Isaac Newton: The Last Keemiyagar
Newton gave us gravity and a lifetime of
numericals. What our Matric books never told us is that he also spent some
thirty years chasing the sang-e-paras. Chai ka cup uthaiye, yeh kahani mazedaar hai.
“Uske haath mein to mitti bhi sona ban jaati hai.” We say this
about people with a golden touch, na? Well, today I want to introduce
you to a man who took that muhaavra quite literally.
Everyone of us who has sat a Matric physics paper knows Isaac Newton. An
apple falls on his head, and gravity is discovered; and the night before the
board exam we do ratta of his three laws from some key book. Basss… that
is our whole relationship with the poor man.
But what if I told you that the same Newton, the hero of reason our
Master sahibs practically worshipped, wrote or copied out roughly a million
words on alchemy?1
Yes, much of it was copied from other alchemists’ books, but still, janaab,
that is a mountain of ink. For about three decades he kept a furnace going in
his college garden in Cambridge, chasing what our old naanis called the
sang-e-paras: the magic stone that turns ordinary loha into sona.
Nahi yaar, this is not one of those forwards from the family WhatsApp
group. The manuscripts exist and are online today.
“Not fit to be printed”: ghar
ki murgi daal barabar
Newton died in March 1727 at the age of 84, without making a will. Behind
him was a mountain of paper, by one estimate some eight million words.2 The family
asked Dr Thomas Pellet, a physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, to see
what was worth publishing. Bechara Pellet listed 81 items and approved
only five.3 On
many of the others he wrote a short, cold verdict: “Not fit to be printed.”
Socho zara. The greatest scientist of his age dies, and his own
people decide most of his writing should stay locked in the almaari.
Why? A big chunk of it was alchemy, and much of the rest was theology so
unorthodox (Newton privately rejected the Trinity) that it could have finished
his good name.2
The papers passed to the Earls of Portsmouth, descendants of his
half-niece. In 1872 the family offered the scientific material to Cambridge
University. A committee took sixteen years to catalogue everything, kept the
“proper” science, and politely sent the alchemy and theology back home.2 Ghar ki murgi daal barabar.
There it gathered dust for nearly half a century.
Sold like raddi
Then came July 1936. The Portsmouth heir, Viscount Lymington, needed
money badly, and on 13 and 14 July the papers went for auction in London.4
The private notebooks of the man who explained the heavens were split into 329
lots,5 and the whole
collection fetched just over £9,000.4
Honestly speaking, it went like raddi to the kabaariwaala.
Thank God one man understood what was being lost. John Maynard Keynes,
yes, the same Keynes every economics student in Pakistan has heard of, learnt
of the auction only at the last minute. He bought what he could, then spent
months chasing lots through dealers. Calling the scattering of the papers an
“impiety”, he slowly reassembled about half of them.6 His great rival was the scholar
Abraham Yahuda, who went mainly after the theological papers; those now sit in
the National Library of Israel. Keynes left his share to King’s College,
Cambridge.7
What Keynes found in the
trunk
Keynes actually read what he had bought, and it shook him. He first
shared his thoughts in a talk at Trinity College in 1942, the tercentenary year
of Newton’s birth.8
The Royal Society’s grand celebrations, postponed because of the war, finally
took place in July 1946. By then Keynes had died, in April, so his brother
Geoffrey read the essay, “Newton, the Man”, in his place.6,8
In it comes the famous line. Newton, Keynes wrote, “was not the first of the
age of reason.” Instead:
“He was the last of the magicians, the
last of the Babylonians and Sumerians …”
To Keynes, Newton saw the whole universe as a riddle, full of clues God
had hidden for the right mind to decode.6
Now here is a point to be noted. Right at the start of that essay, Keynes
admitted the war had left him no time to check his impressions properly.6 So the most famous sentence ever
written about Newton was written in a hurry. Remember this.
|
Socho zara Imagine someone opens your old
diaries and WhatsApp chats three hundred years from now. What would shock
them the most? And would it be fair to judge your whole life by those pages
alone? |
Inside the “elaboratory”
So what was Newton actually up to? Our best eyewitness is Humphrey Newton
(no relation), his assistant from about 1685 to 1690. Humphrey tells us himself
that Newton wrote the Principia during those years, and that he,
Humphrey, copied out that “stupendous work” by hand before it went to the
press.9 Same man, same
years: gravity on the desk, furnace in the garden. Humphrey later described the
routine:
“About
6 weeks at Spring & 6 at the ffall the fire in the Elaboratory scarcely
went out.”9
Kya baat hai. A fire that did not go out for six weeks, something
no Pakistani household on Sui gas can claim in the month of January. The two of
them took turns sitting up at night to keep it burning. Newton built and
rebuilt his own brick furnaces; “The transmuting of Metals” was his chief
design, and Humphrey felt his master was reaching for “somthing beyond the
Reach of humane Art & Industry.”
Picture it. By day, the orbits of planets. By night, the laboratory at
the end of the garden near Trinity’s chapel, antimony melting in the crucible.
The historian Peter Spargo estimated that over some thirty years Newton ran
around four hundred chemical experiments there.10
And the reading, uff! His Index Chemicus, a personal dictionary of
alchemy, gives page references to more than 144 different works.11 On one list of alchemical authors
he even signed himself “Ieova sanctus unus”, roughly “Jehovah, the holy one”.
Rearrange the letters and you get Isaacus Neuutonus, his own name in Latin.12 Chalaak
aadmi. Hiding in plain sight.
|
Kya aap jaante hain? Newton was so lost in his work that
his meals often went back untouched, says Humphrey, and the old woman who
made his bed would happily carry the dinner home with her.9 With a Pakistani ammi in
the house, this would simply not have been allowed. |
Hush-hush, janaab:
why all the secrecy?
Alchemy had a bad name in those days, full of fraudsters promising rich
patrons gold: the Aamil Babas of seventeenth-century England. (Had
Newton lived in Karachi, some wall would surely read: “Aamil Baba Newton,
sona banaayein, 100% guarantee.”)
But Newton’s caution went deeper. In 1676 he read Robert Boyle’s paper on
a special mercury that grew warm when mixed with gold. Writing to Henry
Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, he said he doubted the stuff had
much practical use, yet he advised that Boyle keep “high silence”. If the old
Hermetic writers were right, he warned, such knowledge could do “immense
dammage to the world”. Then he asked Oldenburg to keep the letter private.13 Historians
such as Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs read this as a sign that, for Newton, alchemy
touched on sacred truths meant only for a worthy few.14 That is one reading; what the
letter shows for certain is that he took the danger seriously.
Hamara Jabir, unka
Geber
Our textbooks never missed a chance to remind us that Jabir bin Hayyan
was the “father of chemistry”. Here the story comes home. The word alchemy
reached English from the Arabic al-kīmiyā, and in Urdu we still call an
alchemist a Keemiyagar. Much of what medieval Europe knew of the art came
through Latin translations of Arabic learning, and the most famous alchemical
name in Latin Europe, “Geber”, borrowed its authority from Jabir.15 Arabic
alchemy, in turn, had built on Greek and Egyptian writings from Alexandria. So
Newton, bent over his crucibles, stood at the far end of a chain running from
Alexandria through Kufa and Baghdad to Cambridge.
Imam Ghazali even called one of his books Keemiya-e-Saadat, the
Alchemy of Happiness, where the real gold is a purified heart. Newton, with his
prayers and prophecies, might well have understood.
Paara in his hair?
All those years over the furnace may have come at a price. In 1693, what
biographers call his “black year”, Newton wrote to Samuel Pepys that he had
“neither ate nor slept well this twelve month” and had lost his “former
consistency of mind”.16
He also sent strange, accusing letters to friends, including John Locke, and
later apologised.
In 1979, researchers analysed locks of hair said to be Newton’s and found
paara, that is mercury, along with lead, arsenic and antimony, well
above normal levels. One team called mercury poisoning a probable cause of his
troubles.17
Case closed? Itni jaldi nahi. Nobody can be fully sure the hair is his.
His handwriting from that period shows no tremor, he died with nearly all his
teeth, and the breakdown never returned though his furnace work went on for
years.18 Stress,
overwork and a painful break with his young Swiss friend Nicolas Fatio de
Duillier offer other explanations.19
The jury, as they say, is still out.
|
Ghar pe try mat karna! If a mercury thermometer breaks at
home, don’t let the children play with those shiny little balls of paara,
and don’t sweep them with a broom or vacuum them. Open the windows and clean
up carefully. And think twice before swallowing any kushta that claims
to contain paara. |
Jadoogar ya
scientist?
So was Keynes right? Modern scholars aren’t so sure. Dobbs argued that
alchemy was central to Newton’s thinking, not a side hobby, and suggested that
his comfort with invisible “active principles”, and even with a force like
gravity acting across empty space, may owe something to his alchemical reading.14 Not everyone was convinced.
Reviewing her first book in Nature, the historian A. Rupert Hall found
parts of her case hard to accept.20
William Newman of Indiana University, who leads the project putting the
manuscripts online, pushes the other way. For him Newton was no mystic mumbling
mantras but a careful experimenter doing “chymistry”, as historians call it,
since in the 1600s nobody drew a clean line between alchemy and chemistry.
Newman’s team has even recreated some of Newton’s recipes in a modern lab.21 And Newton
had company. Robert Boyle, whom our textbooks call a founder of modern
chemistry, was deep into the same pursuit.
Qayaamat, 2060,
and a job at the Mint
Alchemy was only one private obsession. Newton also combed the books of
Daniel and Revelation for the timing of the last days. On one slip of paper,
now in Jerusalem, he reckoned that the prophetic period would end no earlier
than 2060: “It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.”22 Elsewhere he
explained that he gave such dates only to stop “fanciful men” from making rash
predictions. Imagine, Newton complaining about fake news!
Then the most delicious twist. In 1696 Newton left Cambridge for London
to become Warden, and later Master, of the Royal Mint.19
The man who had spent years trying to turn base metal into gold was now
guarding England’s coins, and he hunted counterfeiters so fiercely that some of
them ended up on the gallows. Qudrat ke bhi kya khel hain.
Toh aakhir Newton tha
kaun?
Keynes, in a hurry, crowned Newton a magician. Newman hands him back his
lab coat. Sach poochein to, the truth lies somewhere beech mein.
Newton was neither a jadoogar in a pointed hat nor the cold, tidy “man
of reason” from our textbooks. He lived before the line between science and the
occult had been drawn.
And some of the Keemiyagar’s thinking did cross over into public
science. In the Queries at the end of his Opticks, Newton wondered aloud
whether tiny attractive forces between particles could explain chemical
reactions, an idea that eighteenth-century chemists took seriously.21,23 The furnace
in the garden, in its own quiet way, fed the chemistry lab.
|
Ab aap batayein •
What
is your verdict: scientist, Keemiyagar, or both? •
Did
your school ever tell you this side of Newton? Most of ours certainly didn’t. •
Which
other “rational” hero do you suspect had a secret side? Write in the comments, and forward
this to that one friend who still remembers his Matric numericals. |
Notes and References
1.
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, general editor William R. Newman, Indiana University
Bloomington, https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/. The project states that Newton wrote
and transcribed about a million words on alchemy, in at least 131
manuscripts. ↩ back
2.
Sarah
Dry, The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s
Manuscripts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩ back
3.
The
Newton Project, “History of Newton’s Papers: 1727–1872,” University of Oxford, https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/1727-1872.
↩ back
4.
The
Newton Project, “History of Newton’s Papers: The Sotheby Sale,” University of
Oxford, https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/sotheby-sale.
↩ back
5.
P.
E. Spargo, “Sotheby’s, Keynes and Yahuda: The 1936 Sale of Newton’s
Manuscripts,” in P. M. Harman and Alan E. Shapiro (eds), The Investigation
of Difficult Things: Essays on Newton and the History of the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); see also Freeman Dyson, “A New
Newton,” The New York Review of Books, 3 July 2003. ↩ back
6.
John
Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” in The Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary
Celebrations, 15–19 July 1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1947); reprinted in Keynes, Essays in Biography. Full text: MacTutor
History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/.
↩ back
7.
The
Newton Project, “Newton-related Papers of John Maynard Keynes,” University of
Oxford, https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/newton-related-papers-of-john-maynard-keynes.
↩ back
8.
J.
M. Keynes, holograph manuscript of a talk on Newton delivered at Trinity
College, Cambridge, 1942, with the typescript read by Geoffrey Keynes on 17
July 1946, Cambridge University Library, MS Add.8536; Daniel Kuehn, “Keynes,
Newton and the Royal Society: The Events of 1942 and 1943,” Notes and
Records of the Royal Society 67, no. 1 (2013): 25–36. ↩ back
9.
Humphrey
Newton, two letters to John Conduitt, 17 January and 14 February 1727/8, Keynes
MS 135, King’s College, Cambridge; transcribed by The Newton Project
(THEM00033), https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00033.
↩ back
10. P. E. Spargo, “Investigating the Site
of Newton’s Laboratory in Trinity College, Cambridge,” South African Journal
of Science 101 (2005), http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21520.
↩ back
11.
The
Newton Project catalogue, “Index Chemicus,” Keynes MS 30, King’s College,
Cambridge (ALCH00019); Richard S. Westfall, “Isaac Newton’s Index Chemicus,”
Ambix 22 (1975): 174–185. ↩ back
12. The Newton Project catalogue, “Three
lists of alchemical writers and works,” Keynes MS 13, King’s College, Cambridge
(ALCH00002). ↩ back
13. Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, 26
April 1676, Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 9597/2/18/53–54; transcribed
by The Newton Project (NATP00268), https://newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00268. Also in The Correspondence of
Isaac Newton, vol. 2, ed. H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1960). ↩ back
14. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The
Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon”
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and The Janus Faces of
Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991). ↩ back
15. Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets
of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). ↩ back
16. Isaac Newton to Samuel Pepys, 13
September 1693, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3, ed. H. W.
Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). ↩ back
17.
P.
E. Spargo and C. A. Pounds, “Newton’s ‘Derangement of the Intellect’: New Light
on an Old Problem,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34,
no. 1 (1979): 11–32; L. W. Johnson and M. L. Wolbarsht, “Mercury Poisoning: A
Probable Cause of Isaac Newton’s Physical and Mental Ills,” Notes and
Records of the Royal Society of London 34, no. 1 (1979). ↩ back
18. Gale E. Christianson, In the
Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times (New York: Free Press,
1984), 359–360. ↩ back
19. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest:
A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980). ↩ back
20. A. Rupert Hall, “Newton as Alchemist,”
review of B. J. T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, Nature
266 (28 April 1977): 785. ↩ back
21. William R. Newman, Newton the
Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s “Secret Fire”
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
↩ back
22. Isaac Newton, Yahuda Ms. 7.3g,
National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. ↩ back
23. Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 31
(in the English editions from 1717 onwards).
↩ back
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