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Sir Isaac Newton, Alchemist

Posted by samzenpus on from the philosopher's-stone dept.

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.'"

17 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Science by rgmoore · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is there some mystical part to the field being pushed that I am not aware of?

      Yes. Chiropractic was originally a semi-mystical practice like a lot of pre-scientific medicine. The founders claimed that all sickness was caused by misalignment of the joints, so they could cure any disease by correcting the misalignments. A minority of chiropractors today still make those claims. They also oppose a lot of other modern scientific medicine, including vaccination.

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    2. Re:Science by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Qxe4
    3. Re:Science by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    4. Re:Science by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      Alchemy was only partially about the transmutation of actual metals. When it talks about turning "lead" into "gold" it is usually talking about a spiritual refinement, a transformation of the base animal aspects of humanity (lead) to a higher, more platonically pure state (gold). If you've read Anathem by Neal Stephenson, you'll find many ideas of science and math that are informed by this tradition. The notion that alchemy was about making gold misses the entire point. The transmutation of metals was as much about misdirecting the Grand Inquisitors as it was about making gold.

      For a very interesting discussion of alchemy, I highly recommend the book Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation by the great historian Peter Levenda. It's also worth reading Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages as an entertaining overview to the philosophical aspects of alchemy.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    5. Re:Science by IICV · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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'

  2. It is *now* becoming clear? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This has literally been known .. well, since Newton. Hardly a secret he spent more time on alchemy than on what's subsequently been regarded as real science.
    Many 'scientists' before science-as-we-know it dabbled in pseudoscience and nonsense, e.g. Kepler did astrology as well as astronomy.

    Newton heralded the modern age of science, but he _wasn't_ the first scientist in the modern sense, he was 'the last magician', as James Gleick put it.

  3. And lead CAN be turned into gold... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:And lead CAN be turned into gold... by fractoid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Exactly. And most importantly, science is about testing your assumptions in order to verify them. If Newton made a systematic, scientific study of alchemy, then he was practicing science, not "a totemic pseudoscience". He may not have managed to turn lead into gold but I'd bet he learned a lot.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    2. Re:And lead CAN be turned into gold... by shawb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have heard a tale from times long ago, about an alchemist and the philosopher's stone.

      This alchemist, he sought the truth, with an inkling that experiment would lead to proof. To get support from nobles and kings the alchemist spoke of untrue things. "I seek a way to form base lead into gold and an elixer that will keep you from every growing old." Popes and priests said truth comes from the bible, that silly games played in labs are just not reliable. The alchemist just smiled and gave them a nod, and told them that gold represents heaven and God. Upon hearing this the alchemist was found without guilt, for churches look so much better when covered with gilt.


      What of the claims that life could be extended? And that the infirm would swiftly be mended? What of the claims of untold power? And of wealth unknown to all at that early hour? The philosopher's stone became much like an orange, for difficult to rhyme is the scientific method.

      --
      I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
  4. Didn't realise this wasn't widely known by Bertie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re: The Alchemists by pmc · · Score: 5, Informative

    No they didn't - they started off with the four elements of air, earth, fire and water. Then they realised that there were maybe a score of "elements" (even the concept was vague), and there was no systematic organisation or predictive value from it. This took a few hundred years. Most importantly they did not realise the that properties of the elements repeat themselves (which is where the concept of the periodic part of the name comes from).

    The comment that they created a "fairly accurate periodic chart" is risible.

  6. Interesting biographical resource - by spads · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/newton/about.html He seemed by no means to be the sort of founding fathers-esque square-head, as he is often depicted (eg. portrait in linked article). Not only did it describe his alchemical endeavors, but also that he was seeking physical proofs for things written in the bible. Interesting how true geniuses are frequently true eccentrics.

    --
    Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
  7. More than a physicist... by JoeRobe · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I recall, according to his assistant's writings, the night that Newton gave his final edition of The Principia to the messenger to go out for printing, he immediately went back into his lab and fired up his alchemy furnace. Alchemy was one of his passions, and he was sincerely attempting to discover the philosopher's stone, and even an "elixir of life". Sounds silly now, but chemistry was so young at that time, nobody knew its potential. He was also passionate about biblical passages. He thought that one could extract important scientific information from the bible, ancient texts and architecture, allowing him to predict the apocalypse and other "insights". Supposedly he wrote more about this than science (in fact I remember hearing 90% was on the occult, 10% "scientific. No reference for that, though).

    The wikipedia page is actually pretty insightful.

    If you ever have a chance to read even a chapter or two of The Principia, you should. It's an amazingly different perspective on what we now know as "Newtonian Mechanics". Geometry was clearly the tool of scientists as the time...

    --
    The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  8. And in the end he was right by greg_barton · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  9. Re:Explain why Science ASSUMES Evolution as true. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    What the fuck are you smoking?

    Some holy shit!

  10. Unacceptable. by BlitzTech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.