Some years after the death of Sir Isaac Newton, William Stukeley recalled a conversation in the garden of the famous mathematician’s home. Sir Isaac had told him that it was here that a falling apple had led him to wonder why things fall straight down only, and to guess that all matter exerts an attractive force of some kind.

As Newton thought about this attractive force, he realised that all objects, large and small, must exert it in some degree, and that this would account for the motion of the planets in orbit around the sun. Over time, the speculations begun beside that apple tree led him and fellow scientists to an astonishing number of new discoveries.

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