Newton also went more or less crazy and spent his last 4 decades studying alchemy and astrology. Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on the order of, "W

Newton also went more or less crazy and spent his last 4 decades studying alchemy and astrology. Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on the order of, "Well, I held up a prism and took a quick look and it seemed ciruclar to me! Mr Newton is a fool." OTOH Goethe (yes, that Goethe...), 200 years later, made roughly the same argument and developed some pretty amazing results from it.