![]() He’s a pretty intelligent human being, after all. He puts two-and-two together and figures that the handle must disengage a locking mechanism inside the door. Knowing levers balance on a fixed point, like a seesaw does, Newton concludes that the force he applies to the door handle by pulling on it will equal the force that comes out of it on the other side of its hinge, but in the opposite direction. The handle is a lever, he surmises - a simple machine first defined by Archimedes in the 3rd century BCE, but probably invented much earlier (as far as we know). Archimedes once said something about using a lever to move the Earth. After a short inspection of the car, he takes a look at the door handle on the passenger door. You pull up to the international terminal (he’s flying in from London), and he comes out dressed in his finest ascot and heels (he hasn’t figured out today’s fashion yet). Since Newton’s never been in a car before, you are curious how he’ll respond to your automatic horseless carriage with a solid roof and climate control. We must have advanced way beyond Newton’s teachings, right? It’s been almost 300 years since he’s been around, and in that time, scientists have made some major advancements. On the way, you start getting excited to show off what the world has accomplished since his ultimate demise. You drive a vehicle that would not have been invented for another 175 years after his death, so there’s no chance he’d understand this confounded contraption, much less be able to take the wheel and get to the museum on his own unscathed. Your task: bring him to the Museum of Science & Industry to show him how far our knowledge of physics and engineering has progressed since he died in 1727. ![]() ![]() You got a call this morning telling you that you need to pick up Sir Isaac Newton from O’Hare airport. ![]()
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