Chances are that when you hear the name Newton, you think of physics. That's right. But it could also have been dark apocalyptic prophecies, or alchemy. For Newton studied it passionately all his life. He himself calculated that the Second Coming of Christ would take place around 2060. Contemporaries found this irrational side of him so bizarre that the family kept its archive closed after his death. The image of the rational scientist had to be preserved.
Kings and generals:these were the heroes of the emerging modern states, the people whose memory was publicly commemorated and celebrated. Artists joined here in the Renaissance and towards the end of the 17 e century another category:naturalists. Their work was now also regarded as something of general interest and therefore had to be preserved.
Until then, scientists' notes were largely lost for posterity. The fact that we still have manuscripts by Kepler or Galilei is mainly a coincidence. Copernicus' notes are almost gone. But Christiaan Huygens left his manuscripts on his death in 1695 to Leiden University and Leibniz's papers were confiscated after his death in 1716 by his landlord, George I of England and Hanover. These documents have been preserved to this day.
Obsession with prophecies
You would therefore think that people were very happy with the leftover papers of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). At his death, he was one of the most important and revered scientists in history. As the founder of modern physics, Newton represented the pinnacle of what human ingenuity could achieve. His papers were almost sacred relics. There was no thought of throwing them away, although it was a staggering mountain. His heirs have carefully preserved everything for centuries.
But for those who delved into the contents of these papers, this beautiful image soon came into question. Of course there were plenty of folios with mathematical or physical calculations or with notes of optical experiments. And there were also many pages of notes on the affairs of the English mint, which Newton had led in the final decades of his career. But by far the largest part of the papers dealt with matters that did not exactly serve as a good example for the inquisitive youth.
Much of his estate was devoted to alchemy, the doctrine of the transmutation of metals or of changes in the material and spiritual world in general. Sometimes it concerned notes of his own experiments, very often also medieval texts that Newton had copied himself.
In the early modern period the teaching became intertwined with concepts from astrology, magic and divination. By 1800, under the influence of Enlightenment thinking, alchemy was dismissed as an outdated superstition. Seventeenth-century scientists such as Isaac Newton, but also the founder of modern chemistry Robert Boyle (1627-1691) were in a transitional phase:the ancient alchemy fascinated them, but they themselves took their profession to a much higher level. With his interest in the most bizarre alchemical inventions, Newton was in a class of its own.
He delved into the "vegetative growth" of metals and minerals, as well as ancient poems about antimony and arsenic, and the deeper meaning of terms such as Neptune's trident or the green dragon, in which the ancient alchemists had contained their speculations. According to Newton, these were traces of a lost ancient wisdom, which he hoped to regain. He even believed that his theory of general gravity, his most important scientific achievement, could be traced back in an encrypted manner in the mystical ideas of the ancient Pythagoreans.
And that wasn't all. Newton had spent most of the ink on subjects of theology and church history. He had a real obsession with biblical prophecies, especially the books of Daniel. and Revelations, which, according to him, described the course of world history up to the Last Judgment. To show how the prophecies had materialized over the course of history, he revised the accepted chronology of ancient history on numerous points.
He stated, for example, that the constellations must have been given their name shortly after the journey of the Argonauts, known from Greek mythology, since they were mainly named after these heroes. This tour was thus dated on the basis of a reconstruction of supposed ancient celestial globes, and this could serve as an anchor point to date other events. In general, Newton had a deep distrust of the dates in ancient chronicles or king lists. He found the only reliable chronologies in the Bible.
Other notes dealt with what he saw as the heretical idolatry of the Trinity, specifically the divinity of Jesus Christ. Since he went directly against the official teaching of the Church, he never made his views public, although these theological studies were undeniably more important to him than his mathematical and physics work.
Meticulous approach
All this attention to irrational subjects was not an aberration of Newton's normal work, undertaken during a period of insanity in his old age or as a result of a temporary breakdown. Newton studied them for most of his life, as thoroughly and systematically as the laws of mechanics or optics. He was not inferior to the best theologian or philologist of his time in his reading of the Church Fathers, Old Christian literature, and ancient historians. So he handled it meticulously, but his results were – to put it mildly – rather outlandish. The whole enterprise was at odds with what was considered the scientific method or the scientific worldview in his day.
This wasn't just bizarre, it was downright shocking. How could one who championed such backward nonsense be one of the foremost standard-bearers of knowledge and progress at the same time? We are perhaps less impressed today that someone turns out to be thoroughly inconsistent and irrational, as many sacred houses as we have already seen fall.
But to imagine the confusion of previous generations, it makes sense to take a look at Newton's legacy at the website The Newton Project from the University of Sussex. Knowing that Newton was dealing with alchemy or prophecy is one thing, but seeing for yourself how insane that stuff looks is another.
Tucked away, sold, collected
So it is understandable that Newton's papers were left largely untouched after his death. The few people who learned about it decided it was better to keep quiet about it. Only a treatise on chronology was published from the estate, but for the rest the lid was put on the coffin. This was not a problem for anyone. Scientific archives were not kept because of the wishes of biographers or historians. They were intended as monuments to the glory of the fatherland and the advancement of knowledge. The aim was not historical analysis in the modern sense, but the worship of "great men." Drawing attention to Newton's irrational side was bad for the reputation of Newton himself, of science and of the fatherland, and served no substantive purpose.
So the general public did not know that Newton was such a wonderful case. Even then at the end of 19 e century a movement to make the archives of great scientists more accessible did not become widely known. The papers of Huygens and Leibniz were then printed. Such publications were monuments of national pride, with the different countries not wanting to be inferior to each other. In England, therefore, Newton's archives were looked at with renewed interest, but interest was still only focused on manuscripts with his well-known scientific insights.
The estate had come into the possession of the Earls of Portsmouth through a distant niece of the childless Newton. In 1872, the then Earl decided to donate Newton's manuscripts to the University of Cambridge (where Newton fellow at the time). Has been). However, the university did not accept the entire collection, but only 'what mattered'; that is, what pertained to mathematics and physics. These papers were moved to Cambridge and thus became publicly available. The rest was returned to the count with thanksgiving.
It was not until 1937, when the family was in need of money, that she decided to sell the entire Newton collection. It fetched nine thousand pounds, a respectable sum for it was, after all, an heirloom of a national figure. But the interest did not come from universities or the British Library. The vast majority of the collection eventually ended up with just two collectors. One of them was the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes, himself a rather unconventional type, with a greater understanding of the capricious ways in which knowledge came about than was customary in his day.
The other was the businessman Abraham Yahuda, who was especially fascinated by Newton's apocalyptic speculations. Keynes later bequeathed his collection to King's College, Cambridge, and Yahuda to the University of Jerusalem. Every now and then you come across something out there. I myself saw an alchemical manuscript offered in Newton's hand a few years ago at the Tefaf in Maastricht.
The fact that the asking price for this single sheet was about the same as the entire proceeds in 1937 indicates that the appreciation for Newton's papers has changed. His religious and alchemical views have been intensively studied in recent decades. Newton's stature as a scientist par excellence made it difficult for a long time to recognize his less scientific sides. Ironically, that stature also kept the papers showing his less scientific side from being thrown out. Now that nationalist sentiment or an absolute belief in progress no longer sets the agenda, space has opened up to take early modern science seriously as it was actually practiced – including alchemy and prophecy.