[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Not every day you get to do this - I'm posting from an outhouse of Newton's birthplace - Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. Yes - it has an apple orchard, and yes, it has his bedroom where he used a south facing window to split light into its spectrum. Sadly, you can't take pictures in the house, but I've got some nice ones from outside that I'll post when we get home in a few hours!


Doug

[djellison]

Here is a little mosaic of three frames from my camera ( Canon S2 IS for those that like such info )

On the right, Woolsthorpe Manor. Take carefull note of the windows on the first floor. The 'top left' window at the front of the house is the bedroom window in which Newton was born Christmas Day 1642. He left to go to Cambridge University but returned when the plague struck Europe and the University closed. When he returned, he did his work on Optics. The top right window on the front of the house is his bedroom from that time - and the small window on the near-side wall ( the middle of the three on that wall ) is the small south facing window thru which he did his spectral work projected, using a prism, onto the far wall of the bedroom (by what I found is the door) - and that front window is the one from which he is said to have considered gravity 'on the occasion of seing a falling apple'. There's 1001 different tales of this if you go online, most not including the myth that it fell on his head, some saying he was sat in the Orchard, but 'on site' they suggest he saw it from his bedroom.

And which tree was he looking at. Well the actual tree is supposed to have been basically killed in an 1820 storm, but the tree they mark down as being either the remnants or decendant of that tree is the tall, distorted tree near the left end of the mosaic ( I took the mosaic so it would show house and tree ). The base does look very warped and broken, so perhaps there are remains of the original tree playing a part in that tree, who knows. There is a snuff box in his bedroom made from a log cut from the fallen tree in 1820 (and somewhere in the US a cutting is rumoured to have grown into a tree), along with a copy of Pricipia Mathematica and a replica of his small newtonian telescope

All in all, a great little trip out today - something of a pilgrimage for a space nut like me, for as Tom Hanks said...once the engines are off "Isaac Newton's in the driving seat"

A few more pics to follow.

Doug

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