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It was the niftiest favor
a plague ever did. Newton was a 24-year-old student at Cambridge when the plague
struck in 1666, and Cambridge closed and sent everyone home. In that "annus
mirabilis" back at the family farm in Woolsthorpe (Lincolnshire), Newton
solved all the revolutionary problems in physics and mathematics that eventually
earned him his fame. It was during this year that the apple fell on his head --
apparently a true story -- and made him wonder if the force that drew the apple
to the ground was the same force that kept the Moon orbiting the
Earth.
Daniel Defoe was only about six years
old when he witnessed the same Great Plague and the Great Fire in London.
Fifty-five years later he wrote "A Journal of the Plague Year," a
novel (he is often credited with inventing the form in English) in the form of a
first-person memoir by a survivor. It's really spectacular and gripping, and
even better, it's on-line at
Where else in
Canada in Gould's years could he have found an adequate recording studio and
piano? Vancouver? Montreal? Which begs the question: Did Gould speak
French?
Elmer the
Newton Freak
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