CROWN, JULY 2015The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT, is one of the world’s scientific powerhouses. Founded in 1861 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it boasts nine current Nobel laureates among its one thousand professors (as of 2014). Its alumni include astronauts (one-third of NASA’s space flights were manned by MIT graduates), politicians (including Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and winner of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize), entrepreneurs such as William Reddington Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard—and, of course, lots of scientists, including the Nobel Prize-winning architect of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman. Yet one of its most illustrious inhabitants is not human; it is in fact a plant, an apple tree. Growing in the President’s Garden in the shadow of the institute’s iconic Pantheonesque dome is a cutting from another tree kept at England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, which is a direct descendant of the actual tree under which Sir Isaac Newton supposedly sat when he observed the falling of his famous apple.
The simple yet profound question that Newton had been contemplating sitting under a tree at his mother’s Lincolnshire farm three and a half centuries ago was: why do apples fall? It may seem churlish to suggest that his answer, one that revolutionized physics and indeed all of science, could be inadequate in any way; but there is an aspect of that famous scene that went unnoticed by Newton and has gone unremarked upon ever since: what was the apple doing up in the tree in the first place? If the apple’s accelerated descent to the ground was puzzling, then how much more inexplicable was the bolting together of Lincolnshire air and water to form a spherical object perched in the branches of a tree? Why ...
