Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Baron-Cohen's paradigmatic case of the discovery specialty operating in physics. Baron-Cohen and Ioan James published a formal assessment in New Scientist, applying contemporary diagnostic criteria to the documented biographical record: Newton's legendary social isolation throughout his adult life, his inability to maintain friendships with colleagues who routinely described him as unreachable, his obsessive narrow focus sustained for years on single problems (optics, calculus, the motion of the planets, biblical chronology, alchemy), his indifference to whether anyone attended his lectures — he reportedly lectured to empty rooms at Cambridge and continued without interruption, because the lecture was not the point; the thinking was the point — and his famous self-experimentation. The incident where Newton stuck a blunt needle between his eye and its socket to test a theory about the deformation of the visual field is not the behavior of a man who needed his body to be safe. It is the behavior of a man for whom the question was so thoroughly the only thing in the room that the body was a piece of apparatus to test against. His Principia Mathematica did not emerge from social consensus or collaborative discussion. It emerged from obsessive, solitary systematizing conducted by a man who could not have cared less what other people thought of him and who did not understand why anyone would expect him to. The integration partner was Edmond Halley (gallery entry below) and the Royal Society network that turned Newton's discovery into the foundation of modern physics.