THE APPLE MURAL

My apple mural next to St. James Street Station in Walthamstow is about Sir Isaac Newton, who was famous for his ideas about gravity and motion. The poem combined two quite well-known ideas.

 

The first is a story about an apple falling out of the tree, which supposedly inspired his ideas about gravity. Lots of versions of the story include the idea that it hit him on the head, and this had made it's was into folklore, but in his original writings he described watching the apple fall to the ground.

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The second idea included in the poem is one of Newton's Third Law of Motion, which states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, meaning that any force exerted on an object is met with an equal force in the opposite direction.

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The poem makes fun of this theory by asking whether, when Newton's apple bounced, the earth also bounced by the same amount.

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The really fun thing about this is that, according to the theory, the answer is yes.