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History is full of talented people who squandered their talents onto meaningless endeavours. Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his

History is full of talented people who squandered their talents onto meaningless endeavours. Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his scientific knowledge and logical reasoning he wasted the second half of his life trying to turn other metals into gold, alchemy - based nothing more than biblical text. Big brain does not prevent ideological blindness.

xyzzy123 4y ago
Newton was a complex person and I think this is an overly reductive take on both his life and study of alchemy.
- heavenlyblue 4y ago
  Is the next thing you are going to say that it's an overly reductive take on the alchemy as described in The Bible?
  - batch12 4y ago
    Where is this description? I am having a difficult time finding a reference to performing alchemy in the Bible.
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      That was one of the things that made alchemy so much fun; all the "instructions" were "encoded" and literally occult. Much of what they were doing was hunting for the keys to a known ciphertext (the Bible) that would give them the secrets of the universe, once they decoded it correctly. Of course we're far too bright and sophisticated to fall into such folly today. You won't fond modern peoples, for example, having passionate arguments about the meanings of text generated by mechanical / statistical processes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hprotagonist 4y ago
a more apt vignette from newton’s life is that he absolutely lost his shirt on speculative investments in a bubble that collapsed and took one of the finest minds to the cleaners.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his scientific knowledge and logical reasoning he wasted the second half of his life trying to turn other metals into gold, alchemy - based nothing more than biblical text. Prior to the atomic model invented several hundred years later, given there was examples of metals turning into other metals (i.e. iron turning into steel, copper turning into brass)... I don't think there was much of a reason to think that the transmutation of metals into Gold wouldn't be possible. And it in fact sort of turns out to be possible in certain circumstances. We can make gold from lead (although it requires a particle accelerator).
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Alchemists being “wrong” is like Michelson-Morley “failing”: More branding than reality, since we accomplished their projects later — transmuting elements and detecting the aether. Ironically, this seems to be a cognitive bias — we never update our first impression nor put together a story across terminology changes. Carlo Rovelli gives an interesting talk on how we’re too quick to dismiss ancient scholars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5-KLvvMGM&t=1199s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5-KLvvMGM&t=1199s
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    It's really fascinating to read historical accounts of science. Cicero's De Natura Deorum has an incredible account various antique world views and how they're motivated. Most of it is wrong in some sense in the light of modern science, but what's fascinating is how often they get things right. It's like they're using poorly chosen basis vectors, and muddling some concepts we now understand to be distinct: They seem to have associated energy and/or thermodynamic heat with the element of fire; the gaseous phase with air and buoyancy, the liquid phase with water, the solid phase with earth and gravity. It's very clear why the model stood for as long as it did despite some remarkably clever people looking into it. It actually fits the empirical evidence pretty well.
  - evv555 4y ago
    >More branding than reality, since we accomplished their projects later — transmuting elements and detecting the aether. Arguably this was accomplished using the work of alchemists. Ontologies tend to progress through stages of differentiation of components("stamp collecting") followed by integrative models. Mendeleev doesn't find periodic patterns in elements without alchemists first inventorying elemental features.
stocknoob 4y ago
After inventing modern physics and calculus I’d think I had the golden touch, too. Newton took a lot of intellectual paths, from tinkering with prisms to thinking about the paths of the heavens. Only looking back can we say “oh, you wasted your time investigating x and y, but z was right on. Why didn’t you just bat 1000?”
mogacom 4y ago
Historical context is important to take into account with Newton. He had no idea he was doing "science" as opposed to something else. He was trying to systematically investigate the natural world in an environment largely composed of ignorance and myth, which he was also part of. Wasn't alchemy simply chemistry before chemistry had been developed into a well-defined field of study? His obsession with the dimensions of Solomon's temple is a little hard to understand though!
oh_sigh 4y ago
It seems he was just overly credulous. Yes, he was very Christian, but I imagine if he got some ancient text from China on how to transmute lead to gold he would give it a shot
tmn 4y ago
I'll ignore the argument that alchemy was a precursor to modern science. An iron man version of 'lead to gold' is that it was never about literally turning lead to gold (which modern science can do). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy 'Esoteric interpretations of historical texts' From this lens, alchemy becomes a form of spiritual meditation. You can argue that such things are meaningless endeavors. But this is itself a subjective take. What are meaningful endeavors really? If I want to take a nihilistic frame, I'll strengthen your comment and say it's impossible to avoid meaningless endeavors. Inevitably one must pick their bias and arrive at their narrative.
asdff 4y ago
Newton was right that you could turn lead into gold, but it wasn't his fault that nuclear science needed to advance a few hundred years before someone ran that actual experiment.

xyzzy123 4y ago

Newton was a complex person and I think this is an overly reductive take on both his life and study of alchemy.

heavenlyblue 4y ago
Is the next thing you are going to say that it's an overly reductive take on the alchemy as described in The Bible?
- batch12 4y ago
  Where is this description? I am having a difficult time finding a reference to performing alchemy in the Bible.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    That was one of the things that made alchemy so much fun; all the "instructions" were "encoded" and literally occult. Much of what they were doing was hunting for the keys to a known ciphertext (the Bible) that would give them the secrets of the universe, once they decoded it correctly. Of course we're far too bright and sophisticated to fall into such folly today. You won't fond modern peoples, for example, having passionate arguments about the meanings of text generated by mechanical / statistical processes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hprotagonist 4y ago

a more apt vignette from newton’s life is that he absolutely lost his shirt on speculative investments in a bubble that collapsed and took one of the finest minds to the cleaners.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> Take the famed scientist Issac Newton for example, despite all his scientific knowledge and logical reasoning he wasted the second half of his life trying to turn other metals into gold, alchemy - based nothing more than biblical text. Prior to the atomic model invented several hundred years later, given there was examples of metals turning into other metals (i.e. iron turning into steel, copper turning into brass)... I don't think there was much of a reason to think that the transmutation of metals into Gold wouldn't be possible. And it in fact sort of turns out to be possible in certain circumstances. We can make gold from lead (although it requires a particle accelerator).

zmgsabst 4y ago
Alchemists being “wrong” is like Michelson-Morley “failing”: More branding than reality, since we accomplished their projects later — transmuting elements and detecting the aether. Ironically, this seems to be a cognitive bias — we never update our first impression nor put together a story across terminology changes. Carlo Rovelli gives an interesting talk on how we’re too quick to dismiss ancient scholars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5-KLvvMGM&t=1199s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an5-KLvvMGM&t=1199s
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It's really fascinating to read historical accounts of science. Cicero's De Natura Deorum has an incredible account various antique world views and how they're motivated. Most of it is wrong in some sense in the light of modern science, but what's fascinating is how often they get things right. It's like they're using poorly chosen basis vectors, and muddling some concepts we now understand to be distinct: They seem to have associated energy and/or thermodynamic heat with the element of fire; the gaseous phase with air and buoyancy, the liquid phase with water, the solid phase with earth and gravity. It's very clear why the model stood for as long as it did despite some remarkably clever people looking into it. It actually fits the empirical evidence pretty well.
- evv555 4y ago
  >More branding than reality, since we accomplished their projects later — transmuting elements and detecting the aether. Arguably this was accomplished using the work of alchemists. Ontologies tend to progress through stages of differentiation of components("stamp collecting") followed by integrative models. Mendeleev doesn't find periodic patterns in elements without alchemists first inventorying elemental features.

stocknoob 4y ago

After inventing modern physics and calculus I’d think I had the golden touch, too. Newton took a lot of intellectual paths, from tinkering with prisms to thinking about the paths of the heavens. Only looking back can we say “oh, you wasted your time investigating x and y, but z was right on. Why didn’t you just bat 1000?”

mogacom 4y ago

Historical context is important to take into account with Newton. He had no idea he was doing "science" as opposed to something else. He was trying to systematically investigate the natural world in an environment largely composed of ignorance and myth, which he was also part of. Wasn't alchemy simply chemistry before chemistry had been developed into a well-defined field of study? His obsession with the dimensions of Solomon's temple is a little hard to understand though!

oh_sigh 4y ago

It seems he was just overly credulous. Yes, he was very Christian, but I imagine if he got some ancient text from China on how to transmute lead to gold he would give it a shot

tmn 4y ago

I'll ignore the argument that alchemy was a precursor to modern science. An iron man version of 'lead to gold' is that it was never about literally turning lead to gold (which modern science can do). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy 'Esoteric interpretations of historical texts' From this lens, alchemy becomes a form of spiritual meditation. You can argue that such things are meaningless endeavors. But this is itself a subjective take. What are meaningful endeavors really? If I want to take a nihilistic frame, I'll strengthen your comment and say it's impossible to avoid meaningless endeavors. Inevitably one must pick their bias and arrive at their narrative.

asdff 4y ago

Newton was right that you could turn lead into gold, but it wasn't his fault that nuclear science needed to advance a few hundred years before someone ran that actual experiment.