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

Lead to Gold? No Problem!

[AKAImBatman]

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

*Ahem*

Simply place the lead into the path of a strong neutron stream. Wait awhile. You should get some gold if you're patient. However, the gold will be highly radioactive and otherwise generally unsuitable for use. Given enough time, it will also turn back into lead.

I read an interesting article once that suggested that alchemists had developed some of the earliest atomic piles. Apparently, many accounts of alchemists include information such as "they had a furnace straight from hell" and that they "suddenly developed lesions and died a few days later." Considering that radioactivity/atomic reactions were not understood until later, it is not a bad hypothesis that alchemists figured out that "warm rocks" such as pseudo-silver (radium) deposits might have special properties. If they piled enough up to create a critical mass, then they would have had a very interesting furnace.

I wish I still had a link to that article. :-/

Re:Lead to Gold? No Problem!

[Quirk]

A book I picked up in a used bookstore spoke to the supposed knowledge of 20th century alchemists. The Morning of the Magicians is a fun read dealing to a large extent with Black Magic as practised in the Third Reich.

Lost???

[otter42]

As an American, I never understood how Europeans could just lose this kind of thing. You're always hearing about some lost Michelangelo sculpture emerging, or a late Beethoven piece being discovered, or a Rembrandt revealed underneath a clown. My question was always, "How???"

Then I moved to France.

If you've never been to Europe, it's difficult to explain the shear amount of art here. It hangs of walls in homes, sits in the middle of city squares, and looms of staircases inside public buildings. They've got it everywhere, and over time, and especially because of a much higher level of secrecy in private, everyday life, these things just get forgotten.

It works like this: a grandmother knows that HER grandfather treasured a certain document and hid it away in a chest. She doesn't know what it was, as her grandfather never confided the secret to her, and when she passes away, her children find just another nameless ancient document in her affairs. They forget about it for generations, having no idea of its worth or origins.

In another example, the Naitonal Archeological Museum of Naples, Italy has so much art and sculpture that they simply haven't cataloged it all yet. In the middle of the building is a gigantic courtyard that is replete with statues that have no name and are just wearing away in the rain and shine. No one knows where they came from, or who made them.

Europe has just got so much of the stuff, hidden away as family heirlooms, in church vaults, or in plain sight in museums that they just can't analyze it all.

Anyway, just my meager attempt to help my fellow Americans what people mean when they talk about "Old" Europe.

Re:Orthodoxy in Science

[tloh]

Well said!

Quackery is more or less recognizable in any age. I feel obliged to contribute an addendum of particular relevence which sheds some light on how Newton's notes on alchemy were regarded before they were lost. The following is taken from the end of Chapter 22 in Martin Gardner's "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?"

When Newton's manuscripts on alchemy were sold in 1936 at a Sotheby auction, the economist John Maynard Keynes was the major buyer. In a brilliant speech on Newton, given at the Royal Society's Newton Tercentenary Celebration in 1947, Keynes spoke of having gone through some million of Newton's words on alchemy and found them "wholly devoid of scientific value." Newton's "deepest instincts were occult, esoteric - with a profound shrinking from the world - a rapt, consecrated, solitary perusing his studies by intense introspection, with a mental endurance perhaps never equaled."

As for Newton's discoveries in mathematics and physics, Keynes believed they resulted less from experiments than from an incredible intuition. Later Newton would dress them up with formal demonstrations and proofs which had little to do with the insights that seemed to enter his head by sheer magic. Keynes put it this way:

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, thought partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

Re:alchemy as an allegory

[h4rm0ny]

If you want a narrative account that deals with Newton and the transition of alchemy to chemistry, you could do worse than Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. It's hardly authoratitive, but it is one of the most fantastic stories I've every read.

Lots of scientists were also quacks

[trime]

Bill Bryson has some interesting examples in his book 'A Complete History of Nearly Everything'. Such as a noted geologist who published several rather long and dry but important papers about rock formation, but was convinced that given the right materials, he could make himself invisible.

The discovery of matches arose from a scientist convinced that urine could be turned into gold (primarily due to the colour similarity). He had buckets of it in his basement, and eventually they evapourated to form a compound high in phosphor which would spontateously ignite. At one time this substance was so valuable they enlisted the entire Swedish (I think, some northern European) army to generate bucketloads of urine. It turned out to be worth 5x its weight in gold!

Newton also did other experiments, such as staring at the sun until he couldn't bare the pain, to see what would happen; he once stuck a needle in his eyeball and moved it around. In both cases (amazingly) he suffered no long term damage, but did have to spend a long time inside after staring at the sun before his vision returned.

Just because we (the unwashed masses) now 'understand' science, we have a different opinion of what now seems ludicrous in the past. Imagine what Newton would have thought of quantum mechanics (heck, I think it's quackery and I have a degree in physics!). Nature is weird and wonderful, and often the only way we can seperate fantasy from fantastic reality is through seemingly bizzare experimentation.