Short Fiction: Isaac Newton and the Forbidden Fruit

A modern fairy tale

In the lord’s gardens at Lincolnshire, Isaac Newton knew of a tree that held the secret to all knowledge.

Some said the tree had grown from a seed stolen by Marco Polo during his trip to the Orient. They claimed that Marco Polo had climbed the Himalayas and infiltrated a secretive order of monks who guarded a sacred tree. The leader of their order had the privilege of taking a single bite from its fruit in his lifetime. The monks believed that the fruit was so strong that a second bite would prove fatal, and that even the first bite would open the mind of man to the mysteries of the world which only the strongest of men could perceive and not go mad. And that Marco Polo, knowing these things and fearing for his life, escaped with a single seed from that tree, for which he earned a king’s ransom.

Some said that the tree was cursed, that it had grown on a graveyard believed to be fallow before being transplanted to the lord’s gardens. That its fruit was haunted by the dreams of the dead the plant had absorbed, and those who tasted of it were filled with memories and impressions not their own, driven mad by spirits with unsettled business on this earth.

And there were those who said that the tree was the original tree from the garden of Eden, for which God had exiled humanity from paradise simply for taking that first bite which extinguished our innocence, and awakened the potential for good and for evil. The tree had been stolen back from the promised land during the crusades and protected by good Christians ever since, who swore never to defy God’s commandment again. The last bite had changed the world. A second might destroy it.

Only two things were certain. The tree was the prized possession of the lord of Lincolnshire. And no one was allowed to eat of it. The lord could sometimes be seen admiring it, but even he never succumbed to temptation: any fruit it produced was quickly collected and burned, under his watchful eye. To the undiscerning, it might have appeared to have been an ordinary apple tree. But young Isaac Newton knew better. The lost treasure of the east, the tree that carried the souls of the dead, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... One of the stories had to be true. Perhaps even all of them. Isaac did not know how he would do it, or what the consequences would be, but he knew he had to eat of its fruit.

The tree was sealed behind a gate of iron with bars too firm to bend even if Isaac had been exceptionally strong, which he was not. The gates were topped with a wide row of spikes making climbing them treacherous even if Isaac had been exceptionally agile, which he was not. The path through the castle to the garden was watched by guards too proud of their loyalty to their lord to allow so much as a child to slip through even if Isaac had been exceptionally charming, which he was not. Isaac was of average wit and ability, and had only one advantage on his quest to eat the apple. His mind was filled with dreams of its potential, and nothing, not even what seemed impossible, would deter him from his objective.

Anyone who expressed interest in the tree gained the watchful eye of the guards: one of Isaac’s friends had heard the legend and asked one of the gardeners about it, and his trips to the garden quickly gained a chaperone. So Isaac never asked about the tree. To loiter around the gardens was also to gather suspicion, another friend had hovered near the outer gardens as the fruit ripened in the springtime, and had kindly been asked to leave. So Isaac never spent too much time near the gardens. One young lad had tried to rush his way to the tree, and earned a cuff on the ear from the guards and a lecture from his parents. So Isaac vowed to make no attempt on the tree until he could be certain of success.

Once a year, come early May, Isaac would take a trip down to the gardens with a blanket in his pack, watching the tree, waiting for one single fruit to fall in the range he needed it to. He would push his luck for an hour, pretending to be admiring the spring air, before returning home empty-handed. A year would pass, the fruit would once again be ripe, and Isaac would return to the tree, staring up at it and hoping for a miracle.

It was during what was to be his last year in Lincolnshire that the impossible finally happened. Isaac couldn’t say how, but just looking at the tree’s branches shake with the wind, he knew it was almost time. The miracle he had been waiting for was about to arrive. Sensing his opportunity was near, Isaac unfurled the blanket under the gate, rolling it down to where the edge of the blanket reached to where the farthest branch of the tree stretched out. As if on cue, there was a tiny snap from the tree and a single apple fell onto the edge of the blanket. Exhilarated, and scarcely believing his luck, Isaac carefully pulled the blanket back towards him, keeping the apple balanced on top until it was in grabbing range. Snatching the magical fruit and the blanket up, Isaac tore off in a sprint back to his home.

Isaac couldn’t have said if anyone had seen him. His heart felt like it was beating a thousand times a minute as he raced his treasure home. It wasn’t until he reached the privacy of his own room that he trusted himself to look at his prize. A flawless red apple, with a tiny green leaf attached. The food of kings. Of gods, even. The Greeks had told a story of an apple hurled by Eris, the goddess of discord, into a party of the gods which had sparked the Trojan war over who would claim it. And if he believed some of the stories, that same fruit was in his hands.

For only a moment, Isaac considered what would happen if he sold the fruit, or tried to plant a tree of his own from the seeds. But he knew what he needed to do. He had waited too long to think of anything else.

Isaac took a single bite of the pure red apple and swallowed, waiting for the divine revelation to descend upon him, and the mysteries of the universe to be unraveled.

And Isaac Newton felt nothing.

Isaac paused, anticipating the moment when he would feel different, for some unexpected sensation to take him over. But the experience had produced nothing mystical in him. It had felt like nothing so much as eating an apple. Sitting in silence, after almost a minute had passed, praying he was not proving too greedy, Isaac took a second bite, chomping down onto the apple and savoring its mix of sweetness and bitterness before swallowing it down.

And still Isaac Newton felt nothing.

Isaac began to grow concerned. How long were the effects supposed to last? Was he meant to eat the whole thing in a single go? Isaac stared at the walls around him, his hands, and the contents of his room, waiting for his world to overflow with transcendent knowledge that would prove this had all been worth it. Isaac waited nearly an hour, and still feeling nothing, consumed the rest of the apple in a rush.

And after all that, still, Isaac Newton felt nothing.

Isaac stared down at his sticky hands and the remaining apple core, and felt like he wanted to cry. As best as he could tell, nothing special had happened, there had been no miracle contained in that fruit. He felt as though the scales were finally beginning to fall from his eyes, as the slightly bitter taste in his mouth started to nauseate him. The bright world of magic and mystery he had believed in was beginning to unravel, and be replaced with cold mundanity.

There was a far more plausible explanation for everything he knew about the tree. The fruit was not of a variety intended to be eaten: perhaps slightly poisonous, or simply not as sweet as the apples he was used to. The lord must have admired the tree, but was careful not to let any reckless children eat from a plant he wasn’t sure was safe. It felt so obvious now that Isaac had thought of it, a thousand times more plausible than the childish supernatural fancies he had allowed to fill his head.

Isaac lay in bed restlessly that night, unable to sleep, a mix of indigestion and disappointment. What a fool he had been. For thinking that all it would take was eating one fruit, and somehow he would be able to do more than anyone who had come before him in unlocking the mysteries of the universe.

And then Isaac Newton began down the path that would lead to him doing more than anyone who had come before him in unlocking the mysteries of the universe.

Lying in bed, trying to put his mind past the apple that had occupied his thoughts for years, a single nagging thought crept into his mind before he fell asleep that night.

Why had the apple fallen?

The question stuck with him until the next day. It seemed so obvious a point that everyone else must already know the answer, Isaac felt like a simpleton for even considering it. To mention it to his parents would be to admit ignorance. So at the end of his school day, Isaac mustered up the courage to ask one of his teachers in private: why did apples fall to the ground?

And Isaac Newton was told that it was simply in the nature of apples to fall. And for a time this answer satisfied him.

But after only a day, something about the answer began to rub him the wrong way, like an itch he couldn’t scratch, or a barb stuck in his shoe. Like the answer was glossing over something fundamental, a patch applied over a tear in cloth, or a coat of paint on a rotting house. The next day, Isaac came back to his teacher with another question: why did oranges fall? Or balls? Or any other object?

And Isaac Newton was told that it was simply in the nature of all objects to fall. And for a time this answer satisfied him.

But the more that he thought about it, the more questions he uncovered. The astronomers claimed that the moon, the stars and the planets floated through space. Why? What force compelled them to circle the earth in their skewed orbits? What caused the tides to change with the year, and be drawn in and out?

And Isaac Newton was told that it is simply in the nature of planets to circle the Earth, the stars to float in space, and the tides to go in and out. And this answer did not satisfy him in the slightest.

Isaac began to suspect that all of this was wrong. Or not so much wrong, as incomplete. That where his teachers had hundreds of reasons: one for every object, one for every phenomena on the earth, there was a single reason. Some unifying principle that could make sense of all of this, and show why all these things had to be true at the same time.

Isaac’s teachers told him that objects fell more quickly based upon their weight. A man named Galileo Galilei claimed to have stood on top of the leaning tower of Pisa, and dropped two weights of identical shape but varying weight, and proved that they fell at equal speed. But Galileo could not explain why. Isaac’s teachers said the Earth was at the center of all creation, orbited by a moon, planets, and the sun in ever greater circles. Galileo alleged that he had seen through a telescope that the planet Jupiter had its own moons, and that the universe was filled with bodies circled by other bodies. But Galileo could not say why this was. Galileo had even argued for a great heresy: that the ground on which they stood was not immoveable, but that the Earth flew through space at unthinkable speeds in the orbit of the sun. But Galileo could not explain why this was true either.

A mathematician named Zeno had once claimed that motion was impossible, since any object must first cross half the distance to reach somewhere, then half the distance again, and half the remaining distance, and so on forever. Something as simple as motion and describing the fall of an apple required a description of how the apple would cross an infinite number of intervals. And mathematics was not equipped to handle infinity.

At least, not yet.

Isaac Newton studied mathematics, and found it lacking. Mathematics could describe aspects of the way the world was, but not how it changed. Isaac Newton studied the philosophies of Aristotle, and found it lacking. Aristotle claimed it was in the nature of objects to fall according to their weight, a principle believed for nearly two thousand years. But if the stories were true, Galileo had shown otherwise. Isaac Newton studied the stories of astrologers who claimed that the stars and planets in heaven were moved by supernatural forces, and found their claims lacking. The planets moved with regularity, not purpose. They were less like men who chose to move, and more like apples. Compelled to move.

Isaac imagined an apple, floating in space, that began to accelerate downwards, at two meters per second. Its acceleration would be constant, a flat line. The speed it had picked up could be defined by a line sloping up the graph at the rate of its acceleration. But what about its position? Since the apple picked up distance at every moment, its position had to be the area under the curve defining its velocity. Isaac drew the sides of a triangle that filled in the area under the curve of the sloped line up to a point. That area was a triangle, or half a square, so the position had to grow with the square of time… a parabola.

Isaac looked at what he had written for each equation. “Position = X^2”. “Velocity = 2X”. “Acceleration= 2”. There was a profound relationship between each of those simple descriptions. Going forward, each equation described the rate of change of the last equation. Going backward, each equation described the area under the curve of the next equation. Given any graph, any pattern of movement, there had to be a similar relationship that could be described: the change taking place, and the impact of a change that took place at that rate.

And so Isaac began to develop the mathematics of change. The mathematics of the infinite.

It was many years later, after untold hours spent buried in his notes and research that Isaac Newton wrote a book describing the mathematics of infinity, and how it could be used to describe the force of gravity that bound reality. His encoding of gravity in numbers and strange symbols would have looked like witchcraft to the illiterate, trapping the complexity of the universe in arcane runes. He called it The System of the World.

The moon circled the Earth, the tides of the Earth shifted with the moon, and apples fell all for the same reason. Because all matter in the universe was drawn together by a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. All the motion in the world, from people, to ships, to avalanches were a consequence of Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Objects at rest remained at rest, objects acted on by a force changed their momentum in proportion to that force, and any force acting on an object produced an equal and opposite reaction. These were not simply stories that could be told, like “apples want to fall.” These were mathematical principles that could be used to predict the eclipses of the sun, the trajectory of an arrow, and the future of the world itself.

For a brief moment, half a billion humans were alive on planet Earth, but only one of them could look at the world and see the fundamental forces that drove it, the machinery of nature expressed in mathematical equations. Untold trillions of creatures had lived out their lives on Earth watching the sun moon and stars float above them in the sky without understanding what caused the sun to brighten the day and disappear by night, and Isaac Newton became the first able to explain why. The first equipped with the knowledge to predict and change reality.

And then Isaac Newton unleashed his science upon the world.

The seed of knowledge planted by Isaac Newton would spread across the entire surface of the Earth. Knowledge of his Calculus and physics would allow for the creation of new kinds of machinery, great and terrible in destructive power, powered by energies gathered from deep beneath the Earth’s crust. It would allow the human race to send vessels to the sky to reach celestial bodies they had only glimpsed through telescopes, and reshape the Earth according to the will of mankind, shrinking the boundaries of nature and diminishing the role of magic and mystery. Some of this, Isaac would begin to see in his lifetime. Other parts of this story are still being told.

It was many years later that Isaac returned to the gardens of the lord of Lincolnshire as an older and wiser man, to find that the tree had disappeared. A new lord ruled in the castle, and had no interest in an old tree the previous owner was afraid to let anyone eat from. Isaac Newton had been the last to ever eat of its fruit. Isaac stared at the place where the tree had once stood, filled with sadness and gratitude for the journey it had sent him on.

When Isaac was asked in public how he had developed such amazing insights into the world, Isaac would modestly shrug, and say that if he had seen further, it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants. But when asked by his closest friends, his thoughts would turn back to his memories of that garden and the legend of a tree’s fruit. And Isaac would say that all of it, the whole thing, had happened because of an apple.

(next in the series: George Washington and the Forbidden Fruit)