Altabin
Posts: 308
Joined: Sep. 2006
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The real expert on Newton's alchemy is Bill Newman, at Indiana University. Together with Larry Principe (Johns Hopkins), he's recreated several of Newton's alchemical experiments - showing that Newton (as well as other alchemists) was not crazy when he wrote his alchemical notebooks. He was describing, in cryptic but intelligible language, what he saw in the laboratory. When the key is broken, Newton's strange language turns out to be very accurately descriptive (the "net of Vulcan," as described on the website below; or the "virgin's milk" which I heard Bill discuss in a paper - it is a colloidal suspension). Of course, he did not always interpret what he saw in the way that we would....
See his website, complete with a photograph of what was often thought to be pure Newtonian fantasy - the "star regulus of antimony."
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