(This follows on from yesterday's post) ... Well I stood on the trampoline and looked up at this apple tree. It's at the other end of the Vale of Belvoir from Isaac Newton's famous tree - about 20 miles. The way I was told the story at school, you'd think no one had come up with the idea of gravity until he saw an apple fall. I don't think that's true. I understand that it was his linking of the falling of the apple with the force that kept the Moon going round the Earth that was the big leap forward. The Moon is actually falling, but it is falling along and down in a curved path, rather than straight down. This means that it keeps missing the Earth, fortunately. Newton was able to come up with a generalised equation to link gravity on Earth and gravity a long distance away. I think Einstein complained that gravity out into space constituted "spooky action-at-a-distance" whereas his curved space-time at least gave a surface that joined the two.
