Newton was more of a scientist to me, concentrating on
physics.
Newton paved the way to the newtonian age but he was a bit of a
quack.
Sir Isaac Newton, famous for
his revolutionary work in mathematics, optics, gravity and the laws
of motion, had a secret hobby.
A collection of his notes
thought to have been lost 70 years ago reveal his passion for
alchemy and fruitless attempts to turn lead into gold...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/jul/01/highereducation.uk2
Newton the Alchemist
Sir Isaac Newton, the famous
seventeenth-century mathematician and scientist, though not
generally known as an alchemist, practiced the art with a passion.
Though he wrote over a million words on the subject, after his
death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to
be printed."
The papers were rediscovered in
the middle of the twentieth century and most scholars now concede
that Newton was first an foremost an alchemist.
It is also becoming obvious that the inspiration
for Newton's laws of light and theory of gravity came from his
alchemical work.
If one looks carefully, in the
light of alchemical knowledge, at the definitive
biography, Sir Isaac Newton by J. W. V.
Sullivan, it is quite easy to realize the alchemical theories from
which he was working.
Sir Arthur Eddington, in
reviewing this book, says: "The science in which Newton seems to
have been chiefly interested, and on which he spent most of his
time was alchemy. He read widely and made innumerable experiments,
entirely without fruit so far as we know." One of his servants
records: "He very rarely went to bed until two or three of the
clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five
hours, especially at springtime or autumn, at which time he used to
employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarce going out
night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate
into."
The answer is that Newton's
experiments were concerned with nothing more or less than alchemy.
(fromAlchemy Rediscovered and Restored by A.
Cockren)...
http://www.alchemylab.com/isaac_newton.htm
The British oligarchy praises Newton as the founder of modern
science. But, at the same time, they have been unable to keep
secret the fact that Newton was a raving irrationalist, a cultist
kook.
Among the oligarchs, it was the British economist Lord John
Maynard Keynes and a fellow Cambridge graduate who began to open
the black box of Newton's real character. Was Newton the first and
greatest of the modern scientists, the practitioner of cold and
untinctured reason? No, said Keynes, Newton was not the first of
the Age of Reason.
He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians
and Sumerians, the last wonderful child to whom the Magi could do
sincere and appropriate homage.
Keynes based
his view on the contents of a box. What was in the
box?
The box contained papers which Newton had packed up when he left
Cambridge for London in 1696, ending his Cambridge career and
beginning his new life in London as member and president of the
British Royal Society, director of the mint, resident magus of the
new British Empire.
Inside the box were manuscripts and papers totalling some 1.2
million words. After Newton's death, Bishop Horsley
was asked to inspect the box, with a view to publication, but when
he saw the contents, he recoiled in horror and slammed the
lid.
A century passed.
Newton's nineteenth-century biographer, Sir David Brewster,
looked into the box. He decided to save Newton's reputation by
printing a few selections, but he falsified the rest with straight
fibbing, as Keynes says.
The box became known as the Portsmouth Papers. A few
mathematical papers were given to Cambridge in 1888. In 1936, the
current owner, Lord Lymington, needed money, so he had the rest
auctioned off. Keynes bought as many as he could, but other papers
were scattered from Jersualem to America.
As Keynes points out, Newton was a suspicious, paranoid,
unstable personality...
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/venscien.htm#newton
