The subject of Isaac Newton’s alchemy has raised varying degrees of controversy since the 1936 Sotheby’s auction that made it widely known to the public. Thanks to the sudden availability of about a million words on alchemy written by the famous physicist over a period of some thirty years, the economist and amateur historian John Maynard Keynes was able to assert that Newton was not the first of the modern scientists, but rather the last of the magicians. This startling new view led to further questions. Was Newton’s alchemy a vehicle for his Antitrinitarian Christianity? Did he derive his belief in immaterial forces from his alchemical research? Did Newton actually believe that the corpus of mythology descending from the ancient Greeks and Romans consisted of encoded alchemical processes? And finally, what was he actually doing in the laboratory? Was he merely reproducing the work of previous alchemists such as the American emigré George Starkey, or was Newton doing original chymical research? Over the last decade and a half, the Chymistry of Isaac Newton (www.chymistry.org) project has been editing Newton’s alchemical writings and attempting to replicate his products in the laboratory. As a result of this ongoing effort, we are now in a position to address the many questions raised by Newton’s alchemy. The present talk gives an overview of William Newman’s research on Newton’s long chymical endeavor, which addresses these questions and others.
