Isaac Newton
The English physicist who formulated gravity, the three laws of motion, and most of calculus — and ran the Royal Mint on the side.
Origin
Isaac Newton (1642–1726) spent the plague years of 1665–66 at his mother's farm and used the time to invent calculus, work out the spectrum of white light, and conceive universal gravitation. The Principia Mathematica (1687) set the agenda for two centuries of physics. He was also a religious millennialist and a serious alchemist, and as warden then master of the Royal Mint he personally interrogated and prosecuted coin counterfeiters. The apple-falling-from-the-tree story is real — he told it himself, late in life — though the apple did not hit him on the head.
Modern usage
'Newton's apple' is the canonical eureka-moment image. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants' is his most quoted line (and not original to him). 'Newtonian' as an adjective means classical, mechanical, predictable — usually contrasted with 'quantum.'
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