Sir Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) might just be the greatest English physicist and mathematician of all time. According to a poll of scientists conducted by Physics World magazine in December 1999, Isaac Newton was voted the second greatest physicist of all time, only after Albert Einstein. But even Albert Einstein himself is said to have kept a picture of Isaac Newton on his study wall, along with those of James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday. Such is the influence of the great man.
I have written an article loosely based on Sir Isaac Newton’s falling apple incident and in the course of my researching him, I was baffled, amused, and inspired.
A couple of things about him, I found peculiar.
The great man loved to write, not only about science and math but also about himself. In fact, we know a great deal about him through his own writings. Here are three notebooks that Newton kept that not only did I not know about, but I also found them quite interesting.
He had a notebook in which he wrote his sins.
He really did!
Meticulous as he was, Newton kept a secret notebook that detailed his sins.
In the summer of 1662, presumably home for the long vacation from Cambridge, Isaac Newton, then a 20-year-old began to make note of the sins that he had committed. Isaac Newton, who was by all accounts a devout Christian, certainly makes anyone wonder what kind of sins the great mathematician did.
Well, his sins included the normal observance of formal religious observations such as “Making a mousetrap on Thy day” or “Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times” or “Twisting a cord on Sunday morning”. Others are the general impiety one might expect from a 20-year-old in college, they included: “Missing Chapel [at College]” and “Not desiring Thy ordinances” or “Not loving Thee for Thyself”.
And yes, others link to the normal sexual pleasures that young adolescents have such as this entry right here “Having unclean thoughts, words and actions and dreams” followed by several entries of “A relapse”. Others are quite suggestive such as this one, “Using unlawful means to bring us out of distress”.
A total list of 49 sins altogether for the 20-year-old Newton. Other entries include his anger towards his family such as “Punching my sister” or “Refusing to go to the close [field] at my mother’s command”.
He recorded every transaction he had at Trinity.
Newton first entered college as a “Subsizar”, a rank commonly referred to as the lowest rung in the social status on campus. Subsizars had to pay for their own food and also attend lectures. They were thus effectively servants of the wealthy students and the “Fellows” at Trinity, doing the most mundane jobs for the wealthy students in exchange for some money.
Keen on money and being the meticulous record keeper that he was, Isaac noted every transaction that he did.
As you can see, he never lent more than 1£ to a debtor. And in the rare case that he did, his nervousness showed up beside the amount “to be paid Friday”1. He was, however, not a big-time loan shark!
He was so good at it that by the end of his second year at Trinity “business” was booming and he became a man of independent means two years later, an upgrade from his “sizarship” status. Technically, he bought himself out of his sizarship status.
The ‘Waste Book’
This was yet another notebook in Newton’s possession. The notebook that was given to Isaac by his stepfather (whom he didn’t much like).
In here, Isaac, then 23, would write over 100 axioms of motion in his quest to understand the motion of bodies. This was in the early 1660s that Newton was very keen on the study of motions of bodies.
When his school closed due to the Bubonic plague in 1665, he carried his notebook home with him, where he further developed his concepts.
In the context of motion, contents of the notebook embraced primitive versions of concepts such as those of inertia and the effect of impacts on bodies being equal and opposite – an embryonic version of his third law of motion.
He also developed his early theories of mathematics (Calculus), gravitation and optics in the same notebook.
Obviously, one might think that such a notebook must have had a wealth of information worthy to be printed and perhaps preserved given that it is Isaac Newton. But it wasn’t. In fact, in the aftermath of Newton’s death in 1727, Thomas Pellet, a fellow at the Royal Society tasked with compiling his work as well as determining which ones had to be printed, labeled the Waste Book “Not Fit To Be Printed”.
Apparently, Newton wrote pretty much everything on that notebook – music, theology, alchemy, philosophy in addition to mathematics and science. It was so random and disordered that almost no one could commit to reading it.
I shared this post as an answer to a Quora question and one user had a strange suggestion for the contents of Newton’s Waste Book. I thought it was funny.
Today the notebook is scanned and preserved at the Trinity College library; the scanned version is available online. And yes! A whole lot of people have actually read it. Some even cover to cover!
Newton had yet another notebook titled “Certain Philosophical Questions”. Not any less interesting I tell ya!
For starters, beneath the title he wrote the following caption, “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is my greater friend”. In it, Newton would step away from tradition and begin to question what he was taught, such as the nature of the Universe and others.
Newton being a private man, he hang on to his notebooks. Most of his writings were revealed after his death, shedding some light on his reserved personality.
