Cambridge (pp 70–72)

In 1663, Daniel Waterhouse returns to his chambers at Trinity College to find his roommate, Isaac Newton, performing a gruesome experiment on his own eye.

“the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour” — In 17th-century anatomy, the Aqueous Humour was one of the three “humours” or fluids believed to maintain the eye’s shape and facilitate vision.

“eyeball experiments” — From the original wiki (Brett Kuehner): “Something similar is described in one of Isaac Newton’s notebooks, experiments 58 and 59, where Newton writes, “I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could”

You can find more (including a diagram from the notebook) at: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Exhibitions/Footprints\_of\_the\_Lion/private\_scholar.html”

“open Waste-Book where Isaac was taking notes” — A Waste-Book was a rough journal used for daily calculations and observations before they were transcribed into formal ledgers; Newton’s actual “Waste Book” remains a vital primary source for historians of science.

“studying the works of Aristotle and Euclid” — While Aristotle provided the logic and physics that dominated the university’s official curriculum, Euclid provided the geometric foundations that Newton would eventually use to dismantle the Aristotelian worldview.

“as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light” — Chromatic Aberration is the failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point, creating blurry colored fringes. Newton’s frustration with this optical flaw led him to abandon glass lenses in favor of mirrors, resulting in his invention of the reflecting telescope.

Original annotations by: kuehner