I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia.
The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.
That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.
I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.
But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.
I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t.
Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
> Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.
His trial and error gave that perspective as a result. Somebody had to waste time on alchemy to then succeed in physics, the time spent on alchemy was not a waste.
Alchemy sired Chemistry and Medicine, not Physics. Physics comes from the natural philosophers pondering ballistics and not the people hoping to make gold out of lead.
Anyway, Newtons contribution with Principia was to collect facts known in his time and put them into one unified mathematical framework, he didn't actually discover any of "his" laws (as predicted by Stigler's law).
Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.
Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical.
I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not.
If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...
> Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’
The purely metaphorical interpretation of alchemy is popular in some circles, but alchemy has a clear experimental basis. Newton did some pretty wild alchemical experiments. Metals are weird.
Attempting to transmute a metal in the material was a ritual act coinciding with the "Great Work". That tandem practice is built into the philosophy of performing the act. That is, to the "mundane" it was just chemical experimentation, but to the initiates of the magical (or other enlightenment) orders was a dual act reflecting one of their core intuitions (paraphrased): "as above, so below" or what is external to the mind is reflective of what is internal. In other words, irreducible to one or the other (mental or physical act).https://news.ycombinator.com/news
I'm teasing at proposing, after Keynes, that maybe his alchemy worked, and he just didn't understand how.
But there's no salvaging the storybook version of Newton here. Newton was many things, but the innocent, curious monkey sitting under an apple tree he was not. (well, he was—at least insofar as we all are, anyway)
I would also recommend Gleick’s book. The best part for me was the extensive quotations from Newton’s correspondence. You really get a sense of his personality from these, and how different he was from basically everyone he corresponded with.
The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.
That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.
I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.
But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.