A WALK ON THE WOLD SIDE
Waiting for the rain to clear, I sit in Grantham’s Costa and look across the square at Isaac Newton. The shopping centre itself is named after him, and so is a pub and a primary school. Quite right too. He was a pupil at the King’s School before he went up to Trinity Cambridge. His home was at Woolsthorpe Manor, not so very far away. Woolsthorpe is now a National Trust property, complete with an apple tree which may or may not have inspired the notion of ‘gravity’. There’s a contemporary-sounding twist to Newton’s experience. He returned to Woolsthorpe in 1665, interrupting his Cambridge studies. It was the plague year, so one can imagine he was entering a kind of self-imposed lockdown, away from coffee houses and the communal life. I suppose each Christian, perhaps each person , could be placed on some kind of x-y grid in terms of their beliefs about the relationship between religion and science. Do the two fields of activity occupy the same space for us? Or in an age of extre