Aight folks time to lay back and relax, because today I'm going to tell you the dramatic true story of what happened when some Japanese scientists decided to re-create the historic discovery of the law of gravity.

As yoll know, this incident occurred in an English orchard in 1666, when, according to legend, Sir.Isaac Newton, the brilliant mathematician, fell out of a tree and landed on an apple. No, hang on. Upon reviewing the videotape, I see that in fact the apple fell out of the tree and landed on Newton.

Had this occurred today, of course, Newton would have simply put on a foam neck brace and sued everybody within a radius of 125 miles. But those were primitive times, and Newton was forced to settle for discovering the law of gravity, which states: "A dropped object will fall with an acceleration of 32 feet per sec, and if it is your wallet, it will make every effort to land in a friggin public toilet" don't ask me how.

Later on, Newton also invented calculus, which can be defined as "the branch of mathematics that is so scary it causes everybody to stop studying mathematics" including yours truly.

That's the whole point of calculus. At colleges and universities, on the first day of calculus class, the professors go to the board and write huge, incomprehensible "equations" that they make up right on the spot, knowing that this will cause all the students to drop the course and never return to the mathematics class again.

This frees the professors to spend the rest of the year playing cards and regaling one another with hilarious stories about the ''mathematical symbols'' they've invented over the years. (Remember the time Professor Arul Mariadoss drew a 'cosine derivative' that was actually a picture of a octopus?)

Yes, Newton made many contributions to science, but gravity was definitely his biggest. That's why a group of Japanese researchers decided, as an international goodwill project, to re-create the original discovery, using an apple tree that was descended from the original Newton tree.

I found out about this project in an article. The article states that in August 1996, researchers at the Construction Ministry's Public Works Research Institute in Arai, Japan, received a sapling descended from the original Newton tree. This sapling, according to the story, came from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which is in charge of weights and measures (so if your pants don't fit the way they used to, this is the agency to complain to).

You might be curious as to why a U.S. government agency would be providing Newton saplings, lemme explain:

The original Newton tree -- for simplicity's sake, let's call it ''Hob'' -- died in 1814. But before Hob went to the Big Orchard in the Sky, cuttings were taken, and over the years these cuttings became trees, and cuttings were taken from those, and so now there are genetically identical offspring -- let's call them ''Hobbits'' -- all over the world.

One Hobbit lives at the NIST facility. It produces apples, but not many; and the reason (I am not making any of this up) is coz it is "a very shy fruiter."

The story gets a little murky at this point, but apparently the sapling sent to Japan for the historic re-creation of Newton's discovery was grown from a seed from one of the NIST Hobbit apples.

This is significant because if the sapling came from a seed, as opposed to a cutting, it is probably not a pure Hob descendant. It is stated, ''the original flower was almost certainly pollinated by some other tree.'' (I say Trees are total sluts this way.)

But let's not be picky. The important thing is that the Japanese researchers had a sapling that was in some way connected to the original historic hob. According to ARTICLE, their plan was to videotape the exact moment when the very first apple fell.

The sapling was planted, and eventually it produced a single apple. The researchers set up a video camera. All was in readiness as, day by day, the apple grew riper and riper, getting closer and closer to the big moment. And then, finally, it happened: A local resident, who knew nothing about any of this, wandered by, saw the apple, and ate it.

So the researchers never did get to videotape the apple falling in a historic manner, although the article states that, ''they did get scenes of the man munching on the apple.'' The man is quoted as saying, "It just tasted really bad."

But this does not mean the project was a waste of time. Often, in science, so-called "failures" produce the greatest discoveries. And this project resulted in a discovery whose value to humanity cannot be overemphasized. I refer, of course, to the fact that ''Shy Fruiter and the Saplings'' would be a great name for a rock band.