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.'"

Comments

Science

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is not a field of study it is the approach.

Re:Science

[phantomfive]

There likely is still a lot of mumbo-jumbo out there (string theory, perhaps?). Science doesn't mean being right. Science, in a single word, might be described as 'evidence-based.' Before science, people trusted people like Aristotle for no other reason than that he was Aristotle. Now when we trust scientists, we're not doing it because we think they have some god-given right, but because we trust that they've looked at the evidence, and we can look at that evidence too if we have the time/desire.

This is why Galileo and Newton are still scientists, even though there was a lot they didn't know. They ran experiments, and looked at what really happened, instead of debating based on what someone said a thousand years before. In Newton's alchemy, he was still experimenting to see what could be done, not writing long dissertations without ever turning on a burner. Seriously, that's what people did before science: before the idea of basing things on evidence.

Nullius in Verba, "On the words of no man," this is what science is; if a man is not backed up by evidence, his words are useless.

Re:Science

[UnknowingFool]

It's obvious because of the stability of lead that you won't be able to do it by chemical means (which is, I guess, often implied). However, with nuclear transmutation is definitely possible to change bismuth into lead and lead into gold. For now, it will cost you more than the gold is worth, but once energy becomes almost free..

It is obvious now after hundreds of years of rigorous theory and testing. In Newton's time, it wasn't clear whether some new, unknown chemical would turn lead into gold. We know now from atomic theory that lead and gold have different number of protons and simple chemical change would not convert one to another. Chemistry at the time was in its infancy. The law of conservation of matter wasn't stated by Antoine Lavoisier, which many historians consider the father of modern chemistry, until 1789 (some 60 years after Newton died). Even then Lavoisier proposed that heat was caused by a weightless fluid called caloric so he wasn't right about everything.

Re:Science

[IICV]

Uh huh, you lucked out - a good chiropractor is basically a physical therapist without that accreditation, or an actual physical therapist going by another name for some reason. It doesn't really matter that the fundamental chiropractic theory is complete and utter unsubstantiated bullshit equivalent to Chi or ghost stories; if the treatment works, after all, it works (though I and I'm sure many other people have philosophical objections to that, it's hard to come up with pragmatic ones).

Unfortunately, not all chiropractors are as good as yours, and not all people who go to chiropractors are as lucky as you. There's definitely bad chiropractors out there, who say that their manipulations can cure literally everything. I mean, don't you remember the three or four Slashdot articles about the British Chiropractor Association suing Simon Singh for libel? They sued him because he said that a lot of their claims were bogus (literally, they sued him for using that word), and they eventually dropped the case because the claims are bogus.

Here's the problem, though: you can't tell which kind it will be before you go to them. Sure, you can look up reviews and ask your friends, but that is pretty meaningless; unless your friends are trained medical professionals, they're not really going to have a good idea of whether or not the chiropractor knows wtf they're doing. If you were designing a house, you wouldn't just find a random architect on Yelp - you'd make sure you found one who had a good reputation and was a licensed architect. The problem with chiropractors, though, is that there's very little if any regulation on who can call themselves a chiropractor, and there's almost no educational requirements; Joe Random off the street can basically just decide he's a chiropractor one day and open up shop, which is not how it works for the MD you so casually disregard.

"Fine," you say, "it doesn't really matter! From a pragmatic standpoint, they're not really hurting anyone, right? Either they cure you, or they send you off to a real doctor who does." Unfortunately, it often doesn't work like that; in terms of actual medical problems, the time a chiropractor spends trying to fix you by adjusting your sublaxations and crackin' your bones is time that's wasted unless you actually had certain classes of muscular or skeletal problem. If you had, say, severe joint pain and spent a couple of weeks going to a chiropractor instead of going to a doctor, the chiropractor might not even know to look for lupus. In the worst cases, unethical chiropractors might refrain from referring a patient with problems they can't handle to a doctor, simply because there's really no standards of conduct for them.

And even then, the contention that what they can only harm you by delaying treatment might not even be true! It's been argued (quite convincingly, I think) that certain kinds of chiropractic manipulations on the neck can cause stroke.

So yeah, it boils down to this: the actual art chiropractors practice (i.e, chiropractic) is a sham and a scam with absolutely no medical backing. Though there are actual chiropractors that know enough to heal you out there, there is no way of guaranteeing that any specific chiropractor won't try to adjust your neck and potentially give you a stroke, or give you bad advice that doesn't work, or string you along and delay effective treatment.

If you don't believe me, check your chiropractor's website or pamphlets - if they're in the USA, I bet you anything that they have something like the Quack Miranda Warning somewhere in there. And if they don't, they're not just a chiropractor - they almost certainly have some sort of real medical certification, which means that they don'

And lead CAN be turned into gold...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Didn't realise this wasn't widely known

[Bertie]

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.

And in the end he was right

[greg_barton]

You can transmute one element to another. It's called nuclear chemistry.

Unacceptable.

[BlitzTech]

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.

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 /.), and a total failure to understand basic statistics (most 'shocking' studies posted on /.). These idiots give the rest of us researchers a bad name.