Do any authenticated documents made by Isaac Newton on the subject of Alchemy still exist? And are there any serious works on why such a man as Newton found Alchemy to be as worthwhile a study as Astronomy and Natural Philosophy?
Web searches prove many links to sources that seem biassed towards affirming Alchemy as a real science by association with Newton. Was Newton really studying the Chemistry aspects of Alchemy, or was he also into the more essoterich and magical aspects of Alchemy?
I couldn’t quickly find any papers on alchemy by Newton, and I suspect that this may be because they weren’t widely printed. Newton apparently wrote more than a million words on alchemy, but little of it was printed, even after his death. It seems that the scientific establishment in Newton’s time was not interested in alchemy, and may have disagreed with its mystical aspects. (This doesn’t necessarily mean that they disagreed with alchemy on scientific principles; it may mean instead that it was shunned for political and religious reasons.)
A chronology of Newton’s life includes some of his major achievements in alchemy, but doesn’t include much that would help one decide if he was a mystic or a more practical alchemist. (In Newton’s time, there were alchemists who made real contributions to the science that would eventually become chemistry; Robert Boyle, with whom Newton corresponded, was one of them.) Newton did correctly theorize that there were attractive forces between particles in matter, but he incorrectly claimed that these forces were the basis of acidity. This isn’t as bad as it sounds; acidity wasn’t fully and correctly understood until Arrhenius’ work at the turn of the 20th century. Probably the most mystical entry on the chronology is that Newton ‘made Jupiter fly on his eagle’. This might mean that he somehow made tin (the metal associated in alchemy with Jupiter) turn white, perhaps by heating it to form an oxide (then called a ‘calx’ and thought to be the pure form of the metal). At least, it suggests that he still talked like an alchemist, though it must be remembered that alchemists at this time still did not understand the true nature of chemical elements and very often used such mystical language to hide their studies from the uninitiated. The idea that salt, mercury, and sulfur were not the true chemical elements was suggested by Boyle in The Skeptical Chemist (modernized spelling), and Newton may have agreed with this. Finally, Newton attributed advanced scientific knowledge to the ancients, arguing that the Pythagoreans must have known about gravity (which led him to use Greek-style geometric arguments to prove his own theories, rather than the calculus – fluxions – he had developed). He believed that the antediluvian Hebrews must have known about the atomic structure of matter.
Another rather unknown thing about Newton is that he was not much liked by many of his contemporaries, and it is believed by many historians that his famous ‘If I have seen further, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants’ was an insult. Robert Hooke, a prominent member of the Royal Society who Newton disliked greatly, was apparently very short in stature, and so, when Hooke failed to understand Newton’s work and criticized it, Newton said essentially that he was able to ‘see further’ because he was not viewing the world from a vantage point as low as Hooke’s.
Some Articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2108438/
http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog_rev_1/docs/nytimes/2003-06-12_nytimes_newton_project.pdf note: pdf.
http://www.worldscibooks.com/histsci/etextbook/4141/4141_newton.pdf
I got these trying (and failing) to find an online copy of Keynes’ article Newton, the man. Keynes got access to alot of Newton’s papers and was surprised and a little shocked to find out just how deeply Newton had studied alchemy and other occult sciences.
I must recommend Richard Westfall’s book Never at Rest, the best Newton bio. It is long and scholarly but goes into Newton’s alchemical beliefs pretty thoroughly.
Great stuff, from Larry Borgia’s first link comes this tit-bit.
We know now that Newton, the alchemist, hid behind a pseudonym, Jeova sanctus unus.
I note that I posted some links which mentioned the Newton project without posting a link to the project itself. I believe it is an attempt to put all of sir Isaac’s extant papers on the web.
If anyone’s still interested, here it is:
Yes, and in copious amounts. Newton published nothing explicitly alchemical during his lifetime, but privately built up a vast mass of handwritten notes on the subject. These are a mixture of texts by alchemical writers (at a time when some books were hard to buy, he sometimes borrowed copies and copied them by hand), notes on his reading of other authors, speculations on alchemical theory and records of the experiments he did himself. On his death most of these passed into his relatives’ hands, eventually becoming part of what’s known as the Portsmouth Collection of Newtonian manuscripts. When this was sold at auction in 1936 it was estimated that the alchemical papers amounted to 650,000 words. Sothebys split this mass of stuff into multiple lots, though the majority of these alchemical ones were bought by Keynes and so are now held by King’s College in Cambridge. Related lots were bought by other buyers, so there are significant holdings of them elsewhere, including in private hands.
Compared to the likes of Newton’s correspondence or his mathematical and optical papers, the alchemical manuscipts have been relatively ill-served to date when it comes to publishing them in modern editions. This one major area where the Newton Project (as linked to by Larry) is likely to prove particularly significant as it progresses.
It should be emphasised that this hasn’t been a matter of neglect: preparing a scholarly edition of them would be a lifetime’s commitment by someone. Virtually all the alchemical manuscripts are available to be read by specialists and they have been studied in detail. Which brings us to …
Since I’ve already said much the same elsewhere in GQ in the last day, I’ll echo Larry’s recommendation of Westfall. The best known particular specialist on the alchemical writings has been Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, who published two booklength studies on them: The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy (Cambridge, 1975) and The Janus Faces of Genius (Cambridge, 1991), in which she revised many of the conclusions she’d come to in the first.
There have also been recent investigations recreating his alchemical experiments in terms of modern chemistry.
One important aspect to grasp is that it was possible to regard alchemy as esoteric , but not necessarily magical. For better or for worse, it was evident that there was some sort of alchemical tradition that seemed to being handed down from the past. This was obviously wrapped in endlessly elaborated mystical symbolism. At least to some large - and arguably exclusive - extent, Newton was interested in peering beyond these trappings to discover whatever truths lay enclosed within. To do so he, not unnaturally, concluded that he had to understand all the allusions involved in alchemical writings and read as widely as possible amongst this literature.
(As an aside, the notion that key theological and scientific truths were known to the Ancients and might be recoverable through extensive study of their writings and commentaries upon them is a recurring theme in Newton’s though - as noted by Roches. )
The fact that he was steeped in alchemical theorising has led some (including Dobbs and Westfall) to suggest that this influenced his ideas about physics. Newton’s very early speculations in physics were heavily purely atomistic and there’s the suggestion that exposure to the notion of other types of interactions rather than atoms bumping together may have led to action-at-a-distance.
I’ll also repeat what I said in this thread yesterday: it’s pretty clear that he eventually became disillusioned with alchemy in the 1690s and completely abandoned most of his interest in it. The reasons for this are unclear, though they may be related to the psychological stain he was under in roughly the same period.
As for contemporary New Age “alchemists”, they seem entranced by the very symbolism that Newton probably saw as merely superficial obscurantism. I doubt few of them have ever touched a furnace in their life.
I’ll use my one free bounce, before the weekend in case any weekend dopers have more to say, and because the answers I have received so far in this thread are so good and so scholarly.