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Isaac Newton: alchemist and fundamentalist
Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Martin Gardner
And from my pillow, looking forth by light Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold The antechapel where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
- William Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 3, lines 58-63
There are three Sir Isaac Newtons. For several centuries the best-known Newton has been the great mathematical physicist who in his early twenties invented calculus, discovered the binominal theorem, introduced polar coordinates, proved that white light was a mixture of colors, explained the rainbow, built the first reflecting telescope, and showed that the force causing apples to fall is the same as the force that guides the planets, moons, and comets, and produces tides. His discoveries revolutionized physics. His genius is undisputed.
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Unknown to most people, even today, are two other Newtons. One is the alchemist who struggled for decades to turn base metals into gold. The other is Newton the Protestant fundamentalist.
Newton worked quietly alone, almost in secret, on his great discoveries. His classic Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica was not published until twenty years after his youthful achievements, and then only at the insistence of astronomer Edmund Halley, for whom the comet is named, and who funded the book's publication. For a large part of his life Newton's time and energy were devoted to fruitless alchemy experiments and efforts to interpret Biblical prophecy. His handwritten manuscripts on those topics far exceed his writings about physics. They constitute several million words now scattered in the rare book rooms of libraries and in private collections. The American philosopher Richard Popkin is currently working on a twelve-volume edition of these manuscripts.
Although other scientists of the time, notably Robert Boyle, were interested in alchemy, none was as obsessively occupied with such research as Newton. He read all the old books on alchemy he could find, accumulating more than 150 for his library. He built furnaces for endless experiments and left about a million words on the topic. He thought of himself as working within a secret occult tradition of wisdom that traced back to Earth's earliest history. He even suspected that the ancients had known the inverse-square law of gravity!
It is with Newton's fundamentalism that this essay is mainly concerned. He was a devout Anglican, firmly believing the Bible to be God's revelation, although he granted that the original texts had been heavily corrupted by an unscrupulous Roman Church. He accepted the Genesis account of creation in six literal days, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark and the universal flood, the blood atonement of Jesus, his birth by a virgin, his bodily resurrection, and the eternal life of our souls in heaven or hell. He never doubted the reality of angels and demons, and a Satan destined on judgment day to be cast into a lake of fire. Bishop James Ussher, the seventeenth-century Irish scholar, had settled on 4004 B.C. as the year of creation. Newton revised it in the wrong direction by making it five hundred years later!
Newton's universe was a vast machine operating by laws created and upheld by a personal yet transcendent deity. Infinite space was Gods "Sensoriam" - the means by which he observed and controlled the cosmos. Although for Kant and later admirers of Newton the universe was deterministic, never deviating from unalterable laws, Newton was convinced that from time to time God needed to adjust the orbits of planets to keep them free of perturbations caused by comets and other forces.
This notion that God has to tinker with the universe to repair it struck Newton's German rival, the great philosopher-mathematician Leibniz, as blasphemous. If God is perfect, omnipotent and omniscient as Newton believed, why, Leibniz wanted to know, would he create a universe so flawed that it would require perpetual adjustments?
Newton had no use for pantheism. His God was the God of the Bible, in whose image we were created, but so wholly other that we cannot comprehend how we resemble him. Newton's greatest departure from the prevailing religion of England was his rejection of the trinity. He was an Arian (forerunner of Unitarianism) for whom Jesus was indeed the divine Son of God, but in no way equal to God. Trinitarianism, Newton believed, was a crude heresy concocted by the Roman Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. He kept this belief to himself, knowing well that if it became known he would be expelled from his Cambridge college, ironically called Trinity, where he was a professor of mathematics for twenty-six years. It later would have endangered his job at the Royal Mint where he worked for the last half of a long life. He was a diligent servant, overseeing England's currency and merciless in sending counterfeiters to the gallows. He was the first to recommend gold as a monetary standard.
For Newton, the beautiful patterns of the material universe were overwhelming evidence of God's creative powers. As an example, he singled out the fact that all the planets revolve on the same plane, in the same direction, with just enough centripetal force to keep them from crashing into the sun. Newton was puzzled by the fact that gravity seemed to operate instantaneously at a distance. He admitted he could do no more than describe it without comprehending how it worked. Not until Einstein's general theory of relativity was gravity changed from a "force" to the movement of matter along the shortest paths in a curved space-time. As physicist John Wheeler likes to say, the stars tell space-time how to bend, and space-time tells the stars how to go.
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