Or something.
From Wired:
When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books. There are pages upon pages of scientific and mathematical brilliance. But there are also pages that reveal another side of Newton, a side his descendants tried to keep hidden from the public.
Even in his lifetime, Newton was hailed as an eminent scientist and mathematician of unparalleled genius. But Newton also studied alchemy and religion. He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.
The story of Newton’s writing and how it has survived to the modern day is the subject of a new book, The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts. Author Sarah Dry traces their mysterious and precarious history and reveals both the lucky twists and purposeful turns that kept the papers safe.HT: Daily Speculations
We spoke to Dry about the famous luminary, his beliefs both rational and not, and the different ways that people have thought about Newton throughout history.
WIRED: Why did you decide to trace what happened to Isaac Newton’s papers?
Sarah Dry: In the history of science there is no greater figure than Newton. He was this shining emblem of Enlightenment rationality. If you ask people to name a scientist they’re going to say Newton, Einstein, or Darwin. So he’s become an icon, both more and less than human.
But there’s always been a great mystery surrounding him. You tell people you’re working on Newton and they say, “Oh yeah, wasn’t he an alchemist?” And it makes them feel like they know something that changes our ideas about this great man. I think there’s a real draw to sort of have this cake and eat it too – to have this super rationalist saint, and also his secret obsessions.
One mystery was why there was no complete edited collection of his papers. There’s a section in the book where I talk about how the great Continental scientists had all had their due by the early 20th century. But nobody had gotten to Newton. And the question was why would there be this hole around Newton?
Then there’s the detective story of what happened to these papers that Newton left behind, and how has it taken so long for them to come to light. There’s no conspiracy, but there is some suppression, some neglect, and some confusion about the contents of the papers.
WIRED: How much of Newton’s writing has survived?
Dry: A huge amount. There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math....MORE
