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Newton has a fair claim to be the greatest genius that every lived, with his hugely influential work on gravitation, law of motion, optics, calculcus and more. But he also spent a huge amount of time and energy on bible studies and alchemy. I wonder what other areas of science and maths he might have discovered without those distractions?

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Spending time on alchemy is, to me, symptomatic of a curious mind that was open to experimentation where his peers might reject things altogether on presuppositions.

If he had no been that easily distracted by weird things I expect he would have pushed the envelope of knowledge significantly less.

A curious person finds treasures in one of three rooms they searched. Obviously they should have ignored the other two from the get go.

I think Newton was curious about everything around him, and a lot of it paid off.

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