In the autumn of 1665, on a yeoman estate in the hamlet Woolsthorpe Manor, ripe apples fell on the wet ground. Their fall, an accelerated movement under the influence of gravity, was being watched by Isaac Newton, a twenty-two-year-old student of Trinity College in Cambridge. He had just returned to the family farm from London, where the epidemic of bubonic plague had struck, which was to claim around 100,000 lives.
Woolsthorpe, however, was quiet and peaceful. Lincolnshire, a county in the east of England, is to this day an agricultural region, with sparse towns and vast fields and gardens. In the middle of Woolsthorpe Manor estate, there is a two-storey house and three rows of windows where Newton was born, surrounded by fields and meadows for grazing sheep.
In the garden around the house, the Newton apple tree has been growing (whose offspring, which sprang up at the other side of the world, is in the photograph). According to the renowned anecdote, Newton had his revelation about the universal law of gravity while observing apples falling from the tree. Anyway, until he returned to Cambridge in 1667, during his seclusion due to the epidemic, Newton had come up with a series of revolutionary ideas in this very garden – differential calculus, optics laws, laws on gravity, vital discoveries which were to lay the foundations of modern physics.
Many other breakthroughs happened in similar places – in secluded gardens. The oldest garden of knowledge of this kind used to be not far from the ancient city of Athens, two kilometres to the north of the Acropolis, where the renowned Plato’s Academy was founded circa 387 BC. Apparently, there lived Academus, who Theseus invited to Attica ‘from the quiet region’ (which is the meaning behind his name in Greek). He saved the city in a less-known episode with Helen’s abduction, which happened before her marriage to Menelaus, and the whole mess leading up to the Trojan War. Academus revealed where Helen was hiding to the vicious Dioscuri, so, to show him gratitude for rescuing them, the Athenians in his honour named a grove Academia after him.
It’s a little-known fact that the famous school, in which the known world has been described and whose name became synonymous with school, was actually a big garden. In this holy garden, where for centuries olive trees grew undisturbed, since the Bronze Age, there was a temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Together with the cult followers, Athenian philosophers gathered in the olive shade, where, as it seems, there was a school (where Socrates taught the young) even before Plato. Aristotle attended Plato’s Academy for two decades, until he founded his school on the other side of Athens, in a place known as Lyceum.
The Academy lasted for centuries as a leading scientific institution of the Ancient Age, until in 529 BC, it was abolished by Byzantium. The garden where the school was located was respected by numerous enemies of Athens, which spared it during conquests. It was destroyed by Roman dictator Sulla, who had it cut in 80 BC to build siege engines.
Many contemporary parks preserve the ‘memory’ of eminent discoveries. Nowadays, there is a park named ‘The Rose Garden ‘on the hill overlooking the Swiss city of Bern. Here, from the top, one can see the city skyline, the Aare River curves, and the famous city clock tower Zytglogge, where, in addition to the regular clock, there is an astronomical clock working as well. Visitors to the Rose Garden can find a statue of Albert Einstein on a park bench, who resided here in the early 20th century. It was precisely during his walks around Bern that the young clerk at the Patent Office, married to Mileva Marić at the time, came up with several of his famous revelations. Einstein published them in a series of five papers, on the special theory of relativity, photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, in the ‘miraculous’ 1905 (often taken as the beginning of contemporary physics).
Einstein is frequently connected to a park at Princeton University in the USA, where the renowned physicist spent his late years at the Institute for Advanced Study. In this garden, numerous photographs of steel-haired genius were taken while he walked, with the most famous probably being the ones with mathematician Kurt Gödel, whose ‘incompleteness theorem’ changed the way of considering mathematics. Their walks around the garden in Princeton inspired the title of Jim Holt’s book ‘When Einstein Walked with Gödel’. Nowadays, at this university, as well as at most other world scientific institutions, there are gardens being cared for.
Gödel, similar to Einstein, came to America from Europe, but it is less known that during the Second World War, during the submarine war in the Atlantic, two saplings of the famous Newton’s apple were taken to the USA. After the war, they yielded runners which were planted in several leading institutions of physics in the USA. The photograph actually shows Newton’s apple in the garden of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where the gravitational constant was measured more than half a century ago. The tree bears fruit, but the ones that have tried it say its taste is awful.
There is a garden of physics at the Institute of Physics Belgrade as well. Along the banks of the Danube River in Zemun, not far from the Mihajlo Pupin’s Bridge, a green oasis is tended. The popular science video serial is recorded in this place. The series is produced by the Institute in cooperation with the ‘Science through Stories’ initiative, which is inspired by the concept of popular IPB forums, which brought together a vast audience at the Big Hall of the Student’s Cultural Centre until the epidemic outbreak.
S.B.