Can you solve it? Isaac Newton’s tower drop puzzle
Sir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenSir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesAlex Bellos's Monday puzzleMathematicsCan you solve it? Bearing in mind the rotation of the Earth itself, where will the object land? slightly to the west slightly to the east exactly at the bottom The answer is counter-intuitive. Or, in the words of Isaac Newton, who posed the problem in a letter he wrote to Robert Hooke in 1679, the answer is “quite contrary to ye opinion of ye vulgar.”Some hints.
- ▪Sir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenSir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesAlex Bellos's Monday puzzleMathematicsCan you solve it?
- ▪Bearing in mind the rotation of the Earth itself, where will the object land? slightly to the west slightly to the east exactly at the bottom The answer is counter-intuitive.
- ▪Or, in the words of Isaac Newton, who posed the problem in a letter he wrote to Robert Hooke in 1679, the answer is “quite contrary to ye opinion of ye vulgar.”Some hints.
The Guardian — Science publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under science. We currently carry 110 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/28/can-you-solve-it-isaac-newtons-tower-drop-puzzle |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:10:25 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T06:31:06.903Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T06:31:06.903Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | slVq5aK3lwaI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Sir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenSir Isaac Newton Photograph: Imagno/Getty ImagesAlex Bellos's Monday puzzleMathematicsCan you solve it? Isaac Newton’s tower drop puzzleThe problem that changed the worldAlex BellosMon 28 Sep 2026 02.10 EDTLast modified on Mon 28 Sep 2026 02.15 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleToday’s puzzle played a pivotal role in the birth of classical phyics.The tower dropThe first known diagram of the puzzle, from Claude Dechales Cursus seu Mundus Mathematicus (1674).An object is dropped from a high tower. Bearing in mind the rotation of the Earth itself, where will the object land? slightly to the west slightly to the east exactly at the bottom The answer is counter-intuitive.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Science.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Guardian — Science
