Newton Apple Quotes

Millions saw the apple fall, Newton was the only one who asked why?

What goes up must come down.

Mass is not proportional to volume. A girl as small as a violet. A girl who moves like a flower petal is pulling me toward her with more force than her mass. Just then, like Newton’s apple, I rolled toward her without stopping until I fell on her, with a thump. With a thump. My heart keeps bouncing between the sky and the ground. It was my first love.

Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why,

If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple as well.

Down through the ages and in the whole world, Watt and Newton cannot have been the only ones to notice the steam from a boiling kettle or observe an apple fall. Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster.

How much do you know about natural sciences?” “Er,” said Robin. “Gravity? Sir Isaac Newton?” “The apple chap?” Edwin visibly shredded his planned explanation into shorter words.

Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.

Mindfulness is observing and asking why. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton asked why.

Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood.

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

theory or have remained unaffected by them. It is true that a fact can sometimes appear to resemble an “accident,” as in the case of the apple that fell near Newton, but the accident only became a “fact” because Newton asked certain questions.

consider," replies the geomancer, "--adam and eve ate fruit from a tree, and were enlighten'd. the buddha sat beneath a tree, and he was enlighten'd. newton, also sitting beneath a tree, was hit by a falling apple,--and he was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest trees produce enlightenment. trees are not the problem. the forest is not an agent of darkness. but it may be your visto is.

For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Rontgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new...

Truth is the language that expresses universality. Newton did not “discover” a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus. He accomplished a creative operation. He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun. Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

(The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”)

I’m not being needlessly dramatic when I say that it was a whole thing. On Facebook. On the news, including 60 Minutes. Even Oprah talked about it—the Jonathan Smith-Turner Affair, the Theoretical Hoax, the Physics Scandal. Einstein rolled in his grave. Newton puked up his apple. Feynman quietly stepped in a tank of liquid helium.

The World Has Need Of You” everything here seems to need us —Rainer Maria Rilke I can hardly imagine it as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient prayer of my arms swinging in counterpoint to my feet. Here I am, suspended between the sidewalk and twilight, the sky dimming so fast it seems alive. What if you felt the invisible tug between you and everything? A boy on a bicycle rides by, his white shirt open, flaring behind him like wings. It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? The cliffs? The gulls? If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple.

While philosophers were still debating whether a machine could be constructed to reproduce the thoughts of Newton, the emotions of Bach or the inspiration of Michelangelo, the average man of science was rapidly becoming convinced that no machine could be constructed to reproduce the light of a candle or the fall of an apple.

All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”)

The wind was as ripe as apples, so full of fall that you could almost bite every breath.

It was a little insulting to admit that a drooling dolt like Coulter might be right about something, but after all, Isaac Newton didn’t reject gravity just because the apple had a low IQ.

service, which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-drawing style of Victorian illustrated fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree framed by a quote from Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple Computer. Perhaps

Newton’s law of gravitation. That’s all you need (with a spot of calculus to crunch the numbers) to work out how the Earth will orbit the Sun or how an apple will fall if you let it go at a certain height. The only trouble is that Newton had no idea how this gravity thing worked. His model was simply: ‘There is an attraction between bits of stuff, and let’s not bother about why.

The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of noting; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole. Man's knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton's theory of gravity changed mankind's outlook on the world.

Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they’re often oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius. We want our Isaac Newtons to be sitting under the apple tree when the apple falls. We want Archimedes in his bathtub. But the truth is usually more complicated than that. The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

(The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat ‘in a contemplative mood’ and ‘was occasioned by the fall of an apple.’)

The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.

There was a hubbub in Billy's head all night. He would hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush. He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, a tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.

Like Sir Isaac Newton, after insight hit in falling fruit, they recognized the perfect label for Indians not sharp enough to make it all the way home, left in that space between two places. Red on the outside, white on the inside, forever locked away from both worlds, separated by the thinnest membrane.

Consider,” replies the Geomancer, “— Adam and Eve ate fruit from a Tree, and were enlighten’d. The Buddha sat beneath a Tree, and he was enlighten’d. Newton, also sitting beneath a Tree, was hit by a falling Apple,— and he was enlighten’d. A quick overview would suggest that Trees produce Enlightenment. Trees are not the Problem. The Forest is not an Agent of Darkness. But it may be your Visto is.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.

It has been frequently said that many of the world's greatest inventions were due to accident. In a sense this is true. But the accident was prepared for by previous hard thinking. It would never have occurred had not this thinking taken place. It is said that the idea of gravitation came to Newton because an apple fell on his head. Perhaps. But apples had been falling ever since there were apple trees, and had probably been falling on men's heads ever since men had acquired the habit of getting their heads in the way.

But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.

why Newton’s apple fell. The apple isn’t moving at all at the start of the process, so why would changing the shape of space make it move? The wonderful answer is that massive objects don’t just warp space, they warp space and time. In Einstein’s world, space and time are united into the single entity, spacetime. In principle we should think of spacetime as a four-dimensional object – but that’s hard to envisage, so what we tend to do is to just use two space dimensions and one of time. (The third space dimension hasn’t gone away, we just don’t need to think of it.) When we speak of warping space or time, what happens is that the axis is no longer straight, but starts to curve.

Luck ever attends the bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton's mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer's to begin her morning's shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice. "We've only two of the big tins of corned beef," he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr's. But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end. "Tongue as well. Very good. I'll send them up at once," he added, and came forward into the shop. "Good morning," said Diva. Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation. "Got any big tins of corned beef? The ones that contain six pounds." "Very sorry, ma'am. We've only got two, and they've just been ordered." "A small pot of ginger then, please," said Diva recklessly. "Will you send it round immediately?" "Yes, ma'am. The boy's just going out." That was luck. Diva hurried into the street, and was absorbed by the headlines of the news outside the stationer's. This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny...

When 'consciousness' is unawares transferred from great things to small' - which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter-the result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on whether the person's emotions are of the type capable of participating in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique, walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and the trivial planes meet; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero perish or a sparrow fall'. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a banal event and a general law of nature - Newton's apple or the boiling kettle of James Watt.

This description of physiology—as the exquisite matching of form and function, down to the molecular level—dates back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, living organisms were nothing more than exquisite assemblages of machines. Medieval biology had departed from that tradition, conjuring up “vital” forces and mystical fluids that were somehow unique to life—a last-minute deus ex machina to explain the mysterious workings of living organisms (and justify the existence of the deus). But biophysicists were intent on restoring a rigidly mechanistic description to biology. Living physiology should be explicable in terms of physics, biophysicists argued—forces, motions, actions, motors, engines, levers, pulleys, clasps. The laws that drove Newton’s apples to the ground should also apply to the growth of the apple tree. Invoking special vital forces or inventing mystical fluids to explain life was unnecessary. Biology was physics. Machina en deus.

What matters is not how much we remember, but how we remember. As I see it, intelligence is closely related to creativity, to noticing something new, to making unexpected connections between disparate facts. Isaac Newton’s genius consisted of realizing that what makes an apple fall from a tree is the same force that keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth: gravity. Centuries later, in his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein uncovered another astounding relationship when he noted that the effect of the force of gravity is indistinguishable from the acceleration of a spaceship in outer space or the tug we feel in an elevator when it starts to move. Attempting to memorize facts by rote does nothing more than distract our attention from what really matters, the deeper understanding required to establish meaning and notice connections—that which constitutes the basis of intelligence. The method of loci does nothing to help us understand the things we memorize; it is just a formula for memorization that, in fact, competes against comprehension. As we saw in the previous chapter, Shereshevskii was able to memorize a list effortlessly using the method of loci, but was incapable of grasping its content enough to pick out the liquids from the list or, on another occasion, to realize that he had memorized a sequence of consecutive numbers. Using the method of loci to store these lists left Shereshevskii no room to make any of the categorizations that we perform unconsciously (person, animal, liquid, etc.) or to find basic patterns in a list of numbers. To be creative and intelligent, we must go beyond merely remembering and undertake completely different processes: we must assimilate concepts and derive meaning. Focusing on memorization techniques limits our ability to understand, classify, contextualize, and associate. Like memorization, these processes also help to secure memories, but in a more useful and elaborate way; these are precisely the processes that should be developed and encouraged by the educational system.

Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, 'It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.' In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything-that is, the theory that described all motion. It all began when he was twenty-three years old. Cambridge University was closed because of the black plague. One day in 1666, while walking around his country estate, he saw an apple fall. Then he asked himself a question that would alter the course of human history. If an apple falls, then does the moon also fall? Before Newton, the church taught that there were two kinds of laws. The first were the laws found on Earth, which were corrupted by the sin of mortals. The second were the pure, perfect, and harmonious laws of the heavens. The essence of Newton's idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth. In his notebook, he drew a fateful picture (see figure 1). If a cannonball is fired from a mountaintop, it goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. But if you fire the cannonball at increasing velocities, it travels farther and farther before coming back to Earth, until it eventually completely circles the Earth and returns to the mountaintop. He concluded that the natural law that governs apples and cannonballs, gravity, also grips the moon in its orbit around the Earth. Terrestrial and heavenly physics were the same.

This aspect of the creative process, the fact that it emerges in response to a particular difficulty, has spawned its own terminology. It is called the “problem phase” of innovation. “The damn thing had been bugging me for years,” Dyson says of the conventional vacuum cleaner. “I couldn’t bear the inefficiency of the technology. It wasn’t so much a ‘problem phase’ as a ‘hatred phase.’” We often leave this aspect of the creative process out of the picture. We focus on the moment of epiphany, the detonation of insight that happened when Newton was hit by the apple or Archimedes was taking a bath. That is perhaps why creativity seems so ethereal. The idea is that such insights could happen anytime, anywhere. It is just a matter of sitting back and letting them flow. But this leaves out an indispensable feature of creativity. Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot. As Dyson puts it: “Creativity should be thought of as a dialogue. You have to have a problem before you can have the game-changing riposte.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.

It was there, forcibly removed from the university’s community, that Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravity. It was there, in a garden and not in a lecture hall, that he saw a falling apple and wondered why.

Newton found the law of gravitation not in a written page, but in a falling apple.

For the man on the street, science and math sound too and soulless. It is hard to appreciate their significance Most of us are just aware of Newton's apple trivia and Einstein's famous e mc2. Science, like philosophy, remains obscure and detached, playing role in our daily lives. There is a general perception that science is hard to grasp and has direct relevance to what we do. After all, how often do we discuss Dante or Descartes over dinner anyway? Some feel it to be too academic and leave it to the intellectuals or scientists to sort out while others feel that such topics are good only for academic debate. The great physicist, Rutherford, once quipped that, "i you can't explain a complex theory to a bartender, the theory not worth it" Well, it could be easier said than done (applications of tools

Looking back on that incident, Jack Carley has a different perspective. Nineteen sixty-eight was a whole new political world. All the rules were being broken. There were no standards. The radicals were yelling down speakers, students were taking over universities, violence was, in the words of Black Panther Huey Newton, "as American as apple pie." And, when the senses are assaulted and brutal obscenities are hurled, it is difficult for those being attacked not to develop a mentality of "them versus us.

An ambitious effort to build the first handheld computer, the Newton, seemed to sputter even before the first version was released.

popular religion produces shallow people. Several years ago, Bill McKibben wrote an article in Harper’s magazine that described the current condition of American Christianity:   Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that, “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counterbiblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.6

As science turns toward the realm of the Spirit to understand the physical universe, Space, Matter, Time are more prone to induce reverence than arrogance among scientists, who are sounding more like Isaiah in the temple than Isaac Newton under the apple tree.

Galileo and Kepler had succeeded in explaining how these bodies moved, but Newton became eager to know why. The question had gnawed at him for weeks on end. Then one moonlit night in 1666 while he was seated beneath a tree in the orchard of his Woolsthorpe farm, his meditations were jarred by the thud of an apple falling to the ground beside him. It was a commonplace occurrence, but coming when it did, it set off a chain of thoughts that enabled Newton eventually to answer all the remaining questions about the motion of planets and stars.

We often leave this aspect of the creative process out of the picture. We focus on the moment of epiphany, the detonation of insight that happened when Newton was hit by the apple or Archimedes was taking a bath. That is perhaps why creativity seems so ethereal. The idea is that such insights could happen anytime, anywhere. It is just a matter of sitting back and letting them flow.

The most famous story about gravity involves Isaac Newton and an apple that supposedly fell on his head, inspiring him to concoct his theory of universal gravitation. (It’s mostly famous because Newton himself couldn’t stop telling it later in life, in an unnecessary attempt to add some extra juice to his reputation as a genius.)

Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before. Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree.

American financier Bernard Baruch once remarked, ‘Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” —Bernard Baruch

Whether an apple had actually inspired Newton to derive his theory of gravitation had long ceased to matter. The trees grew; the story thrived.

In 1991, when Apple started to talk about the hand-held computing devices called personal digital assistants, or PDAs, a lot of people both inside and outside Intel considered them a “10X” force capable of restructuring the PC industry. PDAs could do to PCs what PCs were doing to mainframes, many said. Not wanting to be blind to this possibility, we made a very substantial external investment and started a major internal effort to ensure that we would participate in any PDA wave in a big way. Then Apple’s Newton came out in 1993 and was promptly criticized for its failings. What does this say about the PDA phenomenon? Is it less of a “10X” force because its first instantiation was disappointing? When you think about it, first versions of most things usually are. Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface and the predecessor of the Mac, did not receive good acceptance. Neither did the first version of Windows, which was considered an inferior product for years—DOS with a pretty face, as many called it. Yet graphical user interfaces in general, and Windows in particular, have become “10X” forces shaping the industry.

Illustrious past episodes corroborate that creative characters thrive in lockdown. Isaac Newton, for one, flourished during the plague. When Cambridge University had to shut down in the summer of 1665 after an outbreak, Newton went back to his family home in Lincolnshire where he stayed for more than a year. During this period of forced isolation described as annus mirabilis (a “remarkable year”), he had an outpouring of creative energy that formed the foundation for his theories of gravity and optics and, in particular, the development of the inverse-square law of gravitation (there was an apple tree beside the house and the idea came to him as he compared the fall of an apple to the motion of the orbital moon).[157]

One Lying Jeep by Stewart Stafford Pavlov's dogs got hold of, Occam's Razor and shaved, Archimedes in the bath while, Pureeing Newton's apple core. Ecstasy = McDonald's Squared, Leaning Tower of Pizza Experiment, A swirl of Higgs Boson minestrone, Quaffed blind with Halley's Vomit. Ignore a Big Bang in your black hole, Red Giant piggybacking a White Dwarf, Massive obelisk stuck in the Stargate, Happy Doomsday to you - lights out. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

But there’s a less obvious yet surprisingly powerful explanation for introverts’ creative advantage—an explanation that everyone can learn from: introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck once observed, introversion “concentrates the mind on the tasks in hand, and prevents the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, if you’re in the backyard sitting under a tree while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, you’re more likely to have an apple fall on your head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts. William Wordsworth described him as “A mind forever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone.”)

Hallowell writes: “Columbus was at play when it dawned on him that the world was round. Newton was at play in his mind when he saw the apple tree and suddenly conceived of the force of gravity. Watson and Crick were playing with possible shapes of the DNA molecule when they stumbled upon the double helix. Shakespeare played with iambic pentameter his whole life. Mozart barely lived a waking moment when he was not at play. Einstein’s thought experiments are brilliant examples of the mind invited to play.

Earlier I mentioned that Newton and Jobs were great synthesizers. Newton brought together planetary astronomy, laws of motion, differential mathematics—ideas developed by others—and synthesized them into a coherent whole the world hadn’t seen. Jobs brought together design, marketing, and technology into a coherent whole, as few others could do. But he was missing a key ingredient. Like Land before him, who brought similar skills together, Jobs had led only as a Moses. Which is why the most valuable gift that Jobs received—from the perspective of Apple product lovers today—was not the financial reward of his Pixar investment. It was seeing the Bush-Vail rules in action. He learned a different model for leading, for how to nurture loonshots and grow franchises while balancing the tensions between the two. That missing ingredient became the key to his third act, when he returned to hardware and revived his previous company—along with the entire American consumer electronics industry.

But the clown whom he had seen last year with Milly at the circus – that clown was permanent, for his act never changed. That was the way to live; the clown was unaffected by the vagaries of public men and the enormous discoveries of the great. Wormold began to make faces in the glass. ‘What on earth are you doing, Father?’ ‘I wanted to make myself laugh.’ Milly giggled. ‘I thought you were being sad and serious.’ ‘That’s why I wanted to laugh. Do you remember the clown last year, Milly?’ ‘He walked off the end of a ladder and fell in a bucket of whitewash.’ ‘He falls in it every night at ten o’clock. We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience.’ ‘Reverend Mother says …’ ‘Don’t pay any attention to her. God doesn’t learn from experience, does He, or how could He hope anything of man? It’s the scientists who add the digits and make the same sum who cause the trouble. Newton discovering gravity – he learned from experience and after that …’ ‘I thought it was from an apple.’ ‘It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before Lord Rutherford went and split the atom. He had learned from experience too, and so did the men of Hiroshima. If only we had been born clowns, nothing bad would happen to us except a few bruises and a smear of whitewash. Don’t learn from experience, Milly. It ruins our peace and our lives.

(In an odd twist of fate, ex-CEO Amelio came back to visit Steve at Apple headquarters late in 1998 with an offer to buy the assets and intellectual property of the mothballed Newton operations. A few days after the meeting, Steve told me he was flabbergasted that Amelio would have any interest in trying to make a go of it with the Newton. But selling it to him would have been “a cruel joke,” he told me. “I can be mean, but I could never be that mean. No way would I let him further humiliate himself—or Apple.” So the Newton stayed dead.

observation-model-prediction. That is, in science, you figure out what happened, then figure out why it happened, then, using that knowledge, cleverly deduce what may happen in the future. An example would be Isaac Newton observing an apple falling to Earth, deducing universal gravitation, and from his deductions realizing that the moon orbits the Earth because of Earth’s gravitational pull. He can then generalize this logic to predict the future: he may realize that an apple will fall on the surface of any heavenly body, like the moon or Mars, and not just the Earth. This is science, running from cause to effect, observation to prediction, and past to future. Accounting is materially the opposite. In accounting, you start out with what is going to happen in the future: ie: that you are not going to pay any taxes, then figure out why you’re not going to pay any taxes, and then, from this, decide what, for tax purposes, happened in the past.

Four out of every five products launched perish within the first year, and the best companies learn from their flops. The Newton MessagePad, the Pippin, and the Macintosh Portable all bombed for Apple yet helped pave the way for winners like the iPad.

before Isaac Newton, billions of people had seen apples or objects fall to the ground. But it was Isaac Newton who formulated the Law of Gravity. In ancient India, hundreds of millions or billions of grandmothers healed their grandchildren with branches or brooms, but they did not understand the principle behind what they were doing. It was necessary for MCKS to explain and put emphasis on the very important concept of diseased energy.

What was worrying me was where the power was coming from. I never was very good at electricity, so I didn’t know how much power it took to make a werelight, but levitating one small apple against the Earth’s gravity—that was essentially the standard definition of one newton of force and it should be using one theoretical joule of energy every second. The laws of thermodynamics are pretty strict about this sort of thing and they say that you never get something for nothing. Which meant that that joule was coming from somewhere, but from where?