Newton's Alchemy

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Newton was very interested in alchemy. He believed that if you pray, you can cleanse your own soul and get nearer to god. But he pursued a huge amount of alchemical research. And many of his beliefs got carried over into his natural philosophy. His theory of universal gravity is absent from modern physics. It's something we still really haven't resolved. If you've got two lumps of matter, like the earth and the moon, is made of inert material, how is it that somehow they can attract each other? That's the sort of question that science has never been able to answer....

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career, details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution after his famous (though perhaps mythological) discovery under the apple tree. Her work emphasizes science as a long, continuous process composed of incremental contributions–in which women throughout history have taken a crucial part–rather than the sole province of a few monolithic innovators.

Patricia joined Tyler to discuss why Newton left Cambridge to run The Royal Mint, why he was so productive during the Great Plague, why the “Scientific Revolution” should instead be understood as a gradual process, what the Antikythera device tells us about science in the ancient world, the influence of Erasmus Darwin on his grandson, why more people should know Dorothy Hodgkin, how George Eliot inspired her to commit unhistoric acts, why she opposes any kind of sex-segregated schooling, her early experience in a startup, what modern students of science can learn from studying Renaissance art, the reasons she considers Madame Lavoisier to be the greatest female science illustrator, the unusual work habit brought to her attention by house guests, the book of caricatures she’d like to write next, and more.

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Recorded January 15th, 2021 Other ways to connect

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