Newton

Jason mentioned that the story about Newton’s apple tree apparently is not true. Coincidentally I got to know the background in the course of a philosophy lecture (“Scientific thinking”) last semester right before left Vienna: My professor, Herbert Pietschmann, told us that this story was most probably invented by Newton himself. Newton was kind of paranoid because the method of differential calculus was awarded to Gottfried Leibniz even though they both developed it independently at the same time. So he worried that the same will happen with his law of gravitation, because Robert Hooke formulated one as well. So he told the public that he was already thinking about gravity when he was a little boy lying under an apple tree. This strory was then further developed and enlarged.

Julia Heuritsch