Enlightenment · Europe · Science

1666

Newton Describes Gravity at Woolsthorpe

1666

According to Newton's own later account, he sat in his mother's garden at Woolsthorpe that summer, watched an apple fall, and wondered whether the same force that pulled the apple to the ground might extend to the moon. The story is probably true in outline, if not in apples, and the insight it represents would eventually unify terrestrial and celestial mechanics.