Little Ox's Two Birthdays (Part One)

The sketch Xu Yun saw was simple, but the information it revealed was equally obvious:

Young Newton had already become curious about Universal Gravitation.

In terms of significance, this was undoubtedly a milestone-level "drawing."

It was just that, for Xu Yun, who was playing the part of the apple, the feeling in his heart was ever so slightly complicated.

Of course.

Though Newton vaguely sensed something at this point, he was still a long way from fully deriving the Law of Universal Gravitation.

Readers whose physics teachers had not been angered to death should know this concept:

Gravity and Universal Gravitation were different.

Gravity was the force exerted on an object by Earth's attraction, while Universal Gravitation referred to the tendency of objects to accelerate toward one another.

Moreover, gravity always pointed straight downward, which did not necessarily mean toward Earth's center—only at the equator and the poles did it point toward the center. Universal Gravitation, however, pointed toward Earth's center.

As far as the ground was concerned,

the gravity an object experienced was one component of the Universal Gravitation between the object and Earth. The other component of Universal Gravitation provided the centripetal force required for the object to follow Earth's rotation.

Thus, gravitational acceleration was greatest at the poles and smallest at the equator.

This was precisely why the Deduction Process for Universal Gravitation required three concepts:

First, Kepler's Three Laws; second, Fluxions, which Young Newton had derived himself; and third, Hooke's elliptical orbit.

That was right.

The first person to devise the thought experiment of Earth's attraction on objects was not Young Newton, but Hooke—The man who would later have a love-hate relationship with Old Master Newton.

This thought experiment was actually very simple:

If an object was thrown horizontally from a high tower, assuming it could pass through Earth and encountered no resistance, what would its eventual trajectory be?

Young Newton proposed that the object's path should be a spiral, eventually coming to rest at Earth's center.

Sir Hooke, however, believed that since the horizontally thrown object lost no energy, it should travel in an elliptical orbit around Earth and return to its starting point.

Of course.

Hooke had stated the elliptical orbit based on intuition; he had not derived it—he had only derived the Inverse Square Law together with Huygens, and its basis was to treat planetary elliptical orbits as circles.

So, students who failed this topic in high school, do not curse Old Master Newton. Go curse Hooke instead.

But Old Master Newton was a crafty man. Faced with Hooke's opinion, he accepted it inwardly without showing it.

Then he secretly went off to calculate it himself.

Young Newton had already derived Fluxions at the time, and with the final piece of the puzzle in place, Universal Gravitation was thus—or rather, finally—derived by him.

Therefore, deriving Universal Gravitation was nowhere near as simple as getting hit by an apple. Unless Xu Yun laid out a whole pile of deduction processes like =dA/dt, merely hinting at something like "Why do I fall downward?" was utterly meaningless.

And if he wanted the proud Young Newton to sit quietly and watch his derivation, that was absolutely impossible without some rapport:

Five months before Young Newton returned home, a girl from Trinity College had wanted to ask him a question. Because she took up a little too much of his time, Young Newton had directly splashed a faceful of ink on her.

The incident was recorded in Trinity College's archives. Incidentally, Young Newton had more than a dozen similar entries on record—he was incorrigible.

So the saying remained the same: Old Master Newton's academic standing was like Mount Everest, while his character was the Mariana Trench.

Xu Yun's mission was to become friends with Young Newton. In terms of difficulty, it was not much easier than deriving the Law of Universal Gravitation.

Besides, given that Halo's usual tricks, Xu Yun seriously doubted whether he could successfully write out the entire Deduction Process without loss—time travel had already appeared, so a Great Silence Spell would be nothing unusual.

So, as always, everything had to be planned for the long term.

Xu Yun then shifted his gaze from the manuscript to a metal stand.

The main body of the metal stand was a cross, roughly thirty centimeters tall. Its base appeared to be made of copper, with a date engraved upon it:

1642.12.25.

December 25th—Christmas.

The moment Xu Yun saw that date, a flash of insight crossed his mind. Still, he knowingly asked:

"Mr. Newton, may I ask what this is?"

Young Newton reached out and touched the top of the cross, then said calmly:

"As you can see, my birthday."

Young Newton's answer was rather casual, like a local introducing something to a guest by saying, "Those are the flowers I planted last year," without expecting any response.

But to his surprise, a trace of astonishment appeared on Xu Yun's face.

"December 25th? Isn't that Christmas?

So Mr. Exa and Jesus were born on the same day?"

He then pointed to the Holy Bible on the desk—the book that had knocked him unconscious—and said with a smile:

"Mr. Newton, in my distant Eastern homeland, people like you are generally seen as lucky people blessed by heaven.

Perhaps, years from now, you too will be worshipped like that man in some field."

At Xu Yun's words, Young Newton froze for a moment. Then a hint of excitement appeared on his face, and even his voice trembled slightly.

"A lucky person? Fat Fish, are you telling the truth?"

Xu Yun nodded with utmost certainty and explained:

"Of course it is true. Such lucky people sometimes have another nickname: This Child.

When they are young, their fates may be full of hardships—perhaps an engagement is broken off, they are bullied, betrayed, or even rejected by their parents.

But once the right moment arrives, they will soar into the heavens, ultimately shining like stars, terrifying beyond measure!"

At those words, Newton's eyes immediately lit up.

At first, he had thought Xu Yun might merely be flattering him. But after hearing the latter part, he could be sure Xu Yun was telling the truth!

Because aside from having an engagement broken off, every other one of those things had happened during Young Newton's childhood!

And he was certain that he had never had any contact with Xu Yun before. The other man had neither the ability nor reason to investigate his past—he was only an ordinary university student, hot-tempered and friendless. Who would bother looking into him?

Therefore, there was only one possibility:

He was the kind of This Child Xu Yun had described!

Of course.

Newton had not reached this conclusion because he had been afflicted with some intelligence-reducing halo. Rather, it was because this involved a secret he had never revealed, one he would only mention in a letter sent to Formisa in 1719:

He was a veteran chuuni who, until his death, believed himself to be the chosen one entrusted with a sacred mission.

And the seed of it all began with Young Newton's birthday—two birthdays assigned to different points in later calendars.

Note:

Today, I asked a friend to look into something and unexpectedly learned that the online side of Oxford University's Bodleian Library had scanned versions of Newton's manuscripts—more than 170 letters in total—so I downloaded them all first.

By the time you read this chapter, I will still be downloading them. Getting over the firewall is painfully slow, only 23 KB per second.