Science and Health

Light is shed on Newton's zeal for alchemy

By Natalie Angier (New York Times)
Updated: 2010-10-24 08:37

Sir Isaac Newton knew he was a genius and didn't like wasting his time. Born on December 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn't play sports or a musical instrument. He was unmarried, and had no known romantic liaisons.

No, it wasn't easy being Newton. Not only did he hammer out the universal laws of motion and gravitational attraction, formulating equations that are still used today to plot the trajectories of space rovers bound for Mars; and not only did he discover the spectral properties of light and invent calculus. Sir Isaac had a whole other full-time career, a parallel intellectual passion that he kept largely hidden from view: alchemy.

The scope and details of that after-hours enterprise are only now becoming clear, as science historians go over Newton's extensive writings on alchemy �?a million-plus words from the Newtonian archives that had been largely ignored.

How could the man who vies with Albert Einstein for the title of "greatest physicist ever" have been so swept up in a medieval delusion?

In the view of William Newman, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, there were plenty of reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.

Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.

Pools found around other mines seemed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. "It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy," said Dr. Newman. "Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did."

And Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays.

The conceptual underpinning to the era's alchemical fixation was the idea of matter as hierarchical and particulate �?that tiny, indivisible and semipermanent particles come together to form ever more complex and increasingly porous substances, a notion not so different from the reality revealed by 20th-century molecular biology and quantum physics.

With the right solvents and the perfect reactions, the researchers thought, it should be possible to reduce a substance to its core constituents and then prompt these to adopt new configurations. Newton and his peers believed it was possible to prompt metals to grow, or "vegetate," in a flask.

The miners' finds of tree- and rootlike veins of metals led alchemists to conclude that metals must be not only growing underground, but ripening. Might not the lead be halfway to a mature state of silverdom? Surely there was a way to keep the disinterred metal root balls sprouting in the lab?

Well, no. If mineral veins sometimes resemble botanical illustrations, blame it on Earth's molten nature and fluid mechanics: when seen from above, a branching river also looks like a tree.

Yet the alchemists had their triumphs, such as inventing brilliant new pigments, perfecting the old. The chemistry lab replaced the monastery garden as a source of new medicines.

Alchemists also became expert at spotting fraud. It was a renowned alchemist who proved that the "miraculous" properties of vitriol springs had nothing to do with true transmutation.

Instead, the water's vitriol, or copper sulfate, would cause iron atoms on the surface of a submerged iron rod to leach into the water, leaving pores that were quickly occupied by copper atoms from the spring.

"There were a lot of charlatans, especially in the noble courts of Europe," said Dr. Newman.

Should an alchemist be found guilty of attempting to deceive the king, he would be dressed in a tinsel suit and hanged from a gallows covered in gold-colored foil.

Newton proved himself equally intolerant of chicanery, when, in his waning years, he took a position as Master of the Mint.

"He was brutal," said Mark Ratner, a materials chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "He sentenced people to death for trying to scrape the gold off of coins."

Newton may have been the finest scientist of all time. But make no mistake about it, said Dr. Ratner. "He was not a nice guy."

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/24/2010 page11)