Getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health

September 24, 2024 1:48 AM

Nowadays, we have a different appetite or tolerance for scientists who had mystical beliefs. We have become increasingly tolerant of his heretical views, which have seemed less problematic. Sometimes, people can still get very upset about the alchemy. But there’s actually very little that he left of his own work in alchemy. Most of it is copies of other people’s stuff that he indexed and made notes on. It’s hard to know what he thought about it, because we don’t know quite what he was doing. from The Strange, Secret History of Isaac Newton's Papers [Wired; ungated]

Welcome to the Newton Project, as mentioned in the article

posted by chavenet (11 comments total)

If you ask people to name a scientist they’re going to say Newton, Einstein, or Darwin. So he’s become an icon, both more and less than human. But there’s always been a great mystery surrounding him. You tell people you’re working on Newton and they say, “Oh yeah, wasn’t he an alchemist?”

natural philosopher [wiki]
posted by HearHere at 2:39 AM on September 24 [3 favorites]

I doubt if he was an alchemist that believed in fools gold as opposed to those who sensed that the process was a projection onto matter of unconscious transformations.
posted by DJZouke at 5:35 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]

I was sure the 'hazardous to your health' line was going to involve mercury poisoning. Alas, it was figurative!
posted by mittens at 5:44 AM on September 24 [2 favorites]

Since he was human, and a curious one at that, I have to believe he was at least interested in alchemy as a subject. He was also smart enough to realize it wasn't a science even if it did occasionally result in something unintended (albeit useful).
posted by tommasz at 7:02 AM on September 24

> If you ask people to name a scientist they’re going to say Newton, Einstein, or Darwin.

That's an old fuddy-dud boomer talking. Kids today would name Stephen Hawking, probably, or Richard Dawkins (not that he belongs in the company of those others). Get people thinking about the foundations of physics and they will name Newton, but I doubt he's many peoples' first thought when they hear the word "scientist."

> I was sure the 'hazardous to your health' line was going to involve mercury poisoning.

Or antimony or arsenic...

Only if reading them leads you to follow Newton's practice of using the sense of taste for analytical chemistry of heavy metal compounds.

So, Isaac Newton was really mostly a theologian who dabbled in natural philosophy in his off time?
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:35 AM on September 24 [1 favorite]

I doubt he's many peoples' first thought when they hear the word "scientist."

Just for fun, I did an image search of "scientist".

YMMV
posted by BWA at 10:42 AM on September 24

Ah yes, Sir Isaac Newton. The father of the Society of the Wise, aka The Folly, developed from his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis.*

*Spend an entertaining afternoon with the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch and get your dose of fictional Newton alchemy.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:34 PM on September 24 [4 favorites]

Alchemy remains useful as a language of personal development and self-understanding. To credit it with the birth of modern physical science and then forsake its residual utility is to give it short shrift indeed. As Jung puts it,

In order to understand [the language of dreams], we have to learn the psychological secrets of alchemy. It is probably true what the old Masters said, that only he who knows the secret of the stone understands their words. It has long been asserted that this secret is sheer nonsense, and not worth the trouble of investigating seriously. But this frivolous attitude ill befits the psychologist, for any “nonsense” that fascinated men’s minds for close on two thousand years—among them some of the greatest, e.g., Newton and Goethe must have something about it which it would be useful for the psychologist to know. Moreover, the symbolism of alchemy has a great deal to do with the structure of the unconscious, as I have shown in my book Psychology and Alchemy. These things are not just rare curiosities, and anyone who wishes to understand the symbolism of dreams cannot close his eyes to the fact that the dreams of modern men and women often contain the very images and metaphors that we find in the medieval treatises. And since an understanding of the biological compensation produced by dreams is of importance in the treatment of neurosis as well as in the development of consciousness, a knowledge of these facts has also a practical value which should not be underestimated. - Collected Works of CG Jung, vol 13 Alchemical Studies

There's a punchline here about how Jung spent his last years in a wizard tower of his own construction studying ancient alchemical texts, but maybe it's not so much of a punchline because that is almost exactly how I would like to spend my late retirement.
posted by Richard Saunders at 3:32 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]

I think that it's really reductionist to try and separate Newton's Theological, Alchemical, and Physics & Mathematics work just because the find the last group currently useful. It is not like theological and alchemical thought can't be rigorous and intellectual. The article throws mystic around a bit, but theological speculation can be very rigorous -- the Christian, Jewish, and Muslin theologians of the Middle Ages are ample proof of this, although they start from received wisdom rather than observed reality. Hell, even Augustine, the second-worst thinker to happen to Christianity (in a crowded field), brought extreme rigor to his analysis and thoughts.

Half of all of Newton's writing was speculative theology! Shouldn't we examine that to get an idea of how his mind worked? Of how he addressed problems? Of what was central to his thought? I suspect the problem is that there aren't many scholars equally fluent in theology, alchemy, physics, and mathematics to find the commonalities.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:31 PM on September 24 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the spin from our old science textbooks was like: Newton was genius when it came to physics; but he was also an eccentric idiot because he was also interested in things that we don't care about.
posted by ovvl at 10:02 PM on September 24 [1 favorite]

Just for fun, I did an image search of "scientist".

Oooh, look, to be a scientist you need a microscope and a turkey baster - I guess I'm one!
posted by mbo at 11:45 PM on September 24