Isaac Newton meditates on the apple that has just fallen from the tree
More or less everyone, starting from the first grade, knows the story of the apple who accidentally fell from a tree branch onto the head of the scholar Isaac Newton , would eventually inspire him with the theory of gravity, in practice a real revolution in the scientific field.
But is this reality or just a popular legend that has been handed down more or less unchanged in recent centuries?
The anecdote, in detail, is certainly invented, but a grain of truth, as often happens in these cases, is there and it is Newton himself who confirms it, as it was he who reported to the archaeologist William Stukeley , that the notion of gravity was inspired by the banal fall of an apple (Stukeley reports this in his "Conversations ").
The fact that the fruit always and only fell vertically in fact, and never horizontally or upwards, must necessarily mean the existence of a law of attraction of the Earth towards the objects and people who inhabit it.
Newton later extended this law to space, to the Earth-Moon system and, thanks to Kepler's laws , he also succeeded in demonstrating that this force is proportional to the square of the distance.