Newton’s Apple

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: 20ct gold, carved and engraved coral (recycled), carved apple-green jade, 18ct red gold, 18ct white gold pin

height (without pin): 34mm width: 24mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 423.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 218

The greatest scientists, like our equally visionary poets, have always made their leaps of understanding (and their subsequent explanations) through the mercurial mental process of metaphor. The genre-defining ‘Eureka’ moment was, of course, when Archimedes understood the displacement theory of bodies (his own, in the bath) as a means of determining density through volume related to mass. This was, as legend relates, a problem arising from the royal distrust of a goldsmith, so out of ancient guild-loyalty I shall not dwell further on this particular example. Perhaps, then, the second most memorable recorded thunderbolt of enlightenment was another of science’s most pivotal moments: the understanding of the Laws of Gravity and the Forces of Attraction revealed to Isaac Newton by the falling of an apple lit by the sphere of the moon which, significantly, did not fall. I hope my pin proclaims this understanding: the apple bearing this beautiful thought, expressed through the ‘musical’ notation of Algebra, is forever held, arrested, in a second fall into grace by the hand of Newton himself.