After all, Newtonian physics aren't that tough. There are times when even within mathematics, nothing happens. Apart from what is known, nothing is new. The skin of the subject shrivels. Mathematicians amuse themselves by arranging and then rearranging the same handful of books.
Someone coughs wetly in the humid night.
And then all at once, things change. No one quite knows why. Mathematicians who had been snoring wake with a snort and their eyes still red with sleep, begin to riffle through their papers, noticing and noting, drawing connections, framing conjectures, scribbling their now urgent messages onto the narrow margins of the page. Now some would call that over-writing, but I enjoyed it. It's so far over the top that it's amusing.