Most of us heard the tale back in grade school: A young Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree, contemplating the mysteries of the universe, when an apple falls from the tree and hits the young scientist on the head. That simple event, which has been somewhat embellished over the centuries, is thought to have provided the inspiration for Newton's law of universal gravitation. The importance of that event for scientific history was recognized in 2010, when British-born astronaut Dr. Piers Sellers brought a 4-inch (10 cm) chunk of that original tree and a picture of Newton into orbit on the space shuttle Atlantis.
A famous tree, still going strong:
- Although Newton did not specify the tree he was sitting under in the summer of 1666, there was only one apple tree at Woolsthorpe Manor near Grantham in Lincolnshire, the site of the event.
- The apple tree blew down in a storm in 1816, but a major portion was re-rooted and the tree survived.
- Isaac Newton’s apple tree, now more than 350 years old, is on its third set of roots. It still provides a good crop of apples each summer.