The Apple and the Alchemist (Engineer's Cut)

Album: The Cosmos and the Heart

Cambridge shut in sixty-five
A twenty-three-year-old arrived
Alone in a farmhouse with a quill and a mind
Eighteen months — three laws — and he left the rest behind
White light through the prism, seven colours on the wall
Gravity as mathematics, the universal pull of all
The calculus invented in a winter afternoon
The same force moves the apple and the moon

The apple and the alchemist
One farm, one frozen year
He wrote F equals "M" "A"
And everything became clear
Every bridge, every engine, every tide
Every orbit and every flight
Built on what one young man proved
By candlelight

The Industrial Revolution ran its course
On the back of Newton's three laws of force
Every structural beam that stands today
Bends to the calculus before it's laid
The shuttle's path to orbit — that's his math
The satellites above us walk his charted path
Every telescope that reads a dying star
Began with one prism, near or far

Three hundred years of engines, steel, and thrust
Derived from laws he wrote in winter dust
The force that pulls the apple pulls the tide
The same equation sends the rocket to the sky
Every modern wonder that we've made
Traces back to Woolsthorpe and one man's crusade
He didn't just describe what falls and spins
He wrote the rules for everything that begins

The apple and the alchemist
The same hands, the same year
He turned the cosmos into engineering
Made the invisible force appear
The last of the old world
The first of the new
A twenty-three-year-old in a farmhouse
And the modern world broke through

"If I have seen further..."
"It is by standing on the shoulders of giants."