Enlightenment

We learned a little about Isaac Newton, the man. He was a farmer's son, but his father died before he was born. In the 17th century, this had immense consequence for his mother. Bearing a son meant that the farm became his, administered in trust by his mother until he was 21. If the child died - hardly unlikely at that stage of history, especially for a tiny child, born prematurely - the farm would revert, not to Hannah, but to some distant male cousin who happened to be the nearest male relative. She would have no income and no home

It's not hard, then, to discern a motive for her to marry the village clergyman, a man already in his 60s, three years later, and bear him three children. For this, he obliged her to leave Isaac in the care of his grandmother and move to the vicarage. Young Isaac apparently grew to resent his step-father for this theft of his mother

The farmhouse survives, little changed, and was on our route, so we dropped in to pay homage to the famous apple tree. National Trust volunteers were passing on this kind of colour. The walls of the house still have the marks of six-pointed mandala-like symbols scratched into the plaster-work - protection against the forces of evil. Also a well-phrased letter, written to him by his mother - his father could not write his own name; how did they become a married couple?

Amateur psychology gives us a weak, lonely, fatherless child, resentful of the churchman who has stolen his mother, beset by the primitive superstition of his grandmother, not fit enough to make a successful farmer, but bright enough to teach them all that he knew better. The foundations of modern science were assured; job done! 

I couldn't help wondering what would have happened if he had indeed died as a child. How soon would someone else have written out those Laws? How different would the development of science have been? To what extent is individual genius a factor in the collective endeavour?

It was a day for that kind of speculation. We stopped for lunch at a random farm shop, that turned out to be an enormous historic aristocratic estate (again!) I read that Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited in 1913. He came very close to being killed in a shooting accident there. 10 months later, he did meet his end through a bullet - no accident - in Sarajevo, and the 20th century went downhill from there. What if...?

The picture is of a hologram - part of the Newton-related science fun at his house. He worked with light, but knew nothing of lasers. I think he would have loved it though - an apple in mid air, not falling