IT LOOKS as though, set among the modern Pyrex glass and fume cupboards in achemistry lab at Indiana University in Bloomington, a piece of the Middle Ages hascome unstuck in time. What is this crude furnace doing here, constructed from bricksand mortar? It gets worse: look past the furnace and you’ll see a couple ofexperimenters surrounded by antiquated crucibles and arcane powders and poringover what appear to be the scrawlings of a madman. What’s going on – is this therebirth of alchemy?

Yes, in a way it is. The writings, set out in a laboratory notebook, describe analchemical experiment that chemists William Newman and Cathrine Reck are hopingto carry out. But their author was no madman – he was arguably the most famousscientist of all time, Sir Isaac Newton.

Previous historians of science have tended to assume that Newton’s interest inalchemy was motivated by abstract philosophical or religious objectives. JohnMaynard Keynes, who bought many of Newton’s manuscripts, declared in 1946 that“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”Newman thinks otherwise. He says that Newton was simply trying to do chemistry –or as he prefers to call it, ‘chymistry’, a transitional science between the alchemy ofthe Middle Ages and the chemistry of the 18th-century Age of Reason.

Contrary to what historians have often believed, Newman is convinced thatNewton’s chymical enthusiasms were quite normal for scientists of his time, and thathis primary concern was simply to uncover the chemical laws of nature. Thenotebooks certainly show that Newton made no distinctions between alchemy andwhat we now accept as ‘real’ science. The very same book in which he recorded hisepoch-making experiment of reconstituting white light from its spectral componentsis filled with recipes culled from alchemical sources. “Alongside sober explanationsof optical and physical phenomena such as freezing and boiling”, Newman says, “wefind ‘Neptune’s Trident’, ‘Mercury’s Caducean Rod’ and the ‘Green Lion’, allsymbolising alchemical substances.”

So is it possible that Newton’s alchemical experiments led to scientificdiscoveries as profound as his more familiar works? The first step in answering thatquestion is to decipher the notebooks. It is no easy task: Newton didn’t always recordhis chymical experiments in the most transparent way. Alchemists were notorious forveiling their writings in impenetrable jargon, but Newton made matters even worse byinventing symbols and systems of his own. That is part of the reason why, despiteNewton’s reputation, many of his manuscripts have still not been properly edited andinterpreted. “They are in a state of considerable disorder,” Newman says.

An extract from one of Newton’s notebooks, and the transcription.

Even where the text can be deciphered, this only gets you so far. “Althoughwe can make educated guesses about his chymical work from reading,” Newmansays, “there are often too many variables in chemical research to make it possible topredict an exact outcome from Newton’s notes.” So Newman and his colleagues setout to repeat the experiments Newton described – using exactly the same conditions.

Newman insists that to do this it is necessary first to reproduce the apparatusNewton would have worked with. So the researchers have, for starters, reconstructedNewton’s furnace from bricks and mortar. “Modern electrical furnaces don’t producethe complex mix of gases that resulted from charcoal-burning furnaces, which cangenerate reducing atmospheres,” Newman observes.

Following Newton’s recipes in every detail, they have produced a pellet of thesubstance Newton called the “net”. It is a purplish alloy of copper and antimony witha dimpled, reticulated surface from which it got its name. According to his notebooks,Newton learned of it from the Bermudan-born, Harvard-educated alchemist George

Starkey, who proposed that the synthesis of the net was, like many other alchemicalprocesses, encoded in a story in Greek mythology.

The researchers have also used Newton’s notebooks to recreate the tree-likemetal structures that may have influenced his manuscript Of Nature’s Obvious Lawsand Processes in Vegetation. Some of the trees grow as precipitates of metal salts in agel of sodium silicate, which chymists in the 17th century called oil of sand; similarbranching structures are familiar today in so-called chemical gardens. To Newton andhis contemporaries, their organic appearance confirmed the old alchemical idea thatmetals have a kind of life and can “vegetate”. Another of Newman’s experiments hasreplicated Newton’s alchemical synthesis of a crystalline alloy of antimony and ironcalled the Star Regulus, which forms as radiating, star-like crystalline shards. “Thesereplications can teach us about the actual successes and failures that Newtonexperienced,” Newman says.

The Star Regulus, a crystalline alloy of antimony and iron.

Decoding the lab books and then recreating the experiments is hard work, butNewman reckons it is worth the effort. Unravelling the identity of Newton's chemicalmaterials and lab methods will eventually help to illuminate the relationship betweenhis experiments and the literature of chrysopoeia--the transmutation of metals intogold-- that inspired him. Newman has already found from the notebooks that, whileNewton learned the alchemical term “The Green Lion” from Starkey, he used it tomean a different substance from Starkey's antimony and its ores. “Until weunderstand the meaning of such cryptic terms in Newton’s notebooks, we will notcompletely understand his experimentation in alchemy, nor what his ultimate goalswere,”Newman says. “Modern laboratory replication of Newton’s experiments willhelp us eventually to crack this enigma.”

Will these investigations reveal Newton to have been as innovative inchemistry as he was in physics? With many of the experiments in his notebooks yet tobe repeated, the jury is still out on that question, but historian of science LawrencePrincipe of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore doubts it. “I frankly don’t thinkthat Newton made significant contributions to chemistry,” Principe says. “Much of

the material in his chymical manuscripts was dependent on work already known orperformed on the Continent.”

Even if Newton is shown to have been something of a plodder in chemistry,that will still give us a more complete picture of a man who has since been all butdeified. Newman’s studies mean we now know far more about the context in whichNewton did research and wrote his treatises, says Rob Iliffe, a science historian andNewton scholar at Imperial College London. He may not, after all have been a geniuswho plucked ideas out of thin air. “But on the other hand”, says Iliffe, “we will have amore detailed and subtle understanding of exactly what his brilliance and creativityconsisted in.”

Further reading:The Chymistry of Isaac Newton: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jspThe Newton Project: http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1William Newman’s web pages on experimental reconstructions:http://mypage.iu.edu/~wnewman/lab.html

The Royal Society of Alchemists?Isaac Newton -- an alchemist? Confronted by Newton’s alchemical musings whilewriting his biography in 1855, the physicist Sir David Brewster complained: “Wecannot understand how a mind of such power, and nobly occupied with theabstractions of geometry, and the study of the material world, could stoop to be eventhe copyist of the most contemptible alchemical poetry.” To Brewster and hiscontemporaries, Newton was the paragon of rational thought and mathematicalprecision, far removed, so they thought, from suspect alchemical musings.

Sir Isaac Newton.

This assessment now seems to have misunderstood the state of knowledge inNewton's time. Alchemy was waning in the late 17th century, but it wasn’tparticularly frowned on. Many of the greatest scientists continued to believe not onlyin the possibility of transmuting lead into gold, but also in a host of other ideas thatare now regarded as “occult”, such as astrology and prophecy. Studies by Lawrence

Principe have revealed that even Newton’s colleague Robert Boyle, whose famousbook of 1661, The Sceptical Chymist, has long been interpreted as a damning critiqueof alchemy, attempted to transform other metals into gold – chrysopoeia, as it becameknown – all his life.

Boyle and Newton regularly exchanged information about chrysopoeia, oftenencoded in the arcane terminology of the alchemists. When Boyle died in 1691,Newton was desperate to find out what he had known, scanning through his papersand inveigling from Boyle’s friend John Locke a sample of a red material that hethought might be a crude form of the Philosopher’s Stone, the catalyst oftransmutation. It was shortly after Locke sent him Boyle’s recipe that Newton seemsto have succumbed temporarily to mental illness, perhaps brought about by hisextensive distillations of mercury in his efforts to replicate Boyle’s procedure.

Both Boyle and Newton were strongly influenced by the chymist GeorgeStarkey, who became a member of the group of scientific, religious and utopianthinkers associated with the Prussian exile Samuel Hartlib. Some of these men wereamong the founders of the Royal Society in London in 1660 - an organisation that, farfrom being a beacon of what we would now consider to be scientific rationalism, wasthus set up in an atmosphere of mysticism, occultism and utopian fantasies aboutsecret brotherhoods.

Balancing alchemyOne in 10 of the books in Newton’s vast library was devoted to alchemy. His copy ofOn the Transmutations of Metals by Paracelsus, arch-alchemist-wizard of theRenaissance, was dog-eared from extensive use. The American historian Betty JoDobbs, one of the first people to tackle Newton’s alchemical work seriously,concluded that his alchemy was primarily a spiritual concern. Newton had unorthodoxChristian views – he was an anti-Trinitarian who believed that Jesus was created byGod as a mortal man – and was interested in the biblical prophecies in the books ofDaniel and Revelation.

It would not be surprising if his strongly held religious convictions impingedon his alchemical work, but William Newman insists that it is a mistake to interpretall of Newton’s alchemy as a kind of coded religion. Newman and Principe argue that"esoteric" alchemy such as chrysopoeia, with its attendant secrecy and crypticsymbolism, cannot be split off from practical early chemistry of the sort practised bymetal-workers, dye-makers and apothecaries. Both are aspects of chymistry, they say,and by separating them Dobbs and other Newton scholars have presented a distortedview of what he was up to. “Newton was involved in all of chymistry’s majorbranches,” says Newman. “Including all of Newton’s work in chemical technologyand metallurgy alongside his chrysopoeia will provide a far more balanced picture ofhis interests.”