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Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist
Hugh Pickens writes "Natalie Angier writes in The Hindu that it is now becoming clear that Newton spent thirty years of his life slaving over a furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. Angier writes, 'How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic pseudoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold?' Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. 'Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,' says Dr. William Newman, 'and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.' Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. 'I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton's breakthroughs in optics,' says Newman. 'He's not just passing light through a prism — he's resynthesizing it.'"
Science is not a field of study it is the approach.
Also, it certainly isn't pseudoscience to turn elements into other elements. Nuclear reactions can do this, just not in large quantities. Their methods were incorrect, but the idea itself is not ridiculous.
I mean, Bill Bryson talks about it at some length in his eminently readable Short History Of Nearly Everything. As well as being into alchemy, he "spent endless hours studying the floor plan of the lost temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem (teaching himself Hebrew in the process, the better to scan original texts) in the belief that it held mathematical clues to the second coming of Christ and the end of the world."
Bryson also reports that John Maynard Keynes bought a load of his papers at auction, only to find that the great majority of them were about alchemy, rather than optics or astronomy.
You can transmute one element to another. It's called nuclear chemistry.
There is no civilization as we know it without currency. If people start debasing the currency, they are robbing from the rest of the populace - everyone has to work that bit harder to support them. Make enough to never have to work again, and you have effectively caused the rest of the society to chip in a lifetime worth of slavery just so you can sit on your ass. The crime is not really any different to counterfeiting, and every country takes that very seriously for that reason. So meh.
Newton may or may not have been personable, but it is difficult to argue that he contributed far more to the world than he took from it, and from that perspective he was one of the nicest guys to have ever lived.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
There is nothing wrong with seeking physical proofs for things written in the bible. In fact, there are physical proofs for some things written in the bible, such as the ruins of the city of Jericho. But that's besides the point. The problem isn't looking for scientific proof of things, the problem is when you don't accept the evidence that contradicts what you expected. Newton was living at the dawn of scientific investigation, he could have investigated almost anything and found something worth writing a paper about.
There is nothing wrong with seeking physical proof for even astrology. The only problem is when you ignore the evidence that shows it's useless.
Qxe4
By the modern standards of today, "alchemy" is considered a pseudoscience. Why do new "researchers" (and I use the term VERY liberally) continue to apply modern context to historical figures? Newton was a pioneer of his day. Alchemy was considered a real science, one he spent quite a bit of time furthering, and to condemn 30 years of his life for searching for a way to turn lead into gold is insulting to his memory and legacy as well as insulting to researchers and historians who actually understand that modern opinions, ideas, and knowledge don't always apply in the past.
/.), and a total failure to understand basic statistics (most 'shocking' studies posted on /.). These idiots give the rest of us researchers a bad name.
I am getting very tired of "researchers" making claims with unpublished data that cannot be verified for accuracy (Gliese 581 g possibly a hoax), making 'groundbreaking' claims about history without even considering historical context (this and about 50% of similar posts on
Congrats on finally getting your submission posted after going halfway around the world to find a copy not at the New York Times. Seriously.
Of course, when you know science as we do today, it's easy to say that this was an obvious dead end. However, imagine how much was known about anything such a long time ago. How could he have known that these experiments would not lead to success? Many other experiments were done at the same time (and much later) that seem much more esoteric, and which ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs. What comes to my mind right now are Faraday's electrical experiments with frog legs...
So from that point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Newton trying to "cook" some chemical elements seeking for new insights.
What else is eccentricity but deviation from the norm? There are loads of things the average person would probably do differently if he was smart enough to be in the top 0.1% of people, because the better way to do a particular task would then be obvious. Of course, his compatriots are doomed to never understand why his ways are better, because they aren't smart enough to do so. Thus, they label him eccentric.
If you are a genius, even the conventional wisdom of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" can be flouted, because then you would be smart enough to figure out exactly what sort of un-Romanlike things you can get away with. The extent to which you do the un-Roman things depends on how much you value social approval. The thing is, someone recognized as a genius will care more about implementing a better way of doing whatever it is they want to do, than social approval. When that better way catches on, that is how they get recognized as a genius. So it is no accident that perceived geniuses are eccentrics, some just hide it better than others.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
A couple of things:
1. Alchemy has little to do with chemistry. It's about the purification of the soul through repeated heatings and coolings, and as Newton was learning Hebrew, I'd guess he'd probably figured out some of the fundamentals in play re Gnostic Christianity and similar. "Lead into Gold" is a metaphor, as was much else about alchemy. But I don't know much about Newton, so whatever. Maybe he really was trying to generate a money mill.
2. Not knowing something isn't a crime. Exploration of ideas and the world should never be punished if the person searching is doing so out of an honest desire to learn and isn't hurting anybody in the process. People are far too hard on each other for being ignorant, and too defensive when their ignorance is pointed out. Learning shouldn't be a punishable offense.
-FL
Some things may wrongly appear to be mumbo jumbo, because we have not researched them properly yet.
If there's no evidence for it, then it isn't science. What's more, if there's alternative explanations that are simpler and demonstrable, then there's little point for the claim at all. Specific claims of ID have perfectly reasonable explanations that do not require aliens, gods or anything of the kind.
I know what you want, you want science to support your superstitions. It doesn't work that way. You may want to believe that Thor causes thunder, but that does not bind science to your explanation, nor does it give you license to redefine words to try to win debates or make points.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
alchemy is laughable, in 2010
alchemy is respectable, in 1710
what exactly is the point of applying 2010 standards to 1710?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A sane researcher would stick pins in other people's eyes. ;)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.