Isaac Newton read “fashionable” authors, such as Descartes and Galileo; during a Cambridge lecture where he was taking notes on Aristotle, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a page; then, after leaving dozens of blank pages, he wrote at the top: “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (Some Philosophical Questions) and then: “Amicus Plato, amicus Aristoteles, magis amica veritas” (Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but the truth is my greatest friend), followed by 45 titles such as “Of Water and Salt,” “Magnetic Attraction,” “Of the Sun, Stars, Planets, Comets,” “Of Gravity and Levity”; in some cases the titles are not followed by notes, in others they are followed by extensive dissertations and calculations. This is the moment when Newton departed from tradition and questioned what he was taught.
