Why Does the Apple Fall Straight Down?

Happy Apple Day.

It began on October 21, 1990, at Covent Garden in London. A group called Common Ground started it. They wanted people to notice something simple.

Apples are not all the same.

Different places grew different apples. Each one had its own name, its own taste, its own corner of the map. Common Ground used the apple to say something bigger. The small, local, ordinary things are worth keeping.

I like that. A whole day for apples.

Now here is a quieter story about an apple.

On April 15, 1726, a man named William Stukeley had dinner with Isaac Newton. Newton was eighty-three years old. The weather was warm. After the meal, they drank tea in the garden, under some apple trees.

Stukeley wrote down what Newton told him. Newton said he had been sitting in a spot just like that one when the idea of gravity first came to him. An apple fell. And he began to wonder.

“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?”

“Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre?”

That is it. That is the whole question.

Notice what is missing. There is no apple bonking him on the head. Stukeley never mentions one. That part was added later, because it makes a funnier picture.

What is left is better, I think. An old man, a pot of tea, and a memory of the day he looked at something everyone had seen a thousand times, and asked why.

Everybody knew apples fall. Nobody thought it was a question.

Maybe there is a small question hiding in your day, too. Why steam curls up from the kettle. Why the best apple is always the one at the very top of the tree. Why the dog turns around three times before lying down.

You do not have to figure out the answer. Just let yourself ask.

Here is something to try tonight. Cut an apple across the middle, not from top to bottom. Look at the center.

There is a tiny star of seeds. It was there the whole time.

You only had to cut it a different way.

So eat one slowly today. Smell the skin first. Wonder something small.

Do you like apples? I do. Pink Lady is usually my favorite. What’s yours?

Enjoy your day!