physics

Time travel is science fiction's favourite wish-fulfilment toy. But once you account for the cosmic movement of the Earth and the messy physics of matter displacement, the fantasy quickly turns into orbital suicide.

On 4 January 1643, Isaac Newton was born in a hamlet in Lincolnshire - a premature, posthumous child who would go on to invent calculus, write the greatest physics book ever published, and spend thirty years looking for the philosopher's stone.