That’s Magic, That Is
Most of us remember Isaac Newton mainly for two things: describing the three laws of motion and sussing out a universal theory of gravity. This pretty much defined the game for physics. But Newton was a busy guy. He invented the calculus (along with Leibniz). He invented the reflecting telescope. He discovered that white light was made up of wavelengths of different colors. When it comes to working out all those little details that have to be gotten out of the way so you can make airplanes and computers and telescopes and spaceships and basically figure out what’s really going on in the world, Newton was all over it. Albert Einstein said Newton was the smartest person who ever lived.
I’m spending so much time going on about the importance of Newton’s contributions to science because in addition to being probably the greatest scientist of all time, he was . . . well . . . an alchemist.
Alchemy is (was, actually, no one studies alchemy anymore and you’ll soon see why) an attempt to figure out how to change one substance into another. It’s often considered the grandfather of chemistry (in the same way astrology is the grandfather of astronomy). So what is so surprising about Newton studying it? In one sense, not much. Lots of scientists did in his day. After all, figuring out what made the universe tick is and always has been what science is about. Alchemy was used to figure out all sorts of sensible, practical things, such as how to make pigments and how to make alloys of metals.
But alchemy, even then, was a bit whiffy.
When you look at Newton’s notebooks, it seems clear that Newton was also using alchemy like all the other alchemists of his day. He was trying to discover a universal elixir that could turn lead into gold. (This was a famous preoccupation of alchemists—greed wasn’t born on Wall Street, it just moved there when it grew up.) But he also wanted to find an elixir that would transform any substance into any other substance. Sounds a lot like magic, doesn’t it?
Or maybe not.
Maybe it sounds like Star Trek’s replicator. A replicator is a device that scrambles the atoms of a hunk of matter—say, some old, mismatched socks you have lying around. Then it reassembles those atoms and spits out something else, maybe a cup of tea—Earl Grey, hot. That’s not magic; that’s science fiction. Sometimes science fiction sounds a lot like magic. And sometimes when it grows up, it becomes science.
Weird as alchemy seems now—and weird as it was even in Newton’s time—trying to figure out how the world ticks was (and is) central to science. Alchemy was more like science fiction than science, but the same impulse was behind it: a desire to know how the natural world worked at its most basic level. And if we understood that, we might be able to tinker with it and do something useful. Or if not useful at least really, really cool.
Arthur C. Clarke, an inventor as well as a science-fiction writer, once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So while alchemy turned out to be an embarrassing waste of time, much of what Newton’s scientific efforts made possible would have seemed, in his day, just as magical as turning lead into gold. Or turning an old sock into a cup of tea.
’til next time,
Avery
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