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For celebrities worried about the rumors being spouted daily by the tabloids, take heart in the wild tales of Sir Isaac Newton, a man whose personal exploits and attributes have been overshadowed by his amazing accomplishments.

David Freeman of Huffington Post has dug up ten bits of trivia about the great thinker that surely caused a few tongues to wag in his time.

Fact #1: Newton was a big-time sinner. At least he thought he was. At the tender age of 19, the future mathematician committed to paper a list of 48 sins of which he was guilty. Transgressions ranged from “peevishness” at his mother to “having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.” He also confessed to “eating an apple at Thy house,” though he gave no word as to whether it was THE apple (see #9 below).

Fact #2: He stuck a needle in his eye socket — on purpose. In Newton’s time little was known about the properties of light. In fact, people weren’t even sure whether the eye created light or collected it, James Gleick, author of a 2003 biography of Newton, told HuffPost Science in a telephone interview. Curious, Newton embarked on his own detailed study of optics — and he wasn’t above acting as his own guinea pig, probing his eye with a blunt needle known as a bodkin. As he wrote in his journal:

“I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (so as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles…”

Full story at Huffington Post.

The scandalous side of science.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons