Can Newton's Gravitational Theory be Applied to History?

by Shapol Mohamed

Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Somewhere in the world right now, some students are sitting in a class, dreading the nauseating hours of physics that awaits them. With faces as expressionless as corpses, the burdened students look at the board wondering when they will ever need to know the acceleration of a particle due to gravity in real life. They will wonder, that surely, it would be much better if they threw paper aeroplanes, manufactured with great precision, across the class and in the process earning some foul-mouthed words from fellow peers. The youngsters would also be dreaming that they could be blaring ear-splitting music whilst drumming powerfully on the unstable desks, producing a deafening cacophony that could be heard from the corridors. Instead, they are learning about some “useless” physics that was founded by this person called Sir Isaac Newton.

Those students have no idea how important Newtonian physics is to everyday life. They do not realise that because of Newton's work we know how to launch aircraft (and paper aeroplanes) and understand how much force an object, like the unstable desk, could take. Newton became a pioneer of everyday life by discovering a set of physics laws.

Newton was sitting under an apple tree that had branches spread out as if it was proud of the bounty it brought and the sweetness given from each apple. The tree was a party of colours, of chaos and order, of a beauty that sprung from simple seeds blessed with mud and rain. But then the most beautiful of all things happened: an apple fell. This triggered a bunch of chemicals to fire electrical signals inside the physicist’s head and as a result, gravity was discovered. Newton's laws implied that whatever object goes up must also come down. For example, when you throw an apple up into the air it must also come back down. This law could also be applied to history and life.

One of the largest empires in history, the Mongol Empire, was led to its peak by the brutal brilliance of Genghis Khan. The Mongol Empire covered 12 million contiguous square miles of land - an area as large as the continent of Africa. Genghis fought wars on two fronts simultaneously and conquered Russia in the winter - both feats that eluded Hitler and Napoleon. How did he do this? Thanks to a quantum leap in military technology. The speed and mobility of the Mongol archers, the accuracy of their long-range shooting, their uncanny horsemanship - all allied to Genghis’s ruthless “surrender or die” policy and his brilliant perception that this gave him the possibility of living off tribute from the rest of the world - combined to make the Mongols the Gog and Magog that had aroused from their slumber. They were unbeatable.

At least, that is what they thought.

The problem was that Genghis Khan hadn’t selected an heir. While the situation wasn’t  as bad as in usual polygamist societies, where the country falls into a civil war as soon as the dead king’s sons begin to murder and eliminate each other in a deadly game of musical chairs, with the last one standing being crowned king, The Mongolians never had a clear way to choose who inherits the throne after the death of Genghis Khan. This led to the empire being split into four Khanates; the empire started to crumble.

This great empire rose to the highest of peaks and fell back down. Similarly, we are currently observing the slow fall of the current world superpower, the USA, as China becomes a larger economy. It almost seems that Newton's laws applies not just to physical objects but to empires and to history itself.