Merry Yuletide Newtonmas!

Many of our Christmas carols contain the word yule log or yuletide. The earliest references to it are in the form of month names, where the Yule-tide period lasts somewhere around two months in length, falling along the end of the modern calendar year between what is now mid-November and early January. Yule is a spiritual holiday observed by the native Germanic peoples, also known as the Winter Solstice. Private ceremonies to celebrate the rebirth of the Great Horned Hunter God are held while others celebrate with loved ones by Wassailing and building a Yule Log fire.

Wassail is an archaic term for spiced ale or mulled (cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg; dried raisins, apples or orange) wine drunk during celebrations for Twelfth Night and Christmas Eve. The log represents prosperity throughout the new year. Oranges and apples are usually eaten and decorated at this time. Another meaning of wassailing is to drink plentiful amounts of alcohol and enjoy oneself with others in a noisy, lively way. Go from house to house at Christmas singing carols. Here we go a-wassailing! The Old Norse Yule Celebration used the goat as a symbol of Thor, the animal was slaughtered as a sacrifice during Yule.

Issac Newton, famous for discovering universal gravitation after seeing an apple fall from a tree, was born on Dec. 25, 1642. This claim is inaccurate in the sense that he never said it hit him on the head. Seeking to shore up his legacy at the end of his life, Newton told several people, including Voltaire and his friend William Stukeley, the story of how he had observed an apple falling from a tree while waiting out the plague in Woolsthorpe between 1665-7. At that time Newton was struck by two key ideas—that apples fall straight to the center of the earth with no deviation and that the attractive power of the earth extends beyond the upper atmosphere. Universal gravitation came some twenty years later, in 1685, after Edmund Halley asked Newton if he could calculate the forces responsible for an elliptical planetary orbit.

There is a myth that Newton himself didn't make merry at Christmas or any other time. There are only two specific instances that we know of when he did according to https://blog.oup.com/2014/07/ten-myths-about-isaac-newton/. One was when a friend to whom he had lent a volume of Euclid’s Elements asked what the point of it was, ‘upon which Sir Isaac was very merry.’ (The point being that if you have to ask what the point of Euclid is, you have already missed it.) So far, so moderately funny. The second time Newton laughed was during a conversation about his theory that comets inevitably crash into the stars around which they orbit. Newton noted that this applied not just to other stars but to the Sun as well and laughed while remarking to his interlocutor John Conduitt ‘that concerns us more.’