Best known as a physicist, mathematician, and a father of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton also dabbled in alchemy, the pseudo-science that preceded chemistry and involved such things as transmuting lead into gold and other noble elements.
Now, a handwritten manuscript belonging to Newton has been rediscovered, and it contains the recipes that the renowned scientist hoped to use in his alchemic endeavors, National Geographic and the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Among its contents are the instructions needed to create “sophick mercury,” a substance needed to make the legendary Philosopher’s stone.
According to published reports, the 17th century document has been privately owned for several years, but was recently acquired by a nonprofit Philadelphia-based group known as the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Now, the organization is in the process of uploading digital scans and a set of transcriptions to an online database so they can be seen by scholars all across the world.
While there is no evidence that Newton actually created sophick mercury, Nat Geo reported that the scientist copied the recipe by hand from a text owned by American alchemist George Starkey and added his own notes to the back of the document, which experts said should provide clues as to how he interpreted the complex, enigmatic instructions used by alchemists.
Furthermore, science historian William Newman of Indiana University told the website that the newly acquired manuscript will help scholars understand how alchemy influenced Newton. Not only did he frequently collaborate with alchemists, Newman said, he wrote tens of thousands of words on the topic and hoped it would help him fully understand the properties of matter.
Credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Manuscript could reveal how alchemy aided Newton’s work in the field of optics
Newton’s alma mater, Cambridge University, reportedly had the chance to archive these recipes in 1888. Instead, they were sold at a private auction in 1936, and were inaccessible for decades. Now that the Chemical Heritage Foundation has acquired the sophick mercury recipe, it will enable researchers to learn more about the inner workings of this now-dead art.
The recipe has been translated by modern scholars, and reveals that in order to create sophick mercury, the alchemist would have to repeatedly distill regular mercury, then heat it with gold. Ultimately, this process would produce an alloy with “delicate, branch-like growths,” Nat Geo explained, which Starkey purportedly believed meant that it had became “animated with life.”
While that might sound absurd, the Post explains that alchemy – also known as “chymistry” during the 17th century – was centered around the belief that metals were made up of several different compounds, including a mercuric or sulfuric principle, and altering one of these principles would alter the metal itself. However, many alchemists also believed that using the Philosopher’s Stone would allow this to happen automatically, James Voelkel, curator of rare books at the foundation’s Othmer Library of Chemical History, told the newspaper.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect to the discovery is a series of notes, written by Newton himself on the back of the recipe, describing a process for alchemically subliming lead ore – a process that Nat Geo explained was a key part of his attempts to create the Philosopher’s Stone. Furthermore, Newman said that the document may also detail some of his collaborations with other alchemists, some of which may have influenced his work on optics.
“Alchemists were the first to realize that compounds could be broken down into their constituent parts and then recombined,” the historian told the publication, adding that Newton then took that information and “applied [it] to white light, which he deconstructed into constituent colors and then recombined. That’s something Newton got from alchemy.”
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