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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.'"
Alchemy is not so crude or base, it's an allegory for the purification of the soul. Transformation from human soul to the divine, base matter to gold. Only the ignorant and the greedy would pursue this craft solely for monetary rewards with singed hair, blasted retorts and noxious chemicals used in an unsafe fashion. They got what they deserved while true alchemists achieved something far more subtle and rewarding than is commonly accepted in our western, material society.
I dub thee, Newton, the Full Metal Alchemist.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
No scientist has ever won a Nobel Prize by posting [AOL]Me Too![/AOL]
.do it!
Overthrowing orthodoxy is the career making Holy Grail of every scientist.
All you have to do to collect your Nobel is . .
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
Seems like these papers contain nothing more than plans on how to get a cockroach to navigate a room while perched atop a ping-pong ball. Oh, the progress we've made.
Fear my awesome powers!
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Math genius though he was, there is nothing scientific about much of what Newton did with his life. In Martin Gardner's delightful book "Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?", we are introduced to not only the Newton the Alchemist, but also Newton the Protestant fundamentalist who was obsessed with Bible codes and thought the Pope was the anti-christ. Funny that you should mention spectroscopy, though. Newton was the one who pass white light through a prism and demonstrate it was composed of a mixture of colors. A bit more rational investigation on his part and he may very well have developed the principles of spectroscopy.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Alpha and beta radiation doesn't feel warm.
Yes it does. Or more precisely, it warms the material itself. You feel the heat by old-fashion convection. That's why Pu238 (an Alpha emitter) is warm to the touch and can be used as a power source inside RTGs.
In either case, the theory is that these alchemists created a critical mass of a radioactive material. It would have begun fissioning, thus producing all kinds of radiation; including thermal, infrared, gamma, neutron, and others.
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Found in his notes:
1)Find lead
2)Convert to gold
3)Profit!!
Oh... you didn't know?
:)
You can make gold by a simple double decomposition reaction. You just need Copper and Aluminium:
Cu + Al = Au + Cl
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?"
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I don't like being stoned
.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.)
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. .
KFG
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.
.....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'.....
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.
Perhaps you'd like to check out CRITICALITY ACCIDENTS from 1943-1970. Plenty of people saw large fission reactions first-hand and lived a day or two afterwards.
:
From about three quarters of the way down the page
At that time, the screwdriver apparently slipped and the upper shell fell into position around the fissionable material. Of the eight people in the room, two were directly engaged in the work leading to this incident.
The "blue glow" was observed, a heat wave felt, and immediately the top shell was slipped off and everyone left the room. The scientist who was demonstrating the experiment received sufficient dosage to result in injuries from which he died nine days later. The scientist assisting received sufficient radiation dosage to cause serious injuries and some permanent partial disability.
"er, Whoops."
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Incantation 229
Take the pod of durham and triticale, mill to fine white powder. Add bovine lactation, and yolk from flightless fowl. Reduce fruit of fig tree, fill earlier mixture and fire result for 15 minutes. Alas, it is not gold, but these Fig Newtons do sell rather well.
Anybody want a peanut?
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:
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
Too much Law; not enough Order.