# Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer



## rtroxel (Nov 17, 2004)

[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif][size=-1]*Book Review: *​
[/size][/font][font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif]*Isaac Newton:The Last Sorcerer*[/font] 
By Michael White 
Perseus Books Group, 1999
Paperback: 402 pages



Here's a volume for all you history-of-technology buffs. Written in layman's terms, the book traces the career of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) from childhood through knighthood. 

The author has chosen to forego explaining the details of Newton's mathematics (he invented calculus) or the subtleties of his laws of planetary motion. Instead, he concentrates on Newton the man. As a consqeuence, the book contains some surprises and some let-downs, but ultimately, you're forced to conclude that Newton was one of the great benefactors of mankind: Start up your car, ride in an elevator, or watch those lasers read the numbers on the packages at the supermarket, and you are indirectly paying homage to the discoveries of a college student in 1666. 

To the average person of Newton's time, the world was still controlled by spiritual and magical forces which he or she could never understand, much less control. The stars, for example, were thought to control human lives; comets and meteors were portents of human calamities. Across England and the rest of Europe, hideous religious wars were being waged. Witch trials were being conducted in North America. 

Many biographies present Isaac Newton as a man who rejected this sort of conduct and was therefore a pioneer of the rationalized understanding of the universe. Newton is often regarded as the man who reduced the universe to mathematical certainty where there had once been only superstition. 

The truth, according to White, is that Newton was motivated by many superstitious beliefs, especially in his lifelong study of alchemy. Newton did not set out to disprove the superstitions of old, but assumed that these beliefs contained truths that had been forgotten by mankind. He assiduously studied the Old Testament prophecies for clues on how to accurately measure events in time . He computed (he thought) the sizes of Solomon's temple and Noah's Ark. To his last days, he believed the world would end in 1867. 

Newton, to an extent, sought to explore the mind of God and try to understand how He controlled the world. He saw no conflict between religion and science, nor did many of his contemporaries. 

Britain was then at the forefront of the scientific revoloution. Newton's fellow scientists (with whom he had vicious quarrels) included Liebniz, Huygens, Flamsteed, and Hooke, the founders of what we now consider "modern technology." 

*The Alchemist* 

A vain and secretive man, Newton spent hours by himself pouring over the Old Testament and alchemical texts. Thousands of pages of his notes on alchemy survive - all of them scientifically worthless. 

Possibly, he might have noticed that certain substances had the ability to attract each other, whereas others repelled each other. He was no doubt aware of magnetism as well. Possibly he saw the relation between those substances and the gravitational pull between planets. (If that's true, then this would be the only practical justification for his obsession with alchemy.) Like Einstein, Newton was possibly searching for a unified field theory - one common force that unified all matter in the universe, big and small, stars and atoms. Unfortunately, Newton's alchemical notes contain no such ideas. 

However, _The Last Sorcerer_ spends considerable time explaining how Newton's obsession with alchemy actually inspired and controlled his scientific research. The author suggests that by Newton's seeing himself as a sorcerer, as master over his material, and as the re-discoverer of lost knowledge, Newton could gain the confidence and courage of his convictions. 

*"The Year of Miracles"* 

In a sense, the entire body of Newton's scientific discoveries result from an 18-month period he spent on his stepfather's farm from 1666 to 1667. He had been a student at Cambridge, but the university had been forced to close down due to an outbreak of the plague. 

The droll story of Newton being hit on the head by a falling apple supposedly occurred about this time. Actually, Newton had already been hit many times by falling apples, because he had worked in orchards since childhood. On this particular summer however, he wondered why the apples fell to the ground in a straight line. Was it because the earth was attracting the apples? Or was it because the apples were attracting the earth? The answer, as Newton quickly guessed, was "yes" to both. Both earth and apple were attracted to each other by an unseen force he called "gravity". Because the earth was the more massive object (by far), only the apple was affected by this force. 

But there was more to come. During that same year, Newton purchased a small prism at the county fair. He had long been fascinated by the rainbow of colors that could be seen around the edges of carved glass. returning home, he poked a small hole in a window shade, just enough to let a thin ray of sunshine pass through. In the path of the sun ray, he placed the prism. The sunlight passed through the prism and was then projected upon a wall, not as white light, but broken down into all the colors of the spectrum. 

Newton concluded that white light is in fact composed of all colors. Further, colors do not come from objects themelves but are reflected from objects by sunlight. _Colors exist because of the way the human eye perceives them._ (The colors that you see on your monitor as you're reading this are composed of thousands of tiny red, green and blue pixels.) 

*God said, "Let Newton be!", and there was light*. 
_...Alexander Pope, contemporary British satirist _

Newton was now obsessed with his discoveries, but also knew that he would have to prove them, or else his academic career would be in jeopardy. For the next 20 years, he refined and polished his theories of gravity, concluding with the publication of his _Principia Mathematica_ in 1687. 

In this one great volume, he demonstrated the theory that celestial bodies - planets, stars and comets - all are held in place by a force he called gravity. He could not explain what the force was, but he could describe it perfectly - with a new set of mathematics which he called "fluxions" and later "the calculus". 

In 1704 he published his _Opticks, _a summary of his life's research on the subject, which had begun with the purchase of the prism in 1666. 

The visible universe was now understandable and even predictable: His friend Edmund Halley was able to predict the return of the famous comet that bears his name. Even the tides - caused by the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans - were predictable. 

Newton had spent hours testing his theories. A sensitive and secretive man, he was also given to shrill outbursts of temper and to writing scurrilous letters to contemporaries who questioned his theories. (Many of these embarassing documents survive.) The astronomers Flamsteed and Hooke were frequently the targets of Newton's outbursts. Their recorded observations of planetary movements were needed by Newton in order to prove some of the theories explained in the _Principia,_ but they were reluctant to give them to him - partly from professional jealousy. 

*Triumph of the Nerds?* 

_The Last Sorcerer_ also deals with other aspects of Newton's later life: his career as Member of Parliament, as international celebrity, and as head of the London Mint. 

And late into the night, he still kept the alchemical furnace burning. With little sleep for days, he would stir, boil and bubble strange metals and substances, searching for the "philosopher's stone" that had eluded alchemists for centuries. 

For me, however, the most remarkable chapters in _The Last Sorcerer _deal with Newton's career as director of the London mint. In this position, he hunted down counterfitters and "clippers" - mint workers who clipped small bits of silver from freshly-minted coins. In order to bring these criminals to justice, Newton entered the most dangerous parts of London at night, wearing various disguises. Perhaps the kinship he felt with the Biblical prophets gave him a sense of self-righteousness that energized his pursuit of criminals. 



It's hard to set this book down without feeling a slight chill from the man now considered to be the father of modern science, but maybe that's too harsh a judgment. Imagine yourself, for a few minutes, at age 23, playing with prisms, watching apples fall and knowing you could determine to the last second the arrival time of a comet. Wouldn't that make you just a little vain? 



In any case, I'd like to know if anyone here has read this, and what are your opinions?​​[To see a re-creation of one of Newton's alchemy experiments, visit the University of Indiana's site .]​


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## Jayaprakash Satyamurthy (Nov 18, 2004)

Thanks for the in-depth review and welcome to Chronicles! I have seen this book around but have not read it. However, I am familiar with Newton's alchemic interests and beliefs. Several scientists around his time did dabble in ideas we would find mystical and pseudo-scientific today - I remember that Kepler had some odd mystical theories as well, for instance. It's worth bearing in mind that magic and alchemy served as precursors of the scientific approach, with their catalogues of materials to be used in various processes and so on. In a very real sense, magic is early science and it's no surprise that Newton was poised halfway between the magical viewpoint and what we'd today call the scientific method.


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## dwndrgn (Nov 18, 2004)

I haven't read it but it reminds me of Stephenson's Quicksilver, which is fiction but takes quite a bit from the true stories of the forefathers of modern science like Newton and his cronies.  I might have to check this one out just to see more about him.


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## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 18, 2004)

I read the book a few years ago and liked it very much.  What an excellent and comprehensive review!

Most people have little understanding of what alchemy was really about:  a search for spiritual riches as well as earthly ones.  It's not surprising that a noncomforming but still deeply religious man who was also interested in science and lived when Newton lived would be drawn to it.  

Science, magic, and mathematics were all mixed up together for a whole lot longer than they've been divided.


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## dwndrgn (Nov 18, 2004)

Kelpie said:
			
		

> Science, magic, and mathematics were all mixed up together for a whole lot longer than they've been divided.


I still think they are all different facets of the wonders of our universe.  If I lived back then, I'd have dressed up as a man so I could be one of his hangers-on.  The workings of his and his contemporaries' minds facinates me.  Just call me a Newton groupie


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## Teresa Edgerton (Nov 19, 2004)

dwndrgn said:
			
		

> I still think they are all different facets of the wonders of our universe.  If I lived back then, I'd have dressed up as a man so I could be one of his hangers-on.  The workings of his and his contemporaries' minds facinates me.  Just call me a Newton groupie


 I agree, dwndrgn.  And, in fact, quite a lot of alchemy makes quite a lot of sense once we take into account that they were usually writing in metaphors about perfectly ordinary and concrete things.


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## Brian G Turner (Nov 19, 2004)

Hi Roy, and nice to see you visit the Chronicles Network. 

Thanks for the review, too - now if only Newton could only get Celeron's to transmute into Dual Opterons.


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## rtroxel (Nov 19, 2004)

I said:
			
		

> if only Newton could only get Celeron's to transmute into Dual Opterons.


It might take him an hour or so to figure it out. Can you imagine Newton on the Web? Wonder what his site would look like?


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## Brian G Turner (Nov 20, 2004)

I can only think "Apple".


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