Isaac Newton will be spinning in his grave. Westminster Abbey, the last resting place of Britain’s greatest heroes, including Newton, is to honour his arch-rival Robert Hooke with a stone plaque.
When Hooke died in 1703, Newton and his supporters did their best to erase his memory. Hooke had accused Newton of pinching some of his ideas on gravity and the motion of planets. And it was Hooke who discovered the strange concentric bands of coloured light, now known as Newton’s rings, which reveal that white light is made up of different wavelengths.
Newton is honoured in the abbey…
