More than Just Newton and the Apple

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Recommended: Isaac Newton and his contributions to science

As the familiar story goes, Sir Isaac Newton was lounging under an apple tree on a beautiful day in the seventeenth century. Without any warning, a rogue apple fell from a high branch and struck him on the head. Despite the resulting head trauma, Newton spontaneously concluded that some force, which he named gravity, must have caused the apple to fall and thus he formulated his Universal Law of Gravitation. According to Newton, gravity acted as an instantaneous attraction between two objects that could occur over a distance of any size. He developed equations that predicted the effects of gravity with astonishing accuracy, from the falls of apples to the orbits of planets (Strobel). However, Newton’s profound achievement lacked one key aspect. Despite consistent verification by experimental data, it made no effort to explain the mechanism by which gravity operated; Newton said nothing about why gravity worked or how it kept the moon in a perpetual orbit around the earth. He explicitly stated, “I leave this problem to the consideration of the reader,” when referring to the possible causes of gravity (Greene 64). Newton consistently sidestepped this issue, which remained unsolved until the twentieth century.

The first reasonable conjectures about the causes of gravity were made by the German physicist, Albert Einstein. In 1905, he devised his theory of special relativity, mathematically embodied by the famous equation, E = mc2. He declared that the speed of light was constant, relative to all reference points; a grandmother flipping through a scrapbook on a porch swing and a pilot soaring through the air in an F-16 would both see light race by at 670 million miles per hour. Einstein’s theory contained two other principles: Light ...

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...s. N.p., 20 AUG 2007. Web. 14 Nov 2010. .

Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. 1st ed. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2004. 62-75. Print.

Weisstein, E. "Einstein Field Equations." Wolfram Research. Wolfram, 2007. Web. 24 Nov 2010. .

Matson, Ronald. "Scientific Laws and Theories." Kennesaw State University, n.d. Web. 1 Dec 2010 .

Farris, M., and C. Russell. "Maxwell Theory." UCLA, 1997. Web. 1 Dec 2010. .

Stern, David. "Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion." An Overview for Science Teachers. N.p., 21 Mar 2005. Web. 1 Dec 2010. .

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