#Alchemistry chemical combiner recipes code

He was a great scientist, one of the greatest, who just happened to live in an ignorant, benighted time. Gizmodo doesn’t want us to blame Newton for believing in alchemy. … Newton and his fellow alchemists were simply doing the best they could given the dearth of scientific knowledge. Sir Isaac Newton may have been one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, but his contributions to chemistry leave much to be desired. This is just another little page in a corpus of hundreds and hundreds of documents.” Gizmodo’s “dabbled” as well as the “he resorted to the mysterious world of alchemy” reflects not Newton’s interests and efforts but rather Gizmodo’s desire to save Newton from the stain of alchemy: Summarizing the Chemistry World post, Gizmodo piled on with typical dismissal of Newton’s alchemy, “ Rediscovered Manuscript Shows How Isaac Newton Dabbled In Alchemy.” Dabbled? As Jim Voelkel pointed out in the Chemistry World post, “the estimate of Newton’s alchemical output is something like a million words in his own hand. Although CHF has since removed that post, it is still available from Web Archive.Ī number of posts derived directly from the Chemistry World report.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation immediately summarized and linked to the Chemistry World report. CHF immediately excerpted and linked to the Chemistry World post. No language of surprise at Newton’s interest in alchemy. Importantly, the article doesn’t make grandiose claims, but sticks to a rather conservative: “Until now, the contents of this particular manuscript had not been made public.” Other than the title, there’s no language of rediscovery. The Chemistry World article is rather dry, beginning with the title that certainly doesn’t excite interest-“alchemist’s mercury”? yawn. Since the 1930s this manuscript had been in private hands but will now be available to scholars thanks to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which had recently purchased it and will make scans and a transcription available through The Chemistry of Isaac Newton project. Chemistry WorldĬhemistry World first reported on the manuscript in “ Newton’s recipe for alchemists’ mercury rediscovered.” The manuscript contained Newton’s hand-written copy of George Starkey’s recipe for “philosophic mercury” as well as some of his own notes for distilling a volatile spirit. When you restrict the results to the first month following Chemistry World’s report and you prune out duplicate results and other irrelevant hits, you still have hundreds if not thousands of hits for this story about Newton’s interest in alchemy. Following the Chemistry World article as it spread across the internet reveals the process replication and transformation as the information drifted further from the original in time and space.

#Alchemistry chemical combiner recipes code

Within a few days hundreds of sites-ranging from sites like the Daily Kos and CNN to the Ancient Code and Facebook posts-had summarized, linked to, reposted, or transformed the original report. When Chemistry World reported on a Newton manuscript that CHF had recently purchased, it started a small epidemic of posts on Newton and alchemy.