Isaac Newton was a quiet, easily annoyed student at Cambridge University when, in 1665, the bubonic plague swept across England. The university shut down and Newton went home to his family’s farm. He was bored, alone, and 23 years old.
Over the next two years he invented a brand-new kind of math (calculus), worked out three laws describing how every object in the universe moves, split sunlight into a rainbow with a prism, and started thinking about gravity. He later said an apple falling from a tree gave him the spark.
When the university reopened, Newton brought back notebooks full of discoveries that would shape science for the next 250 years. We even use his laws today to fly rockets and land robots on Mars. Not bad for a “lockdown project.”
