Full Circle

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies

Note - a version of this article was originally posted by me on July 2011 on the original QuantumThoughts web site


It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

Take Isaac Newton.  One of the seminal figures of Science and the Age of Reason, and few people today know that he was really, at heart, an alchemist.  And why not?  Alchemy was the hot thing back in the 1690's, as popular to the nerds of the day as IT is to us today.

Alchemy was really all about affecting the world around you, and to learn to be an alchemist you had to learn what made the world tick, often by trial and error (which we now call the “empirical method”).  It was this sort of “experimentation” that ultimately led to the abandonment of "alchemy" and the adoption of the true scientific method – recognizing that simple trial and error was madness, the nascent members of the scientific elite decided to systematize their approach – in short, to formulate a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and if it didn’t work out quite right the first time, change one variable at a time and repeat.  Science.

That approach works well enough to be applied to everything, and led to the industrial revolution – which continues today, with advancements happening at an ever increasing rate.  So much so, that many so-called “futurists” and visionaries are predicting a “technological singularity”, a point at which things become, well, fuzzy.  We won't be able to predict the "next big thing" because the advancements will simply be coming at us too quickly.  And most of the real adherents to the idea of the technological singularity (cross-reference Vernor Vinge if you like, lots of great Sci-Fi there) expect that we'll finally (finally!) have real AI (artificial intelligence), and once *that* happens, the machines will take over, at least in terms  of advancing science and technology.  We'll be left behind, simply the vehicle which was required to lead to the "true" pinnacle of life on earth.

But I digress - let's get back to the alchemy/science bit.  The empirical method, trying something, testing the results, tweaking the hypothesis - three hundred years of advancement and It’s all still alchemy, really.  What were the alchemists trying to do?  Turn lead into gold.  One of Newton’s obsessions was searching for the “Philosopher’s Stone” that would facilitate that reaction.  This was the holy grail of many alchemists, and their search was taken seriously enough that such “research” was banned by the British Government, which feared economic catastrophe if the alchemists should succeed! 

Newton never really gave up on it, and while he never found the Philosopher's Stone, he did at least get to work with gold (did you know he was hired by the British Government to run the Royal Mint?  Standardizing coin sizes, shapes, content, and minting all in order to prevent counterfeiting). 

Now fast forward 300 years -  turns out that we actually did discover the Philosopher's Stone; it's called nuclear bombardment transmutation, and it's an (albeit expensive) way of turning lead into gold.  Basically you crank up the power on a particle accelerator or nuclear reactor, expose some lead to the stream of particles, and wait.  It's hardly practical, since building the machine and powering it costs much more than the value of the gold you can produce - but still!

Alchemy to Science.  Science to Alchemy.  Lead to Gold.  It really feels like magic, and the best thing of it is that it's OUR magic - we make it through science, there's nothing mystical about it - just plain human ingenuity coming Full Circle.