HEATHER BIRKETT: Hello, and welcome to the National Trust
Podcast. I'm Heather Birkett. In today's episode, we discover how
an ordinary incident led to one of the greatest series of
thoughts in the history of mankind and the unravelling of
the mysteries of the universe.
Today, rather than starting our journey in the grounds of a
National Trust property, we've made our way to the iconic
biospheres and exotic plant collection of the Eden Project
in St Austell, Cornwall.
Amongst all of Eden's exciting flora and fauna sits a very
ordinary looking Apple tree sapling that looks a bit out of
place.
It's skinny and spindly, and compared to some of its
neighbours, looks a little bit plain Jane.
But you should never judge a book by its cover, because this
sapling has one inspirational story to tell. [
GENERIC: SFX] 3, 2, 1, 0. Engines at maximum thrust for
lift off.
TIMOTHY PEAKE: There's an incredible amount of power,
noise and vibration as the engines accelerate to full
thrust.
There's not a huge amount of acceleration in the first few
seconds. It's 300 tonnes of rocket lifting off.
My name is Tim Peake and I'm an astronaut with the European
Space Agency.
HEATHER BIRKETT: The date is the 15th of December 2015. And Tim
has hitched a ride on the Russian Soyuz rocket on a
mission to the International Space Station. Quite possibly
the commute of a lifetime.
TIMOTHY PEAKE: Quite quickly after leaving the launch pad,
that's when the acceleration really kicks in.
You're on the way.
It's far noisier outside the rocket for the spectators who
are about a kilometre away.
Inside, we have a number of different stages to go through.
The first stage will take us up to about 60 kilometers.
And then we jettison the first stage boosters. And at that
point, we have a really big drop in acceleration as those first
stage boosters fall away.
It's a much gentler, smoother ride on the second stage with
just one engine firing.
That gets us above the Earth's atmosphere.
And that's when the nose fairing jettisons so we can get to see
the view of space approaching through the window.
And then the third stage kicks in, and that is pure
acceleration, up to about 4 Gs of acceleration.
It just goes on and on and on. The whole launch sequence lasts
for nearly nine minutes.
The idea, of course, is to get you up to about 220 kilometers
at about 25 times the speed of sound. So it's a wild ride.
You really are feeling the full force of that rocket's
acceleration. And then, you know, within a fraction of a
second, the engine cuts out. And we're in zero-g.
Very quiet, very peaceful, and everything floats inside the
spacecraft. And you know that you safely made it to orbit.
HEATHER BIRKETT: Hitching a ride alongside Tim on this mission
are the seeds from which the Apple tree at the Eden Project
grew, and for quite a significant reason. It's a story
that you may be familiar with.
It all started hundreds of years ago on the 25th of December with
the birth of a very special child.
Richard Fairhead, National Trust volunteer, explains more.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: On the 25th of December, a baby was born
surrounded by farm animals.
Some chickens, a few pigs, I have no doubt, and some fields
for vegetables.
The main crop, if you can call it a crop, were sheep. In
Lincolnshire, of course, sheep and wool were very important in
those days, and his mother was very keen that he should take on
the farm.
HEATHER BIRKETT: But rather than agriculture, this young man had
his mind set on other things.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: He was interested in how things worked.
He made models. There's one famous model he made of a
windmill. He took it out into the field, and the wind blew.
And it turned the sails just as it should.
Then the story goes on that he brought it indoors and began to
think, well, it's not going to work indoors, there's no wind.
He thought about this for some time and came up with the idea.
He made a little treadmill, like you have in a hamster cage,
found a real mouse, put the mouse in the treadmill, the
mouse did its stuff, and turned the sails.
I think that's an indication of his practical approach to things
and his inquisitiveness and that practical approach to life
really saw him through the rest of his life.
When he became a teenager, his mother sent him to Grantham, to
the King School.
HEATHER BIRKETT: But school sadly didn't give this young man
the kind of education that he needed to feed his inquisitive
mind.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: They weren't teaching much in the way of
science and the sort of things that he was really interested
in.
HEATHER BIRKETT: And despite having her mind set, on him
taking over the farm after school, his mother was
eventually persuaded to let him go to university.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: In 1661, he went off to Cambridge, to
Trinity College.
HEATHER BIRKETT: And even here, he still wasn't able to get the
kind of education that he desired.
But finally, in 1665, he got his degree. And free to study more
autonomously, he was able to research the things that
interested him.
But this was short-lived.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: In 1665, in London, the plague hit, the
bubonic plague.
And it was beginning to go out to other parts of the country.
And they were so worried at Cambridge that if it got there,
with all the people meeting in the university, it would be a
real disaster.
So they took the decision to close the university and sent
everybody home.
HEATHER BIRKETT: So our young scientist was sent back to
Lincoln to social distance. But far from disrupting his
research, lockdown gave him the time and space to immerse
himself in his work.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: So in about a year and a half, he got started
on some of his big ideas. The world changed in that year.
HEATHER BIRKETT: He studied religion and philosophy,
experimented with lenses, and was the first to split white
light into its rainbow spectrum with a prism.
But it was an instance of happenstance while he was
relaxing in his apple orchard that would lead to his greatest
discovery.
RICHARD FAIRHEAD: He was sitting underneath the tree, probably
reading a book, thinking about some theory he was following up.
And as apples do, one of them fell down besides him.
And I guess he was a bit startled. He looked up to see
where the Apple had come from.
And he began to think, what makes things fall directly to
the Earth? Is there some sort of attraction?
Is there some sort of force which is involved?
And of course, he thought about this over the years to come, and
in time came up with this whole theory of his about gravity.
HEATHER BIRKETT: So in case you haven't guessed it yet, the man
we're talking about is Sir Isaac Newton and the property The
National Trust's Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincoln, still home to
Newton's Apple tree.
His theory of gravity is something we now take for
granted. But in the 1600s, according to Dr Cornelius
Schilt, postdoctoral scholar at Oxford, this realisation had a
monumental impact.
DR CORNELIUS SCHILT: It changed the world of mathematics and the
world of natural philosophy to such a degree that the entire
18th century, so the following century, was basically designed
as a confirmation of what Newton had written.
HEATHER BIRKETT: However, despite the revolutionary impact
of Isaac's encounter, gravity may not have been something that
occupied many of his thoughts.
DR CORNELIUS SCHILT: He's much more interested in optics. He
makes his own reflecting telescopes. He's not really
thinking about gravity.
HEATHER BIRKETT: But for some reason, in 1684, 20 years after
his apple inspiration, suddenly his thoughts once again turned
to gravity.
DR CORNELIUS SCHILT: Out of the blue he drops everything that
he's doing, and he starts writing the Principia.
HEATHER BIRKETT: The Principia, or to give it its full name,
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was a three-volume
publication where Newton first described his theory for the
universal law of gravitation.
But for Newton himself, and for those in his closest circle, his
world-changing ideas needed a lot of encouragement to be
shared in the first place.
JENNIE JOHNS: I don't think that he was perhaps as self-confident
as automatically assumed that this bright, intelligent mind
would be. He needed the help of others to get him where he was.
HEATHER BIRKETT: This is Jennie Johns, part of the team who look
after Newton's home at Woolsthorpe.
JENNIE JOHNS: It's quite understood that he was a
difficult person. There's a well-known feud with a fellow
scientist, a German scientist called Leibniz, that they had a
difficult relationship. Similarly with Robert Hooke at
the Royal Society.
HEATHER BIRKETT: To the Newton family, Isaac was forever
destined to look after the farm at the manor house that he had
inherited.
JENNIE JOHNS: He was born here as lord of the manor since his
father pre-deceased him and spent a lot of time with his
grandmother after his mother remarried when he was three.
And his grandmother was aware of his position as lord of the
manor and therefore didn't really encourage him to
socialise much with the local children.
And it's documented that when he was at school later on as a
teenager in Grantham, at the King's School, he got into a
playground argument with a fellow pupil.
And that actually encouraged him to do better in his studies,
because at the time, he wasn't a great student, he was at the
bottom of his class, not because he wasn't capable, but he was
just distracted by other things and he had other interests.
Today, if- we would really encourage that, and we would be
probably really excited to see this mind at work.
But of course, back then, he was viewed as probably being a bit
strange and different.
But look what he turned into.
HEATHER BIRKETT: These feuds and fallings out ran as a continuous
theme throughout his life. As he matured, the physical fights
lessened, but the truculent personality remained.
Deep down, Newton was a very introverted person.
A biography from Oxford University noting that; "Even in
his maturity, having become rich, famous, laden with honours
and internationally acclaimed as one of the world's foremost
thinkers, he remained deeply insecure, given to fits of
depression and outbursts of violent temper, implacable in
pursuit of anyone by whom he felt threatened."
While we can never truly know the inner workings of a person's
mind, we can, however, say with some degree of confidence that
Newton's was full of ideas, but that he himself felt alone and
unable to share them with anyone.
That was until he met the astronomer, Edmund Halley.
Halley had been working on a theory that there must be a
force that allowed planets to be attracted to the sun.
A force which allowed for their movement, but with a degree of
predictability. Halley had presented his ideas, but they
were quickly dismissed without having any mathematical proof.
Keen to find a solution, Halley headed for Cambridge, where
Isaac Newton was working as a professor of mathematics.
The pair had met briefly before in London and had shared some
letters theorising the movement of comets, but it was this
meeting that set in motion the beginning of the Principia.
When presented with the challenge of why planets move in
the way that they do, Newton suggested that they were
following an ellipse.
And furthermore, he had already come up with the calculations to
prove it.
Halley was stunned, and Newton was encouraged. He was now
reassured that his thoughts and theories could be met with the
praise he knew they deserved.
Halley continued to encourage Newton over the course of the
next 18 months, and in April of 1686, his works were presented
to the Royal Society.
JENNIE JOHNS: And he presented it to the Royal Society and
other scholars, and it was slated. It was heavily
criticised. So he said, right, fine, that's it. I'll sit on it.
I won't publish it. That's it. Never talk about it again.
HEATHER BIRKETT: One of the Society fellows, a scientist
named Robert Hooke, was leading the claim that this work had
been plagiarised, putting Newton into a position he was deeply
uncomfortable with.
Newton's immediate response was to withdraw and threaten to pull
part of his manuscripts away from publication.
Some months passed, and thankfully, with some more
gentle persuasion and the resolve of his friend Edmund
Halley, Newton was finally warmed back to the idea that his
thoughts were worthwhile.
Robert Hooke's claims were never held up, and in June of the same
year, the Principia was given the go-ahead to be published and
printed from the Royal Society.
KEITH MOORE: However, tracking back on what the Royal Society
was up to at that time, it had, the year before, published a
very good book, not as good as Newton's, and that was John Ray
and Francis Willoughby's History of Fishes.
HEATHER BIRKETT: This is Keith Moore, head of collections at
the Royal Society Library.
Although the book had been given the green light, there was no
money to pay for it to get through the printers.
KEITH MOORE: The Society's finances were somewhat
embarrassed, shall we say. It meant that they couldn't afford
to print Newton's Principia Mathematica.
That meant Halley got the job of doing it and paying the costs as
well.
So, Halley is really a scientific hero because he made
it possible for Principia Mathematica to appear.
HEATHER BIRKETT: So, Principia had finally made it into the
world, and with it, a brand new understanding of how the
universe behaves.
Today, we remember Isaac Newton and a chance happening in an
orchard for unlocking many of the scientific ideas that we
hold in the present.
The simple act of an apple falling to the ground became the
perfect and understandable symbol of how our planets and
stars align under the force of gravity.
Pips from Newton's Apple tree have now grown into plants of
their own in the gardens at the Eden Project, the United Nations
in Vienna, and back at home alongside the original at
Woolsthorpe Manor.
As for Edmund Halley, he used his friend's workings to predict
the movement and appearance of one of the most well-known
comets in the sky, Halley's Comet.
And in case you're wondering, he was eventually repaid by the
Royal Society for fronting the costs to have the Principia
published in unsold copies of The History of Fishes.
Thank you for listening to the National Trust Podcast. To find
out more about Isaac Newton and his life at Woolsthorpe, please
take a look at the links in our show notes.
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And if you like anything that you have heard or want to get in
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podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk.
We'll be back soon with a new episode. But until next time,
from me, Heather Birkett, goodbye.