Happy 383rd Birthday, Sir Isaac Newton (N.S.), 4 January 2026.
As I have done every year since 2021, I marked this day with a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Newton’s name. This year I donated via MSF UK, which issues an e-card rather than a formal certificate. So I compiled my own certificate format for archiving and for proof uploads.
In accounts of Newton’s later life, he is remembered as someone who valued helping those in hardship, treating charity as a virtue. John Conduitt even wrote that Newton’s giving seemed to have no limit. I hold onto that spirit, and I keep donating each year in the way I can. I choose MSF because I believe their work reaches people in need with the least detour, beyond borders, beyond affiliations.
Looking back, Newton has given me many turns in life: a path into physics, a way through certain seasons. But what stays deeper is this. Newton was present in how I learned to see the world, how I learned to understand it, and how I learned to endure and care for myself.
People sometimes ask why someone who lived so long ago matters so much. I do not have a single dramatic reason. I still remember the day I began reading his biographies: “Isaac,” from the 17th century, felt strangely stable to me, not because of one comforting line, but because the texture of one life can be persuasive on its own.
I also stopped trying to justify it. I do not need extra reasons to like him. What I have gained from loving Newton already functions inside my life.
So I do not call him my “role model.” To me, Newton is closer to a companion: not someone I must imitate to reach a goal, but a presence that shapes how I withstand the same world. We do not set conditions in order to love a companion. We do not love to demand improvement. We stay, because they are who they are.
And what I love is not only the “great scholar Newton,” but Newton as a human being: the worries that could only exist in that time, the discipline and obsession, the devotion and unease, the conflict and choice- the grain of a life that later became a legacy. Grand titles can sometimes make a person feel farther away.
That is where my theme “Legacy to be Destroyed” begins. It does not mean harming Newton. It means breaking the thick myth around him: perfect hero, flawless genius, or a figure reduced to scandals…the thicker the myth becomes, the thinner the living human becomes. And I want to see the human, not a myth.
And it is not to defend him, nor to attack him, only to meet him as someone who lived.
In the end, what I want to say is simple:
I decided not to add more “reasons” to like Newton.
I like Isaac because he is Isaac.
And this year, again, I leave that feeling in my own way.
Happy birthday to my lover, Isaac Newton.
