28 September is a World Apple Day. Undoubtedly, an apple is one of our national fruits \u2013 fragrant, juicy and crunchy. Apples are associated with the end of summer holidays and beautiful autumn. It is said that it was the apple that contributed to the discovery of one of the fundamental laws governing the universe. You probably guess which law \u2013 the law of universal gravitation as defined by Sir Isaac Newton<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1626772894639{margin-bottom: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;}”][vc_column][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1629883969954{margin-bottom: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;}” el_class=”shadow”][vc_column width=”1\/3″ el_class=”foto”][vc_column_text el_class=”foto” css=”.vc_custom_1632811248601{padding-right: 20px !important;padding-left: 20px !important;}”]![\"Dariusz](\"https:\/\/us.edu.pl\/wydzial\/wnst\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/Nieprzypisane\/KajewskiDariusz.jpg\")
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DARIUSZ KAJEWSKI, PhD, DSc
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\nInstitute of Physics of the University of Silesia<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>[\/vc_column][vc_column width=”2\/3″]\r\n
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Newton is indispensably associated with the apple<\/span> that was believed to fall on his head and \u201cenlighten\u201d him. This story, however, is very often passed down with a mistake \u2013 and it is not about the apple, because it actually did play a key role in the story. But let’s start from the beginning. It\u2019s 1665 \u2013 four years after Newton was enrolled in Cambridge. A great plague begins in England. As in present times, universities are closed due to the pandemics. Young Newton, 22, decides to return to his family home. While sipping his tea under an apple tree, he was supposed to experience an epiphany \u2013 either by observing the falling apple or by direct contact with it. This is where it gets a little wild \u2013 most believe that Newton discovered that bodies fall down to Earth as a result of some force \u2013 the force of gravity. In fact, the story often ends here. However, even an inexperienced squirrel would be able to tell the fact that objects are falling down \u2013 not sideways, not up, but straight down. However, do you think that such a genius as Isaac Newton \u2013 the same one who, during his one-year \u201cvacation\u201d, worked out the calculus, split light on a prism and came to the conclusion that the color spectrum observed as a \u201crainbow\u201d is not a property of the medium but the fact that white light is simply a mixture of colors (which was not so obvious as it is today), he simply stated that lifted objects must fall to Earth? It would be too banal and totally stripped of the beauty of discoveries that are always accompanied by a mental \u201ctrigger\u201d \u2013 an impulse pushing us to combine apparently unrelated facts.<\/p>\nNewton discovered something definitely more important! Not only does the apple fall to the Earth, but the Earth also falls onto the apple \u2013 more precisely, the apple also acts with the force of gravity on the Earth, because the gravitational forces are mutual. What does it mean? That all bodies with mass are the source of gravitational interactions and their mutual gravity pulls them together \u2013 this is what holds together not only the entire Solar System, but the entire Universe! And thus, thanks to this conclusion, he could easily explain where the tides of the sea come from, he could describe mathematically the motion of planets and comets and even calculate their orbits (which Kepler had only described). He literally \u201cdotted the i\u201d in the revolution initiated by Copernicus. Suddenly it turned out that there is no such a direction as up or down! Objects stopped falling \u201cdown\u201d and began to move in direction of the other body.<\/p>\n
The little apple was therefore a \u201ctrigger\u201d for the mind of a great scientist on a compulsory \u201cvacation\u201d. As you can see, sometimes you don’t need much to start an avalanche of thoughts leading to great discoveries that can literally shake the Universe<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>[\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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