The Sins of Isaac Newton

Listed sins in the Fitzwilliam Notebook; note
the numbering of each one

Via Mental Floss and Neatorama comes a bit from the notebooks of Isaac Newton from when he was 19 years old in 1662, 350 years ago. (This, particularly, is the Fitzwilliam Notebook, which can be found at The Newton Project, a neat site that has images and texts from many other of his other notebooks.) A selection of his confessions:

      * * *
Putting a pin in John Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.

Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons

Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some


Striking many

Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.

Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer

Denying that I did so

Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it

Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee

A relapse

A relapse

A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.

Punching my sister

Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar

Calling Derothy Rose a jade

Glutiny in my sickness ...

Note, by the way, that the Mental Floss article claims that "Newton scribbled a cryptic code, a code that went unsolved for over 300 years. In 1964, historians finally solved the script." This is incorrect. The "code" that Newton wrote in was Thomas Shelton's shorthand, which was known as "short writing" and which Newton learned in 1662. It was hardly unknown -- famous diarist Samuel Pepys and President Thomas Jefferson, among many others, used it -- and it was not invented by Newton. An article written by Richard S. Westfall and published in June 1963, Short-Writing and the State of Newton's Conscience, 1662 (in Notes and Records of the Royal Society) deciphered the text, but it does not claim to be the first to do so nor that the text is a great mystery secreted by Newton to the ages. It may be safe to assume that he did not want his mother and step father to know of his desire to kill himself and others, or that he was stealing, pricking people with pins, punching his sister, or had called another woman a "jade" -- i.e. a hussy or whore. But anyway.

Above I've used the transliteration from Westfall's article.