![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ritaerNewton's work in alchemy is usually treated as an anomaly given his role as founder of modern physics. Dobbs demonstrates that Newton was one of a number of scientists who continued to find value in the concepts of alchemy. Among these concepts was a belief that all matter was ultimately one, an idea related to Neoplatonism, a philosophy with renewed popularity in Cambridge. Robert Boyle, regarded as the father of modern chemistry, had not completely abandoned the concepts of alchemy in his work. Indeed he published an account of transmuting water to earth through a series of workings. Numbers of other scientists were attempting to reconcile alchemy with the mechanistic philosophy of Descartes. Newton may have performed experiments along these lines but found them inadequate. As a believer in prisca sapeintia or ancient wisdom, the idea that in earliest times God had granted wisdom and knowledge to the prophets no longer available to moderns, Newton began to read earlier alchemical texts, trying to discern the practical knowledge he thought was concealed by the elaborate symbols and metaphor and mystical language. Ironically modern atomic theory has led to knowledge that matter is all composed of the same basic particles and that transmutation of one element into another is possible although not in ways imagined earlier.
The distorted view of Newton's researches was made possible when his texts, his reading notes and his laboratory records on alchemy were separated from his other work, sold off and archived in different locations. A large amount was purchased by John Meynard Keynes, the economist, and ultimately bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in the late 1930s. By this time, Newton's reputation as first of the modern scientists was so fixed that the idea that he seriously worked with an obsolete, mystical superstition such as alchemy was difficult to assimilate. Dobbs set to work to examine the works that Newton read, which included published works and manuscripts passed from one student or professor to another; the writings of others at Cambridge in his time there; and Newton's notebooks, which contained detailed accounts of his experiments and his results. She makes clear that nothing Newton was doing was irrational or unscientific by the standards of his time.
We now know that it is not possible to turn lead into gold my mixing it with other chemicals, heating, cooling, distilling, grinding, etc. We may never have studied chemistry and have only the vaguest idea of why gold is heavy and yellow or how sodium combines with chlorine to create table salt. But we understand that mercury is a specific substance, not a quality shared by a number of metals--that a mercury of iron makes no sense. But the experimenters of Newton's time did not know these things--Sulphur and mercury were not specific things but qualities, as were salts and acids. Newton believed Boyes accounts of having obtained earth from water by a complex series of distillations. He also believed that agitation, heat and fermentation could "open" a substance, making it possible for transmuting substance to enter.
In this work Dobbs treats Newton's early and middle work, saving investigation of his later career to another book.
The distorted view of Newton's researches was made possible when his texts, his reading notes and his laboratory records on alchemy were separated from his other work, sold off and archived in different locations. A large amount was purchased by John Meynard Keynes, the economist, and ultimately bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in the late 1930s. By this time, Newton's reputation as first of the modern scientists was so fixed that the idea that he seriously worked with an obsolete, mystical superstition such as alchemy was difficult to assimilate. Dobbs set to work to examine the works that Newton read, which included published works and manuscripts passed from one student or professor to another; the writings of others at Cambridge in his time there; and Newton's notebooks, which contained detailed accounts of his experiments and his results. She makes clear that nothing Newton was doing was irrational or unscientific by the standards of his time.
We now know that it is not possible to turn lead into gold my mixing it with other chemicals, heating, cooling, distilling, grinding, etc. We may never have studied chemistry and have only the vaguest idea of why gold is heavy and yellow or how sodium combines with chlorine to create table salt. But we understand that mercury is a specific substance, not a quality shared by a number of metals--that a mercury of iron makes no sense. But the experimenters of Newton's time did not know these things--Sulphur and mercury were not specific things but qualities, as were salts and acids. Newton believed Boyes accounts of having obtained earth from water by a complex series of distillations. He also believed that agitation, heat and fermentation could "open" a substance, making it possible for transmuting substance to enter.
In this work Dobbs treats Newton's early and middle work, saving investigation of his later career to another book.
