Caltech Historian Brings Newton to the Huntington Library

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 16:08:21 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

The Sun is round and yellow.
The yolk of an egg is round and yellow.
The yolk of an egg smells of sulfur when it decays.
Sulfur burns.

And if sulfur weighs as much as a duck...

OM

--

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Lewis Mammel wrote:

Well, how about Newton's approach? It seems to me he was very
rationalistic and systematic in his approach,


That's exactly how you'd expect him to approach it also, given his
approach to other things.


and did not
partake of the mysticism that we associate with alchemy.
He thought stuff like "triumphal chariot" etc. was code .



There was a lot of code involved, but mainly what was involved was good
old fashioned fraud- by writing everything up in a very obscure and
convoluted way the authors could always have an easy out when the
instructions didn't work; the experimenter didn't understand the process
sufficiently, and had done something wrong.

Pat

OM wrote:



The Sun is round and yellow.
The yolk of an egg is round and yellow.
The yolk of an egg smells of sulfur when it decays.
Sulfur burns.



And if sulfur weighs as much as a duck...




Sulfur floats you know...and baby ducklings are yellow.... if we were to
take a baby duckling, and feed it mercury till it couldn't float.... I
think some industries have already tried this experiment. ;-)

Pat

In article ,
Lewis Mammel wrote:
9. Newton and the wisdom of the ancients
This last was his real crazy stuff. He was not alone in it, though. The
idea that there was a lost era of transcendant knowledge - a "wise age"
- was widely held. It survives today with the concept of Atlantis.

It's a natural consequence of the Romantic world view, which pictures the
world as declining from a lost golden age -- a time of noble kings who
were always wise and just, loyal peasants who knew their place and never
got uppity, a beautiful rural countryside that never had crop failures,
etc. etc.

(If you want to steep yourself in the Romantic world view, read Lord Of
The Rings. Note that the first thing Saruman does when he goes bad is to
build himself an industrial town. We never see the goods it manufactures,
mind you -- only the noise, dirt, fire, and belching smokestacks. Tolkien
grew up in a pretty little rural town in the process of being swallowed by
the less-than-pretty city of Birmingham; the Romantic attitude came
naturally to him...)
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Herb Schaltegger wrote:

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

Lewis Mammel wrote:

Pssst. That's practically all anybody knows about Newton
these days - that he "practiced alchemy".

Actually, hardly anybody knows he practiced alchemy, it makes an already
fascinating individual even more intriguing, and I'd really like to see
his approach to it, considering the brilliance of his mathematics.

And those that do only know through the historical fiction of Neal
Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" rather than biographical study.

Somewhat incorrect. I knew of Newton's alchemical research from
neither biographical study nor Stephenson's fiction.


--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Derek Lyons wrote:

Somewhat incorrect. I knew of Newton's alchemical research from
neither biographical study nor Stephenson's fiction.




But rather skrying with John Dee's speculum no doubt. You really should
be more careful about using those things you inherited from your great
uncle Allister- particularly that black puzzle box with the intricate
gold inlays; no good will come of playing with that. :-)

Pat