Royal Society Finds Lost Newton Papers

Quirk writes "The Royal Society has a story on a Lost Newton manuscript rediscovered. From the article: 'The notes are written about alchemy, which some scientists in Newton's time believed to hold the secret for transforming base metals, such as lead, into the more precious metals of gold or silver...The notes reflect a part of Newton's life which he kept hidden from public scrutiny during his lifetime, in part because the making of gold or silver was a felony and had been since a law was passed by Henry IV in 1404.'"

Comments

Re:Hmm, really was crazy

[mbkennel]

Why was it crazy?

The atomic theory of matter wasn't even remotely experimentally provable. The periodic table was unknown and the idea of nuclei completely absent.

Chemistry then was very empirical and without significant systematic reasoning. Here Newton was very right that there was in fact something substantially scientific which could be discovered.

Unfortunately, experimental knowledge and technical ability wasn't available at the time to succeed in his quest, and it didn't happen for a hundred fifty to 200 more years.

There was no scientific reason known at the time why lead (or anything else) couldn't be turned into gold with chemical reactions.

Just imagine if Newton could have done spectroscopy or IR scattering experiments.

Re:Orthodoxy in Science

[CaptKilljoy]

There's a large /. fraternity who will jump on anyone who proposes anything outside the current scientific orthodoxy. And yet here we are reminded that one of our foremost scientific forebears dabbled in a lot of stuff that, today, we see as rather esoteric (to be charitable).

Unorthodoxy is science is fine, as long as the resulting discoveries are repeatable / provable.

Pseudo-science is still pseudo-science, no matter how many fine minds have indulged in it.

Re:Lead to Gold? No Problem!

[AKAImBatman]

A good idea, except that they had no idea what radium was back then. And silver that killed you wasn't very good for business, as these poor fellowsfigured out. :-)

Re:Orthodoxy in Science

[kfg]

No scientist has ever won a Nobel Prize by posting [AOL]Me Too![/AOL]

Overthrowing orthodoxy is the career making Holy Grail of every scientist.

All you have to do to collect your Nobel is . . .do it!

Ah, there's the rub. There are these nasty things called "facts" in the way. You're not allowed to make up just any old shit and collect your prize (or chair).

Neither was Newton. That's why we all know about the laws of motion, but the papers on alchemy were hidden.

They didn't work.

KFG

Re:Orthodoxy in Science

[kfg]

I don't like being stoned

You did not understand my post. Scientists do not support ideas, they stone them. The ideas that can stand up to the stoning are the ones that, well, stand.

Question all you want. That's the point. That's the scientific method. Your issue is that you seem to want to question without being questioned in returned.

Simply form your question so it is possible to show if it is false or not.

If it is, accept that.

As for Autodynamics, you may find the concepts as "cool" as you like, but theories are not judged by their "coolness," they are judged by whether or not they can be falsified. If you do not personally have the means to determine whether they are false or not it is not the fault of the messanger for pointing out their falsity and your not being able to understand it.

Educate yourself and defend the theory from an educated position.

(Frankly, I've just had a look at some of the stuff and it's blatent crackpot nonsense, but of course you can't trust me, because I've been educated in physics, therefore I must be in on the plot. If you educate yourself then you too will be in on the plot, without even knowing it. Therefore it must be true because it can be shown to be false, but only by people who know how. . .or . . .something. Look, it's crackpot stuff on the order of claiming that things don't fall when you drop them because that implies that unicorns are pink and we all know there are no such things as unicorns. Get thee hence and read Bertrand Russell's The ABC's of Relativity. If you don't like my suggestion because you believe I am stoning you, well, tough. Science really doesn't care about your feelings either. That's part of the beauty of it.)

KFG

Re:Hmm, really was crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your reasoning quite narrow-minded. Essentially, what you are suggesting is that scientists should be aware of their ignorance and try to stay within a certain scope of possibilities.

I have news for you. If this was an accepted method in the scientific community, we'd still be banging rocks against each other to make fire.

Carrying out experiments in the direction of what seems obvioiusly unattainable often yields unexpected results, and that's how progress is made.

I find it interesting that you should mention the ability to fly. Think about all those poor schmucks who rolled their own wings and attempted to fly off of high altitude cliffs. They failed, but humans always strived to fly one way or another. Leonardo Da Vinci drew up prototypes of various flying mechanisms, which it can be argued, somewhat influenced modern flight technologies. Choppers, parachutes, etc. Was he over-reaching? Sure. But in many such instances, you have to think ahead by a mile to make any progress, even if what you're imagining is completely out of the realm of modern possibilities.

As far as the Pope being the Anti-Christ.....

[Arren]

.....You could do a lot worse than that as far as Christian fundamentalist obsessions go. Metaphorically speaking, as the figurehead of an international syndicate that has been banking off the perversion of Christ's teachings for two millennia, preying on the (near-)universal human need to understand our meaningful* place in the 'grand scheme of things' (which may or may not exist)..... yeah, that'll do for a Satanic archetype any day of the week. Especially Sunday. * in my opinion, as individuals we struggle to reconcile our subliminal awareness of the collective consciousness with the egoistic nature of our minds and sensory perceptions..... to me this is the impetus for the search for 'meaningfulness'.....

Orthodoxy is required, to the first approximation

[ccmay]

I think the reason he is seen as a giant of science is because he was not straightjacketed by orthodoxy.

There are different types of challenges to scientific orthodoxy. Though we are not omniscient, our understanding of the world advances ever closer to perfection. Some challengers to scientific orthodoxy are far more wrong than others.

Asimov used the example of the shape of the earth, as understood over the centuries, to illustrate this:

• The man who said the earth was a flat disc spinning in space was wrong, but not as wrong as the man who said it was the shell of a giant tortoise standing on elephants.
• The man who said it was a sphere was wrong, but not as wrong as the flat-disc guy.
• The man who said it was an oblate spheroid was wrong, but not as wrong as the fellow who said it was a sphere.
• The man who said it was almost an oblate spheroid with a few little bulges here and there, and described them in a scientific paper wih measurements accurate to within a meter or so, is still wrong, but not as wrong as all who have gone before him.

So Einstein's special relativity approximates to Newton's laws of motion when v is much less than c. The quantum model of the atom approximates to Bohr's model of the atom in every high school chemistry lab. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to every mass, but is unmeasurably small except on the scale of electrons and photons and quarks.

All the great challenges to scientific orthodoxy, for all their brilliance and insight, give results comparable to accepted orthodox wisdom except at the extremes of measurement. If someone makes a claim that does not fit this pattern, he can safely be dismissed as a crank or charlatan.

Newton was a genius when it came to mathematics and physics, and a deluded fool when it came to chemistry. These are not mutually exclusive propositions.

-ccm