A sketch for Easter
Journalist: Good morning, Sir Isaac - may I call you Sir Isaac? It is a privilege to speak with you.
Newton: These chats are a pleasant distraction from my work. All that maths does make my head hurt sometimes.
Journalist: Not only are you are the most famous scientist of today, you are now very popular with the apple industry. All that free promotion for them.
Newton: They have rather played on that story of the apple falling on my head for their commercial ends! Still, it’s helped me get my message across too: that gravity is a law of nature.
Journalist: ‘What goes up must come down’, you might say.
Newton: Well, yes - that’s very neatly put, I must say. Let me just jot that one down…
Journalist: But not everything does, does it? Come down, I mean.
Newton: Such as?
Journalist: Well, bread. Bread rises - and it stays up. Well, my wife’s does (she does a lovely loaf, you know). Magic. None of your gravity working there.
Newton: Aaah, bread is like a building material - bake it and it becomes like bricks and mortar. It can then support itself against gravity. Mind you, don’t let my wife know I’ve compared her bread with bricks and mortar. You won’t publish that, will you?
Journalist: Trust me - I’m a journalist… Moving on, what about the sun?
Newton: What about it?
Journalist: Well, it rises too. And then sets. Then rises again. It’s like the chicken and the egg - which came first, the rising or the setting?
Newton: Aaah, now we’re talking planetary motion. Galileo cracked that one. He died the year I was born, you know - a bit of trivia for your readers! It’s taking a while for his ideas to get popular, though.
Journalist: We did a slot on him just the other week, in fact. The earth going round the sun, and all that.
Isaac: Exactly! Well done. I’ve just written a book about all this, which you can get at a very good price from selected bookstalls. It’s called Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
Journalist: Mmmm, catchy title! - and handily written in Latin too, I believe… In it you say the behaviour of the universe is entirely predictable. That what goes up must come down. That if things appear to rise, it is entirely explainable by physical laws.
Newton: That’s right.
Journalist: So that applies if a person appears to have ‘risen’, then? Jesus, for example. It is Easter, after all.
Newton: Aaah, that’s different.
Journalist: Different?! If I may say so, Sir Isaac, you seem to be undermining your own best-selling book!
Newton: No, this is a different thesis entirely - actually, it’s the really exciting one. Gravity pales into insignificance. And it’s not my theory at all - it’s God’s. (Most of us Cambridge dons are clerics as well, of course - we ‘do’ God too.) But personally I call it ‘Levity’.
Journalist: Levity? That sounds a good name for an Easter bunny.
Newton: Oh dear… Levity, as in levis - Latin, you know for ‘light’. As gravity is from gravis - ‘heavy’. It comes back to a good old classical education… We so often feel burdened by life - by fear, by guilt - like gravity inside us, you could say. Levity is the opposite - when all that’s taken away!
Journalist: Mmm, but what does this have to do with Easter?
Newton: It’s the resurrection, don’t you see? It blew gravity away. Our internal gravity, that is, the things that drag us down, defeat us, even kill us. If it blew physical gravity away we’d all be in trouble! - we’d float away to goodness knows where - maybe some godforsaken planet where no-one knows any Latin... The resurrection, you see, blew open the door to another world, where God raises things up. Because that’s what he does.
Journalist: So when’s your Levity book going to be published?
Newton: I’ll leave that to the real church people. I don’t want to hog all the big ideas!
Journalist: …Well, Sir Isaac, that wasn't the direction I saw this interview going. But you’ve given our readers much to debate over their Easter bunny - sorry, rabbit - stew. Thank you.
Newton: The pleasure’s all mine. Gratias tibi ago (that’s ‘thank you’, by the way!)
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Alphaeus adds:Whilst Newton believed in the resurrection, his 'theory of levity' is, of course, a fictional supposition. A more conventional account of the resurrection can be found at Mark 16 vv1-8.
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