The Chymistry of Isaac Newton

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton was what we now call “alchemy”:

Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on the subject of alchemy, of which only a tiny fraction has today been published. Newton’s alchemical manuscripts include a rich and diverse set of document types, including laboratory notebooks, indices of alchemical substances and operations, Newton’s transcriptions from other sources, and even poetry.

With the support of the National Science Foundation, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is producing a scholarly online edition of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts integrated with new research on Newton’s chymistry. To date, about five hundred, or a quarter of a projected two thousand pages have been transcribed and encoded in TEI/XML. Of these, about two hundred fifty have been edited and are available online, including Newton’s Most Complete Laboratory Notebook.

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Ozornik: It’s funny to read it against this: “The CDC advised her to take her temperature”, posted here on October 14th, 2026 Both Marburg and Ebola are not airborn and require direct bodily contact to spread. Methinks the author of the book might be either one of the lowest form of human existence – a journalist, or might have monetary interest in scaremongering oblivious sheeple. Oh, wait.
Phileas Frogg: People who intend to sit atop hierarchies should acquire the skills for getting and remaining on top of hierarchies. The great delusion of modern education is that they’ll somehow accomplish this by being good at math or engineering. I didn’t realize until I was in my mid-20′s that networking is an art, a specific skillset that needs deliberate cultivation. The best part is that when you tell most people they don’t believe you and just keep on hammering on about...
McChuck: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
PM: Phileas Frogg says: “The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.” Which puts me very much in mind of the Russian Federation’s ongoing initiative to load their bureaucracy with returning veterans of the SMO.
Bruce: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. Getting ‘tired and emotional’? or other euphemisms for ‘publicly drunk’? Lot of overdrinking at work in 19th century culture.
Phileas Frogg: The side with better PPP is always more militarily dangerous than the side with better GDP. We’re going to learn that hard lesson very soon, but what do you expect? We’re ruled by bankers and merchants, while Russia and China are ruled by spies and engineers. The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.
Bob Sykes: The novels of Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, truly excellent as stories, also provide detailed descriptions of life in Britain during the 19th Century. Austin for the gentry, Dickens for the urban poor, and Hardy for the rural working class. Also, A.J.P. Taylor’s history of WWI has an analysis of the economic conditions in the run up to the War, and he concludes that working class was materially better off under wartime rationing than during the peace in the early 1900’s. The...
Jim: Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop...
Steve Sailer: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” ; and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. That doesn’t happen that much anymore. It’s a little hard to grasp what that was about.
Dan Kurt: “Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second…’” A late professor of modern history told me that the German military from the reforms in the early 19th century until its defeat in WW2 tried to select its officers under the chief criterion of one’s Character.
Bruce: “Does it ever occur to you that maybe all these idiots are lying?” — Ed Real, whom I trust on education stuff, maybe about someone else.
Bruce: “Alas, before Wolper could put his plan into action, the book began drawing criticism from Native American groups contending that it was an inaccurate portrayal of the Sioux.” Crab-bucket jealousy has ruined publishing for books about anything with an organized political entitlement class. Even writers of the right ethnicity get taken down if they are any good, like William Sanders.
Jim: And as for myself, I suspect that hard labor would do the lawyers, accountants, software developers, VC executives, bureaucrats, clergy, politicians, and so on a lot of good.
Jim: Capitalism is often described as a celebration of selfishness. That description misses its most extraordinary feature: a functioning market economy is a system of cooperation among strangers. Nearly every object in a modern household exists because thousands of people coordinated their activities. They may live on different continents, speak different languages, practice different religions, and disagree on nearly every political question. They need not love one another! They need only identify a...
Jim: The Constitution of the United States of America was simply a contract of a bloodline. That constitution then withered and died, in irregular increments, in proportion to the supplantation of that bloodline, in its own territory, by the global power which has, since approximately 1830, been shuffling around races en masse, beginning with the Irish Catholics dispatched to Boston, the seat of the American Revolution. Such is life.
Bob Sykes: The Enlightenment died around 1800, and it was replaced, after a while, by Romanticism. The various socialist movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries are the main product of Romanticism, along with Beethoven, Shelley, Nietzsche, Spengler, Hitler… Romanticism, itself, is pretty much dead, too, and has been replaced by Modernism, then post-Modernism. America’s Founding Fathers and their ideas are long dead, and so is the Republic they gave us. We couldn’t keep it. Their Constitution has been...
Wanweilin: Human existence, for thousands of years, has generally been nasty, brutish and short. Only in the last couple of centuries or so has this reality improved. Now as Christendom fades from Western Civilization we are returning to the average human experience. Electricity and water are already intermittent in many areas. Then the intelligent fraction that knows the how and why will die. Then only a few will remain to maintain an ever collapsing infrastructure. Look what happened in Africa when the...
Bruce: A biological attack on America would see the D party using masses of drug-addicted vagrants to shake down the taxpayers as a Godsend.
Jim: The logic of court eunuchry explains far, far too much of America c. 2026.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Absolutely. The state’s willingness to employ coercive measures, even non-violent coercive measures, to achieve ends well beyond their prescribed scope should shock everyone with a conscience or self-respect. But then, they don’t want their court eunuch’s to have self respect, so all the better.

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The Chymistry of Isaac Newton

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