![]() Partly because none of us, along with almost everyone in human history, will ever approach his level of achievement. Shouldn’t we be able to organize our closets? If not, you’ve failed the take-home epidemic exam. Get that novel written, or that screenplay, and, if you don’t, you should at least refocus your life and find your purpose. This cheery piece in the Washington Post is typical of many articles circulating right now: “So if you’re working or studying from home over the next few weeks, perhaps remember the example Newton set.” Social media, naturally, has been more extreme. Now, with the spread of the coronavirus imposing its own isolation, Newton’s miracle year is being touted as a model. The plague created the conditions in which modern science could be created. Suitably distant from the nearest town, it was where, in near total solitude, he would invent calculus, create the science of motion, unravel gravity, and more. Newton’s home, a farm called Woolsthorpe, lay about sixty miles north of the university. Among those on the run: a young scholar of Trinity College named Isaac Newton. ![]() Almost at once, the townspeople raced to isolate themselves in the countryside. Morley was the first known case and death from the disease in Cambridge that year: the signal that London’s outbreak that spring had advanced to the city. When town officials examined his corpse, they noted black spots on his chest, the unmistakable mark of the bubonic plague. On July 25, 1665, a five-year-old boy named John Morley, of the parish of the Holy Trinity in Cambridge, England, was found dead in his home. Illustration from Oxford Science Archive / Getty The idea that the bubonic plague woke the brilliance in Isaac Newton is both wrong and misleading.
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