5:40pm Monday 9th January 2012
Academics from the University of Sussex have published an insight into the mind of the teenage Sir Isaac Newton.
The list has been made available by The Newton Project, a collaboration between University of Sussex and institutions at Cambridge University dedicated to uploading Newton’s unpublished and published works for free online.
Addressed to God, the Fitzwilliam Notebook contains a list of more than 50 “sins” he could remember committing in 1662 when he was 19 years old.
He split his list between those committed before Whitsunday and those after.
He confessed to “making pies on Sunday night”.
In the list, he also confessed to “striking many”, “punching my sister” and “wishing death and hoping it to some”.
He admitted “lying to a louse” and “twisting a cord on Sunday morning”.
A passage on The Newton Project’s website said: “Though we are lucky to have a substantial collection of second- and third-hand accounts of Newton’s early years, only a very few manuscripts in his own hand, dating from his boyhood and undergraduate years, give a more direct insight into his personal world.”
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