I didn't feel like that was too odd, because if Lister is sticking to his engineering course, it's requiring him to learn general education too (remember his big book of famous people in X?), and those could be things he's read recently that he recalls. Newton and Archimedes would be building blocks of physics history, which he'd need some of for the engineering, so ... yeah. Probably not as strange as if in previous series (where it really would be OOC).