For hundreds of years since, that story has been used to introduce the subject to classrooms around the world. There is just one problem. ‘The manuscripts do not support this story,’ says Niccolò Guicciardini, from the University of Milan. ‘Because the conception of gravity that Newton had – and also his mathematics – was very different from the mature theory of universal gravitation that Newton developed in the Principia – much later.’ The apple story, in other words, was a deliberate myth-building exercise; and it was one of many.
