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Isaac Newton was in his early 20s when the Great ____________________ of London hit . He wasn't a ? Sir ? yet , didn't have that big formal wig . He was just another ____________________ student at Trinity College , Cambridge . It would be another 200 years before ____________________ discovered the bacteria that causes plague , but even without knowing exactly why , folks back then still practiced some of the same things we do to avoid illness .

In 1665 , it was a version of ? social ____________________ ? ? a public health tool making a comeback this week as governments , schools and many businesses , including The Washington Post , send people home to try to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus . Cambridge sent students ____________________ to continue their studies . For Newton , that meant Woolsthorpe Manor , the family estate about 60 miles northwest of Cambridge .

Without his professors to guide him , Newton apparently thrived . The ____________________ - plus he spent away was later referred to as his annus mirabilis , the ? year of wonders . ? First , he continued to work on ____________________ problems he had begun at Cambridge ; the papers he wrote on this became early calculus . Next , he acquired a few prisms and experimented with them in his ____________________ , even going so far as to bore a ____________________ in his shutters so only a small beam could come through . From this sprung his theories on optics .

And right outside his window at Woolsthorpe , there was an apple tree .
That apple tree . The story of how Newton sat under the ____________________ , was bonked on the head by an apple and suddenly understood theories of gravity and motion , is largely apocryphal . But according to his assistant , John Conduitt , there's an element of truth . Here's how Conduitt later explained it : ? ? Whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity ( which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground ) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought . ? Why not as high as the ____________________ ? ' said he to himself . . ?

In London , a quarter of the population would die of plague from 1665 to 1666 . It was one of the last major outbreaks in the 400 years that the Black Death ravaged Europe . Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 , theories in hand . Within six months , he was made a fellow ; two years later , a ____________________ .

So if you're working or studying from home over the next few weeks , perhaps remember the example Newton set . Having time to muse and experiment in unstructured comfort proved life - changing for him ? and no one remembers whether he made it out of his ____________________ before noon .