Newton: The Dark Heretic

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On last sunday night there was a BBC program about Issac Newton called Newton: The Dark Heretic. I am totally convinced even with new knowledge about Issac Newton's life from this diaries that he was a Aspie.

That man very much a loner who was terrible with dealing with people, who locked himself inside his room for 5 years, how had an long standing obsession in alchemy, who believed in the bible literally to the extent that he denied the divinity of Christ and he was a fanatical catholic hating puritan who while an undergraduate complained to the vice chancellor of Cambridge about his fellow students behavior.

I thought at first this guy was totally insane, however I felt I shared certain attributes with him.

I think that if your going to go and diagnose dead people as Aspies, Newton has to be the first. I would say he wouldn't be that mild an Asperger's case either.

He had loads of obsessions, he was even obsessive about the colour red. He was obsessive about rules, and did work to catch criminals. He had so many people hanged that the king let him sign death warrants instead of him.

That would make sense. He was also a bit of a genius, to put it mildly. He came up with calculus to explain the whole concept of physics and how the laws of the universe worked. Absolutely brilliant man, probably very unsocial. High possibility that he was an aspie.

He obviously had something, likely Asperger's, but I've seen so many different places classify him differently, going across pretty much the whole spectrum of disorders... I somehow think it was a little more then "depressed" which was what someone tried to tell me. I thought I read somewhere he had like Kanner's autism... but I have no idea.