Isaac Newton and Alchemy
webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu
webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu
Keynes was fascinated by Newton and when his papers were sold in 1936 he managed to buy about half of them. This part in the opening of the lecture fascinates me:
"In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage."
“Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations […] may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.”—Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713
The short story is that we can look back with the filter of 200+ years of science to appreciate Newton's role in the founding of what we know as science today, so we focus on his work in math and physics. But Newton did not have that perspective; he was discovering then, for himself, what we now take for granted. Some of his work produced lasting results, some did not.
A much more recent example of a similar effect is the high levels of interest in ESP and mental powers in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Enormous numbers of very serious and educated scientifically minded people believed that it was possible that we would discover latent powers of the mind. We never did, and today that stuff is largely a punchline among the scientifically minded.
To get a sense of this, read "golden age" sci-fi from these decades and see how often mental powers are included. Asimov's Foundation series, Larry Niven's Known Space series, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and of course Herbert's Dune series are just a few examples.
If we don't already know it, it doesn't exist. If it hasn't already been done, it can't be done.
That's gonna cut out a certain amount of possibly-silly stuff like psi, but it's also going to eliminate a lot of potentially very fruitful "out there" lines of inquiry. I am not sure you can have one without the other. How do you a priori determine what's "silly" without actually investigating things? I feel like that's analogous to solving the halting problem -- you are claiming to know whether an avenue of research will be fruitful without actually pursuing it.
As far as I can see the same establishment skeptical science that no longer takes psi seriously also no longer takes any hopeful, visionary vision of the future seriously. Space colonization? Life extension? Really solving our socioeconomic problems? Meh. Hell, a huge chunk of this crowd thinks that industrial civilization itself is doomed to collapse because we've already discovered all potential sources of energy and none of them are sustainable. To these guys even suggesting visionary futures that are wholly within known physics and even known technology is too "woo woo" for them if it involves steps that have not already been taken.
This isn't scientific. It's rebranded medieval scholasticism with already-known scientific theory taking the place of Vatican dogma.
I'll take my psi-researching acid-dropping 50s-70s woo-woo nuts over today's boring hidebound curmudgeons any day.
Walter Bishop comes to mind...
I agree with your sentiment. The atmosphere of skepticism went into overdrive now. It seems as if a lot of otherwise smart people don't expect anything else than incremental improvements for profit of what is already here. And it's as if people lost hope. Hard problems are hard, be it living on another planet, slaughtering Moloch or conquering death - but they all are in the realms of scientific possibility, and I wish more people would be enthusiastic about pursuing them.
Newton practiced alchemy, occultism, and religious heresy. Thomas Edison researched the use of electromagnetic fields to communicate with the dead. Francis Crick claims that LSD played a role in the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. Jack Parsons, an early pioneer in solid rocketry and co-founder of NASA's JPL, was a practicing occultist and student of Alister Crowley. Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, has bankrolled investigations into the paranormal (Google 'NIDS') and claims that a UFO sighting inspired him to found an aerospace company. Burning Man is practically a Silicon Valley networking event.
Is some of that stuff silly? Sure. But invention is a product of feral minds. If a truly questing mind wants to go there, it's gonna go there and your religious or skeptical-scientific reservations are not going to dissuade it.
I suspect there are many more heretics we don't know about, especially among the non-tenured or not-yet-tenured in academia. Even with tenure, espousing really wild beliefs or asking really out there questions can get you hoisted up on a rail. In the private sector there's a bit of a bias too-- I'm sure many executives or entrepreneurs might feel wary of espousing out-there or unconventional beliefs for fear it might impact their ability to win customers or raise capital.
To me it's unclear whether it's saying they were found labeled that way, or someone upon his death decided as such. I think the latter is more likely, but I'm not sure how common it was for people of the period, or more importantly Newton himself, to label papers as such.
Figures