
forbidden fruit in his hand? It’s heresy, blasphemy, mortal sin. Newton was petrified.
But he was not at his wit’s end. So he said, “It’s gravitation.”
“What’s that?” The priest asked
indignantly.
“That’s a tendency of a body to move
towards the centre of an irresistible force of attraction, which is another
body, with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses
of the two bodies in question…”
“Let’s see what the holy book has to
say about that,” the priest said ominously before strutting off.
Newton was saved when all objects,
however big or small, started falling to the earth ever after. The flying arrows
and the roaring missiles, the feet of the ballerina and the might of the
autocrat… everything ratified Newton’s theory of gravitation eventually.
So he did not add gravitation to the
list of his sins.
Ah, in case you don’t know, Newton
once made a list of the sins he had committed as a young man. Like threatening
his mother and stepfather with burning them alive in their house. He didn’t
like them, that was the reason. His own father had died even before he was
born. Later his mother married Reverend Barnabas Smith. Newton wasn’t fond of
the reverend. And so he didn’t like his
mother either. He called that momentum. Some forces keep increasing as they
move on.
What happened to the apple that fell
from heaven? It moved on with greater momentum from Newton to Einstein to Neils
Bohr to Max Planck to… It has to move on. That’s how forbidden fruits are.
Hari OM
ReplyDeleteTom gravitates toward writing, it is an irresistible force! 🤗 YAM xx
The original sin? 😊
DeleteNewton was kind of a jerk, anyway...
ReplyDeleteAll geniuses are.
DeleteNice light hearted read.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Veeraankutty.
DeleteInteresting read. Never knew that Newton had a step father.
ReplyDeleteI too came to know that fact as I went into some details yesterday.
DeleteEnjoyed
ReplyDeleteGlad 😊
Delete