Oh, the falling apple from the tree argument, which goes no way toward proving that a flat earth model would always spin on its own axis...
If an apple did fall off the tree and hit him on top of the head I should think he learned not to sit under an apple tree where ripe fruit might be likely to fall off it! Additionally, I should think the bump on his head from the apple left a bruise and was somewhat sore for a couple of days or more...
So, what did Isaac Newton know about the shape of the earth?
Well, rather bizarrely he postulated the following interpretation:-
Shape of the Earth:Additional contributions include
'his prediction that the Earth was likely shaped as an “oblate spheroid” – i.e. a sphere that experienced flattening at the poles'. This theory would later be vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others. This in turn helped convince most Continental European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over the earlier system of Descartes.
In terms of mathematics, he contributed to the study of power series, generalized the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed Newton’s method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves. He also shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus. These discoveries represented a huge leap forward for the fields of math, physics, and astronomy, allowing for calculations that more accurately modeled the behavior of the universe than ever before.
