“The plague took my university. Solitude gave me calculus and gravity. The best work happens when there is nowhere left to run.”
— Isaac Newton
Based on Newton's Annus Mirabilis 1665-1666. When plague closed Cambridge, he returned to Woolsthorpe and invented calculus, discovered light composition, and began formulating gravity.
1665. Plague shut Cambridge. Twenty-two, nowhere to go. Back to my mother's farmhouse. No lab. No professors. No one to talk to. Just notebooks and silence. In eighteen months I invented a new mathematics, figured out what light is made of, and started understanding why things fall. Everyone was hiding from death. I was in an empty room doing the best work of my life. When the world takes everything away, it sometimes leaves you the one thing you need: nothing to distract you.