The Last Newton Magician

8/12/2019 The Last Newton Magician

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BY SAM K EAN

Precisely at 1 p.m. just after luncheon on July 1 3 1 936 bidding opened on a remarkable

lot at Sotheby's auction house in London: a metal chest full of Isaac New ton 's priva te, hand-

written pa pers and lab books, some almost three hu nd red years old, most never pu blished

To make Isaac Newton s alchemical manuscripts available online, the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project had to translate all of New ton s scrawled s ymbols, some of

which were used by other alchemists and others which were uniquely his own, into a font. Using an open source font called Newton—some characters are shown

atwDve—as a starting po int, Wallace E. Ho ope r has designed and created a copyrighted fon t called Alchemy Tex tbook for a proposal t o include alchemiczil symbols

Unicode —Vie chymi s t r y o f l Oi Nar íon Project

When Cambridge University, Newton's alma mater, had acquired the trove in 1872, a team of scholars had dedicatedsixteen years to cataloging the contents. This was Newton, after all, and they were hungry for any insight into how he'ddeveloped his theories of motion, gravity, light, and color—work that defines the very Newtonian universe we inhabit.

Strangely, after riffling through and picking out select papers, Cambridge returned virtually the entire bundle to the

owner, the Earl of Portsmouth. Soon forgotten, the chest barely survived a house fire in 1891, and by 1936 one of theearl's descendents was selling it to make some quick cash. Sotheby's itself barely publicized the sale—it was easilyovershadowed that season by a spectacular, £140,000 auction of Rubens and Rembrandt paintings through rival houseChristie's. As the gavel fell for the last time at So theby's on July 14, the bulk of N ew ton 's life's work h ad been split upamong three-dozen book buyers for a pitiful £9,000.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, a Newton admirer, was one of those three dozen, though he'd heard about the auctiontoo late to buy mu ch. Disturbed by the impiety of the transactions, he began acquiring more of the pap ers piecemeal.In many cases, he ha d to play the slick antiquarian, swapping New ton papers w ith collectors, trying to out-connive them.Keynes later rem emb ered, with a touch of Bloomsbury snobbery, I man aged gradually to reassemble about half of them.. . . The greater part of the rest were sn atched out of my reach by a syndicate which hop ed to sell them at a high price,probably in America.

Keynes sought papers on any topic at first, but eventually concentrated on one niche— Newton's alchemy. Few peopleknew th e father of mo dern science had dabbled in alchemy; hut the more Keynes collected and the more he brood[ed ]over these queer collections, the clearer it became tha t alchemy wa sn't a niche to Ne wto n at all. It wa s, in many w ays,Ne wto n's life work— more vital to him tha n physics or mathe matics ever wa s. This Ne wto n was not the first of the age



THE L ST

N E W T O N ^MAGICIAN

Sir Isaac Newton, y Samuel Freeman. 1773-1857)



of reason, Keynes conc luded . He was the last ofthe magicians.

Keynes's findings threw the standard narrative ofscience history into confusion. Keynes re-donated thealchemical papers to Cambridge in 1946, but most histo-rians, still nonplussed, either ignored them or tried toexplain them away. In fact, only recently have scholarsbegun to systematically study the entire corpus, line by

line, picture by pictu re, rune by ru ne. Those efforts aregetting a big boost from librarian John W alsh andscience historian William Newman, both at Indiana

Gottfried Leibniz, and others exchanged letters with andbefriended alchemists, too, looking to chymisfry for wis-dom about the natural world.

Newton's chymisfry followed this tradition in manyways, Newman says, especially his view of nature as ariddle that only a gnostic brotherhood of alchemistscould unravel. At the same time, Newton was uniq ueamong alchemists for uniting his chymisfry wifh other,

seemingly disconnected scientitic obsessions of his, suchas optics. New man even argues that New ton's famousdemonstration that white light was merely a combina-

M arry ^ [sulfur] with ^ , that is our Ç [mercury] which

then hast tho u two s ulph urs m arried & two Çs of on e

University, who head a project to digitize and postonline the thousands of pages that Newton wrote onalchemy. Half of the pages have been posted so far, butNewman and Walsh say they've already gleanedinsights into not only Ne wton the man, but into howalchemy shaped N ewton 's science.

Early in life, New ton turne d to alchemy as a diversion.His father died before he was born (Newton, a sicklyinfant, almost joined him in the grave), and New tongrew up w ith a distant stepfather w ho kept the boy'smother aw ay from him. Nor did New ton, too precociousfor his own good, make friends amo ng his peers.

As compensation, he disappeared into books like

ysteries of Nature and A rt—fascinated by their odd mixof occult philosophy and practical engineering. Showingearly ingenuity, Newton built a water clock and othercontraptions described in Mysteries; showing an earlymischievous streak, he also built a lantern describedtherein, tied it to a kite, and flew it at night near hishom e, a spectacle which wo nderfully affrighted all theneighb oring inhab itants, he recalled. At Cam bridge,New ton further developed his interest in both the prac-tical and theoretical sides of the field, devourin g booksby alchem ist Robert Boyle.

New ton described such work as chymistry And theword is a useful reminder—with its echo of modern chemistry, yet archaic spelling—of wh at alchemy

meant to people in New ton's time. Today, most peoplethink of alchemists as either foolish ne croman cers orlowlifes obsessed with chrysopoeia—turnin base metalsinto gold. That view comes down to us largely throughthe enemies of alchemy. Enlightenment thinkers, forexample, who wanted to stamp out magical thinkingand, ironically, install a mechanistic, New tonian outlookinstead. But alchemists were important for humankind'sintellectual developm ent—the larvae that m etamor-phosed into Enlightenment philosophes and modernscientists. Especially impo rtant was the later alchem ists'willingness to test their theories with experiments, eventheories that conflicted with accepted doctrines. Boyle

was the primary example he re, but John Locke,

tion of colored light rays owes a significant d ebt to th ealchemy of Boyle.

In the 1660s, Boyle got tangled up in a dispu te w ithscholastic philosophers over the essence of matter. Theseadherents of Aristotle believed that once a substancedissolved into so me thing else, it lost its identity forever.Boyle devised an experiment to dissolve camphor, anaromatic chemical, in acid, at which point the camphorlost its scent. This agreed with scholastic thou ght. ButBoyle then added water to the solution—at which poinfthe camphor reappeared , regaining its odor and allother properties. Boyle could pull similar tricks withdissolved m etals like gold. This classic alchemy prove dscholastics wrong , Boyle said: Dissolved substancesdon't lose their identity.

The scholastics retorted that there w as no proof it wasreally the same camphor. When the water was added, thesolution m ight have created the cam phor an ew. But Boylerejected this reasoning. Why, he argued , should the cam-pho r's essence be any different because it came from anexperiment and not from natiire? If it talked like cam phorand walked like camphor, it was camphor, period.

New ton studied B oyle's arguments, and soon deviseda similar theory abo ut color. While on leave fromCambridge during an outbreak of plague, Newtonbegan separating sunlight into colors with a prism,among other experiments. He thought they proved that

colored lights were in white light from the start.Colleagues like the eminent Robert Hooke disagreed,arguing that the prism itself could have produced thecolors as light streamed thro ugh, the way an organ pipeproduces sound when air rushes through. (No onewou ld say that sharps and flats are in the pipe beforethey're played.)

To counter this objection, Newton adopted Boyle'stactics. He showed he could tease white light apart intoreds, yellows, greens, and blues, then meld them backtogether. Crucially, this synthesized white light had allthe properties of sunlight. Newton argued from this thatthe individual colors in light had a permanent, incor-

ruptible existence, even if humans couldn't always sense



them . Boyle had mad e the exact same logical pointsabout the permanence of camphor in acid. According toNew man, New ton's fundamental theory of color wastherefore midwifed by Boyle's alchemy

This success with color and chy mistry mu st havethrilled Newton—he'd uncovered secrets in nature anda little magic of his own. And although Newton expand-ed his work into gravity and astronomy (not to mention

Biblical prophecies, another obsession), he felt pulledback to chymistry his entire working life. Indeed , hededicated six weeks to chymistry ev ery fall and every

explain why Newton concealed his research (Boyledidn't). There's n o delicate way to pu t it: Almost every-one who knew him found him disarmingly weird. Hehad a mean temper, probably never had sex, andsuffered at least one raving breakdown, during whichhe wished death on Locke, one of his few friends.Thoughts of sin tormented Newton. As a young manhe wrote a letter addressed to God outlining every

peccadillo he ever committed, faults ranging from thetouchingly innocuous— making pies on Sundaynight —to the abusive and creepy— punching my

is im preg nated w ith ^ m ust be espou sed w ith our goldof [f] sp ring w hos e father is the O [gold] & [silver] the m other.

spring for decades, the seasons when his unheated labwas bearable—and he often worked through theunbearable mon ths, too. In all, Newton p enned over onemillion word s (five hu nd red times the length of thisarticle) on chym istry

Merely counting words doesn't capture the richness ofthe chymical work. Like all alchemists, Newton pep -pered his prose with gnomic shorthand. Consider thisline in a recipe for sophic mercury, which dissolvedgold and allowed the precious metal to vegetate andmatu re into the philosop her's stone: Marry ^ [sulfur]with ^ that is our Ç [mercury] which is impregnatedwith 4 must be espoused with our gold then hast thou

two sulphurs m arried & two Çs of one of[f]spring whosefather is the O [gold] & [silver] the mother.New ton also included allegorical drawin gs, like a head

with three faces or an elaborate caduceus crowned witha Holy Spirit dove , and verses copied verbatim fromother alchemists. Moreover, those million w ords do n'tcapture the countless hours Newton spent runn ingchymistry experiments on intriguing substances likeantimony and mercury Doctors in later eras have evenspeculated that Newton suffered from chronic mercurypoisoning as a result, which could certainly explain h ispeculiar personal life.

Given ho w m uch labor went into Newton's chymistry,wh y did non e of it come to light until the Sotheby 's

auction? It wasn 't all genteel scholarly embarrassm ent.English alchemists had to veil their true interestsbecause alchemy had been illegal in England since 1404.The crown feared alchemy because transforming leadinto gold would have destabilized the country's econo-my, throu gh counterfeit coins. The general ban on alche-my— the Act Against M ultipliers—w as lifted in 1689,thanks to Boyle's lobbying, but alchemists were stilltainted by association, and counterfeiting remained acapital crime in England. (When Newton took over asdirector of the Royal Mint in his dotage, in fact, he hadone notorious counterfeiter hanged and publicly disem-boweled— and took great delight in seeing it done.)

Still, the illicit nature of chymistry doesn't completely

sister and threat[en]ing my [step]father and moth er. . . to burne them and the house over them.

This eccentricity spilled over into his science. Curiouswhat would happen, Newton once stared into the sunfor so long he had to lie in a dark room for several daysbefore he stopped seeing spots. He also once wedged aneedle into the socket behind his eye, to see how chang-ing the curvature of the eyeball affected his vision. Butfor someone willing to experiment on just about any-thing, Newton was very guarded about discussing hisexperimental results, especially of chymistry He loathedthe thought of someone figuring something new outfrom his ideas, and he was obsessed with getting full

credit for discoveries. (This desire bared its teeth in the1680s when Leibniz published a theory of calculusindepen dent of Newton's earlier but unpub lishedwork, at which point Newton set out to destroyLeibniz's rep utation.)

But really, can w e blame N ewto n for being so secretive,for obsessing? For him, so much was at stake. He wo uldnot have recognized the distinction we draw todaybetw een real science full of experiments and equationsand alchemical pseudoscience full of spells and bootlessspeculation. Chymistry was one grand body of work tohim, the grandest, and he'd coveted kn owing nature'ssecrets since boyhoo d. H e labored so long an d so secret-ly because chymistry seemed the most promising path

to obtaining near magical powers and near mysticalinsights into nature—discoveries that would, if only hecould make them, vault him into the first rank of geniuseswho ever lived.

Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, D.C , where he works asa correspondent for Science. He is the author of The isappearinSpoon an unconventional history of the periodic table.

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project at Indiana Universityhas received $200,000 in NEH funding to edit and publish

online Newton's writings in alchemy and chemistry.



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