Isaac Newton vs. Bill Nye Rap Battle: A Guide

The comic rappers behind the web series “Epic Rap Battles of History” came out with a new installment, pitting Sir Isaac Newton (“Weird Al” Yankovic) against Bill Nye (“Nice Peter”), with an assist by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Jurassic 5’s Chali 2na). But the rhymes flow so fast that you might miss some of the neat scientific and historical references. We’ve got you covered, though:

00:11: Why is it Sir Isaac Newton, anyway? Newton was knighted by England’s Queen Anne in 1705, ostensibly for his scientific achievements, but actually more as a political power play. Newton’s patron, Charles Montagu, the First Earl of Halifax, arranged the knighthood to bolster Newton’s reputation before a parliamentary election. Unfortunately, Newton ended up losing anyway.

00:15: “Of all the scientific minds in history/ They put Beaker in a bow tie up against me?”: Newton is unfavorably comparing Bill Nye to the Muppet Beaker, the lab assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, who speaks mostly in “meep”s.

00:20: “You’re no match for me/You got a bach degree”: Bill Nye does, indeed, hold only a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University (not counting various honorary degrees). He began working as an engineer at Boeing right after college.

00:22: “I got a unit of force named after me”: A newton is the force necessary to accelerate a mass of 1 kilogram by 1 m/s².

00:26: “When I start flowing I stay in motion”: Newton’s first law covers the principle of inertia, or the tendency of objects at rest to remain at rest, or the tendency of objects in motion to remain in motion.

00:37: “I unlocked the stars that you’re dancing with”: Newton’s contributions to astronomy were manifold: his theories of gravity, his development of calculus, and his work on optics (which helped in the development of telescopes). Also, Bill Nye was a contestant on the TV show Dancing With the Stars, but was eliminated early in the season after injuring his quadricep.

00:51: “What’d you do with the back half of your life?/You freaked out, started counting coins for the bank”: Newton had a nervous breakdown in 1693, but Montagu succeeded in appointing him warden of Britain’s Royal Mint.

00:56: “You wrote the book on gravity/But you couldn’t attract nobody”: Newton was an intensely private person, never married, and is thought to have died a virgin.

1:05: “I rap sharp like a needle in your eye”: Newton was interested in the idea that the way we perceive colors is due to the pressure on the eyeball. To test this on himself, he once slid a darning needle around in his eye socket to see how it changed his vision (and almost blinded himself).

1:07: “Stick to drinking that mercury”: Postmortem examination of Newton’s body showed that his hair contained high levels of mercury. Newton did taste many metals, including mercury, as part of alchemical experiments, and some of his troubles later in life—insomnia, paranoia, forgetfulness, and isolation—are consistent with mercury poisoning.

1:14: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction/except for when we both start rappin’”: A reference to Newton’s third law of motion.

1:23: “And I will leave you with a page from a book I wrote at half your age:” This is probably a reference to “De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas,” a 1669 manuscript that was one of Newton’s earliest works on calculus. Newton wrote this at age 27; Bill Nye is 58.

1:26: “The integral sec y dy from zero to one-sixth of pi is the log to base e of the square root of three times the 64th power of what?”: As Neil DeGrasse Tyson mentions later, the answer to this problem is i, or the square root of negative one.

1:44: “Hayden planetary fly”: Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.

1:52: “While Isaac Newton was lying and sticking daggers in Leibniz”: A controversy arose as to whether it was Newton or German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz who first developed calculus. Members of Britain’s Royal Society, which Newton was a member of, began accusing Leibniz of plagiarism. Newton also had a hand in a Royal Society study that proclaimed he was the true inventor of calculus and that Leibniz was a fraud.