> his alchemical work that didn’t. Call me a crackpot, but didn't it? Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences. Alc

> his alchemical work that didn’t. Call me a crackpot, but didn't it? Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences. Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical. I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not. If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it... edit: I'm not making it up. Whether or not you want to believe in whatever, this is what alchemy is to magicians like Newton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy He didn't endeavour to just turn physical lead into physical gold. I know we shit on humanities around here, but facts still exist in that sphere. Further, this isn't my opinion but that of Keynes - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.0053 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.005... > Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’