"Chance counts for half in the success of a man of genius. ... I myself paid tribute to it when I discovered the calculus of attraction. ... An apple was for me, as for Newton, a guiding compass. For this apple, which is worthy of fame, a traveller who dined with me at Février's restaurant in Paris paid the sum of fourteen sous. I had just come from a district where the same kind of apples, and even superior ones, sold for a halfliard, that is to say, more than a hundred for fourteen sous. I was so struck by this difference of price between places having the same temperature, that I began to suspect there must be something radically wrong in the industrial mechanism, and hence originated the researches, which, after four years, caused me to discover the theory of series of industrial groups, and, consequently, the laws of universal motion missed by Newton... .
"I have since then noticed that we can reckon four apples as celebrated, two for the disasters which they caused, Adam's apple and that of Paris, and two for the services they rendered to science, Newton's apple and mine. Does not this quadrille of apples deserve a page of history?"
C. Fourier. (E non credo che stesse scherzando. )