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Newton’s Apple

 

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.

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