absentminded. He lacked social skills. He was into nerdy shit like sundials,
Cartesian planes, and determining whether the moon was actually a sphere.
While the other kids played cricket or chased one another through the woods,
Isaac stood staring for hours into local streams, wondering how the eyeball
was capable of seeing light.
Isaac Newton’s early life was one hit after another. And with each blow,
his Feeling Brain learned to feel an immutable truth: that there must be
something inherently wrong with him. Why else would his parents have
abandoned him? Why else would his peers ridicule him? What other
explanation for his near-constant solitude? While his Thinking Brain occupied
itself drawing fanciful graphs and charting the lunar eclipses, his Feeling
Brain silently internalized the knowledge that there was something
fundamentally broken about this small English boy from Lincolnshire.
One day, he wrote in his school notebook, “I am a little fellow. Pale and
weak. There is no room for me. Not in the house or in the bottom of hell.
What can I do? What am I good for? I cannot but weep.”^2
Up until this point, everything you’ve read about Newton is true—or at
least highly plausible. But let’s pretend for a moment that there’s a parallel
universe. And let’s say that in this parallel universe there is another Isaac
Newton, much like our own. He still comes from a broken and abusive
family. He still lives a life of angry isolation. He still prodigiously measures
and calculates everything he encounters.
But let’s say that instead of obsessively measuring and calculating the
external, natural world, this Parallel Universe Newton decides to obsessively
measure and calculate the internal, psychological world, the world of the
human mind and heart.
This isn’t a huge leap of the imagination, as the victims of abuse are often
the keenest observers of human nature. For you and me, people-watching may
be something fun to do on a random Sunday in the park. But for the abused,
it’s a survival skill. For them, violence might erupt at any moment, therefore,
they develop a keen Spidey sense to protect themselves. A lilt in someone’s
voice, the rise of an eyebrow, the depth of a sigh—anything can set off their
internal alarm.
So, let’s imagine this Parallel Universe Newton, this “Emo Newton,”
turned his obsession toward the people around him. He kept notebooks,
cataloging all the observable behaviors of his peers and family. He scribbled
relentlessly, documenting every action, every word. He filled hundreds of
pages with inane observations of the kind of stuff people don’t even realize
they do. Emo Newton hoped that if measurement could be used to predict and