Today, let's meet Isaac Newton, the secret
alchemist. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
In 1782 James Price, Fellow
of the Royal Society, did a public experiment in
which he appeared to change sulfur into 50 times
its weight in gold. The Society took the claim
seriously enough that they called him before the
other Fellows to rerun the experiment. When Price
failed, historian Richard Gregory tells us, he
drank poison on the spot and died.
We're left to wonder: What did Price really
believe? Why was he carrying poison? If he knew
he'd fail, why didn't he drink it at home and avoid
that last humiliation? Price hands us a disturbing
parable about science and credulity.
Now bear in mind: Hoping to change lower substances
into gold is not silly. Transmutation clearly is
possible. Whenever we drive our cars, we transmute
the hydrocarbons that make up gasoline into water,
carbon dioxide, and worse. Nuclear fusion literally
transmutes hydrogen into helium at the atomic
level.
A century before Price, Robert Boyle wrote a paper
claiming he'd generated heat by mixing a special
form of mercury with gold. The paper was vague. We
don't know what his special mercury was. Since gold
is very inert, Boyle's claim resembled today's
hopes for cold fusion. He may've seen a chemical
reaction, but the claim is as troubling today as it
was then.
The catch is: Boyle didn't believe in alchemical
transmutation, but his contemporary, Isaac Newton,
did. Newton wrote thousands of pages on the subject
and never published one. He was alarmed by what
Boyle had done. He thought Boyle had tapped into
some elemental alchemical truth too dangerous to be
revealed -- like atomic fusion, I suppose.
Newton gave us his laws of mechanical motion, but
he kept his deeper alchemical beliefs secret. A
hundred and fifty years later we would use Newton's
mechanics to describe atoms and molecules. The old
alchemical essences of the mind would give way to a
new atomic physics -- based on objective Newtonian
billiard balls.
And I return to my question: What did Newton
believe; what did Boyle believe; what do you
believe; and what in God's name did Price believe
that he should squander his life as he did?
Scientists have always fought over their claims.
But much of that combat reminds us of Price facing
the Royal Society with a vial of poison in his coat
pocket. Most scientific combat is waged over
convictions that're no less tenuous. What really
drove Price to suicide? I believe it was trying to
live in a world in which, like ours, doubt is made
a greater sin than error. Price died in a world
where it was nobler to embrace conviction than it
was to seek out, define, and ultimately reduce
ignorance.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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