Conference hydra::dave_barry

1040.0. "Japanese try to re-create Newton's gravity discovery" by ORION::chayna.zko.dec.com::manana::eppes (Nina Eppes) Tue Mar 18 1997 18:00

Dave Barry
March 16, 1997

Settle back, because today I'm going to tell you the dramatic true story of
what happened when some Japanese researchers decided to re-create the historic
discovery of the law of gravity:

As you recall, this discovery occurred in an English orchard in 1666, when,
according to legend, Isaac Newton, the brilliant mathematician, fell out of a
tree and landed on an apple.

No, hold it, upon reviewing the videotape I see that in fact the apple fell
out of the tree and landed on Newton. Had this occurred today, of course,
Newton would have simply put on a foam neck brace and sued everybody within a
radius of 125 miles. But those were primitive times, and Newton was forced to
settle for discovering the law of gravity, which states: "A dropped object
will fall with an acceleration of 32 feet per second per second, and if it is
your wallet, it will make every effort to land in a public toilet."

Later on Newton also invented calculus, which is defined as "the branch of
mathematics that is so scary it causes everybody to stop studying
mathematics." That's the whole POINT of calculus. At colleges and
universities, on the first day of calculus class, the professors go to the
board and write huge incomprehensible "equations" that they make up right on
the spot, knowing that this will cause all the students to drop the course and
never return to the mathematics building again. This frees the professors to
spend the rest of the semester playing cards and regaling each other with
hilarious stories about the "mathematical symbols" they've invented over the
years. ("Remember the time Professor Hinkwattle drew a `cosine derivative'
that was actually a picture of a squid?" "Yes! Students were diving out the
windows! And the classroom was on the fourth floor!")

Yes, Newton made many contributions to science, but gravity was definitely his
biggest. That's why a group of Japanese researchers decided, as an
international goodwill project, to re-create the original discovery, using an
apple tree that was descended from the original Newton tree.

I found out about this project thanks to an alert reader named (really) Harley
Ferguson, who sent me a story about it from an English-language Japanese
newspaper called The Daily Yomiuri. The article states that in August 1996,
researchers at the Construction Ministry's Public Works Research Institute in
Arai, Japan, received a sapling descended from the original Newton tree. This
sapling, according to the story, came from the U.S. Commerce Department's
National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which is in charge of
weights and measures. (So if your pants don't fit the way they used to, this
is the agency to complain to.)

I was curious as to why a U.S. government agency would be providing Newton
saplings, so I called NIST and spoke with the official archivist, whose name
(really) is Karma A. Beal. She sent me a bunch of information, which I will
attempt to summarize here:

The original Newton tree -- for simplicity's sake, let's call it "Bob" -- died
in 1814. But before Bob went to The Big Orchard In The Sky, cuttings were
taken, and over the years these cuttings became trees, and cuttings were taken
from those, and so now there are genetically identical offspring -- let's call
them "Boblets" -- all over the world.

One Boblet lives at the NIST facility in Gaithersburg, Md. It produces apples,
but not many; the information Karma Beal sent me refers to the tree as (I am
not making any of this up) "a very shy fruiter." The story gets a little murky
at this point, but apparently the sapling sent to Japan for the historic
re-creation of Newton's discovery was grown from a seed from one of the NIST
Boblet apples. This is significant, because if the sapling came from a seed,
as opposed to a cutting, it is probably NOT a pure Bob descendant. As the NIST
documentation states, "the original flower was almost certainly pollinated by
some other tree." (Trees are total sluts this way.)

But let's not be picky. The important thing is that the Japanese researchers
had a sapling that was in some way connected to the original historic Bob.
According to The Daily Yomiuri, their plan was to videotape the exact moment
when the very first apple fell.

The sapling was planted, and eventually it produced a single apple. The
researchers set up a video camera. All was in readiness as, day by day, the
apple grew riper and riper, getting closer and closer to the big moment. And
then, finally, it happened: A local resident, who knew nothing about any of
this, wandered by, saw the apple, and ate it.

So the researchers never did get to videotape the apple falling in a historic
manner, although the article states that "they did get scenes of the man
munching on the apple." The man is quoted as saying: "It just tasted really
bad."

But this does not mean the project was a waste of time. Often, in science,
so-called "failures" produce the greatest discoveries. And this project
resulted in a discovery whose value to humanity cannot be overemphasized. I
refer, of course, to the fact that "Shy Fruiter and the Saplings" would be a
great name for a rock band.