[TOM] It was a funeral fit for a king.

That the deceased was technically  a commoner didn’t seem to matter. Lords, dukes, and earls  were among the pallbearers.

Even the famous French satirist Voltaire  is rumored to have been in attendance. The deceased lay in state at Westminster  Abbey as the crowd mourned the loss of one   of the world’s most important  scientists: Sir Isaac Newton. He was entombed near a grand monument  celebrating his many accomplishments.

An inscription on the monument  commemorated his work in mathematics,   optics, and the movements  of the heavens themselves. Newton had brought light to the  world, and now that he was gone,   darkness seemed to fall once again. But immediately after his death in  1727, something strange began to happen.

A large body of his work was deemed unfit to   print and was effectively hidden  for more than two hundred years. A biography published in 1752  grudgingly acknowledged Newton’s   relationship with this unsavory field of science, but assured its readers that it was  in a cool, smart, Enlightenment way. An entire branch of Newton’s work, spanning  thirty years and roughly one million words, was being swept under the rug.

The only clue that remained was on that monument. Not in the epitaph, which has no mention of  it. But instead, in the relief on the side.

Little cherubs play with scientific  instruments related to Newton’s work. A prism, a telescope, a balance, and a furnace. Which… wait.

A furnace? What- What does a furnace have to  do with optics, gravity, or math? Well, nothing.

But it has a  whole lot to do with alchemy. Yes, Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist. One who sincerely believed that certain  common metals could be turned into gold, and who sought the Philosopher’s Stone,   a legendary substance that  would enable him to do so.

This embarrassing superstition was  politely ignored for centuries. Until recent scholarship, which loudly  proclaims: It shouldn’t have been! Because it’s not superstition,  and it’s not embarrassing.

Alchemists, who spent more than a millennium  trying to turn cheap metals into gold, weren’t just trying to get rich. They  were trying to understand the world. When Newton described  mystical-sounding substances like the “scepter of Jove” or the “doves  of Diana” in his alchemy experiments, he was participating in a process  that led straight to modern chemistry.

This is the story of the man  who has been called both the   “first scientist” and the “last magician,” and how he hoped alchemy would  unlock the secrets of the universe. [♪ INTRO] [♪ MUSIC] History has preserved an extremely  favorable portrait of Isaac Newton. And I’m not going to tell you  it’s not deserved. But we’ve   left out some of the bits we find inconvenient.

Just like every human being who has ever  lived, Newton was a product of his time. And in his time, alchemy was accepted,  if not quite mainstream, science. A little more secretive than most fields, granted.

Newton never did publish very  many of those million words on it. But his lab notebooks prove that he was actively  carrying out experiments that he thought would lead to the Philosopher’s Stone. To understand why, we first need to establish a  few things about chemistry in the 17th century.

Starting off with that name itself. There was actually no distinction between  alchemy and chemistry at the time. So to represent this hybrid field, many  scholars refer to chymistry, with a “y”. [Newman] I pronounce it with a southern  accent as “chymistry.” [laughs] [TOM] That’s William Newman, a professor in the Department of History   and Philosophy of Science and  Medicine at Indiana University.

He manages an online archive called  The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, and he literally wrote the  book on Newton and alchemy. Now, alchemists were interested in many things,   like changing metals into gold,  a process called transmutation. But they were also trying to make  medicines, just like chemists today.

Another big thing they were  after was called the alkahest. [SLEDGE] Famously, this is the universal  solvent, which produced a logical problem. If it's a universal solvent,  what do you store it in? [TOM] That’s Justin Sledge, an academic who  specializes in the history of Western esotericism. You can find him applying a scholarly lens  to subjects like alchemy, magic, and Kabbalah on his YouTube channel, Esoterica.

So how did Newton get lured  in by the glittering promises   of what many people today consider mysticism? He was coming in at the end of a tradition  that spanned centuries, and cultures, and goes all the way back to ancient Egypt. [SLEDGE] So the going theory about  where alchemy begins is in Egypt. And the idea that normally gets thrown about  is that alchemy is a combination of two things.

It's the combination of indigenous  Egyptian metallurgical traditions, which were very advanced and  very advanced very early. I mean, all you have to do is look at something  like the funerary mask of Tutankhamun. And then the combination of that  with Greek theories of nature, which is to say primarily the  Aristotelian theory of nature   of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water.

So in many ways, alchemy is born in  Egypt and it's born of the combination of Egyptian craft knowledge and  Greek theoretical knowledge. [TOM] Things really seem to  have gotten rolling in the   city of Alexandria around the third century CE. And a lot of what these early, proto-alchemists  were doing was strictly practical. It was kind of a blue-collar gig.

They were doing things like  producing fake gemstones or   changing the color of metals to beautify temples. It was also a really egalitarian  time, at least in the sense that we know of a lot of women who  did alchemy in this period. If you’ve ever used a bain-marie in  the kitchen, aka a double boiler, it bears the name of the alchemist  who’s said to have invented it way back in the first century: Maria Hebraea.

And for me, Hollandaise sauce  is basically liquid gold. So, having her name said by chefs thousands  of years later is very well earned. Speaking of which, one of the  techniques these alchemists had was changing the surface of  silver to look like gold.

All you needed was a little calcium oxide,  sulfur, and I quote, “the urine of a youth.” Heat it up and dunk the silver  for just the right amount of time,   and the surface turns a golden color. Modern chemists have reproduced  this process – pee included – so it was definitely something they could do. And at some point, somebody had an “aha” moment.

They asked themself, why am  I stopping at the surface? Why not go all the way and  turn the whole thing gold? And thus, the dream of transmutation was born.

This Roman-era melting pot of Greek, Egyptian,   and Roman thought is also where  we get the notion of hermeticism. [SLEDGE] So, there was a sort of  syncretistic religion that emerged   sometime around the turn of the common era. No one knows exactly where. Hermes  Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice Great, is sort of a Greekified version  of the Egyptian god Thoth.

And three of the major so-called occult sciences  become deeply associated with Hermes Trismegistus, those being Hermeticism as a philosophy, alchemy as a theory of nature and astrology and magic being sort of the big  three hermetic sciences or occult sciences. [TOM] Yeah, those incomprehensible lines of  text we’ve been showing throughout this video? They’ve been from the Emerald  Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, an incredibly important and incredibly  confusing work of hermetic literature. People, including Newton, have been trying  to figure out what it means for centuries.

It’s… probably about the Philosopher’s Stone? Though the whole thing is pretty cryptic,  so if you know what it means, let us know. But it does bring us to an  important point in our story, because we’ve reached the stage where the  Philosopher’s Stone is starting to pop up.

Mentions of a stone that can transform  things go back to around the 7th century. In the 8th century, Islamic scholars started  to become super interested in alchemy. Modern scholars believe The Emerald Tablet  was probably first written in Arabic.

For the Islamic scholars, transmutation could be  accomplished through different kinds of elixirs, a word whose Arabic origins become obvious when   you swap the E for an A and  pronounce it as al-iksir. That definite article al- is also hanging  out in alchemy, in case you hadn’t noticed. But the most important development by the   Islamic alchemists might be the  sulfur-mercury theory of metals.

The idea was that everything is made up of  two things: sulfur and mercury. Sort of. Like so many good wrong ideas  in the history of science,   the reasoning traces its roots back to Aristotle, and the idea that sulfur  and mercury were fundamental   “principles” or “exhalations”  that rise up from the earth. [SLEDGE] We shouldn't think of them exclusively  as modern elemental mercury and sulfur.

Although they were that, we should also  think of them as principles of fixedness. Sulfur being a principle of fixedness,  what holds a thing together. And mercury is a period of volatility,  the process by which something can change. [TOM] The idea had real staying power.  All the way to the time of Newton.

And the thing is? It’s not  as far-fetched as it sounds. [SLEDGE] Part of the reason why  the sulfur-mercury theory of the   metals was so popular is that it is  empirically verifiable in some sense. And what I mean by that is  that if you take the natural   form- naturally occurring form of lead, galena, and you roast galena what ends up happening is  that as you roast it, the sulfur bound up with it you can smell the sulfur come off of it, and that  tells them hold on, like, there's sulfur in this.

And then if you've ever seen molten lead, it  looks a bit like mercury, and so the idea was it seems like metals must be made of this sort   of fundamental substrate of some  combination of sulfur and mercury. And so the sulfur-mercury theory of the metals   was successful because it matched what  alchemists were noticing in their labs. And you can't blame them.

It's a- it’s a very good  theory. It just happens to be an incorrect theory. [TOM] Basically, what people believed was   that metals weren’t fundamental  elements as we know them today. They were more like compounds  of sulfur and mercury.

So it actually made complete sense that   you could tweak the ratios and  change one metal into another. And that’s the first really  important point I want to make here. When you hear the word “alchemy” you  might think of people putting a pinch   of this and a little of that into a cauldron, hoping something good will happen, but  having no real idea of what they were doing.

Maybe wearing a cool hood to be extra mysterious. Or you might think of more  recent pop culture iterations,   like The Witcher or Full Metal Alchemist, or Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood if you want   the more recent adaptation and to  skip some of the smaller subplots and also the movies are worth watching,  so The Sacred Star of Milos is great. You can skip that if you want,  but it takes place somewhere   ambiguously during I think the second season if you want to be technical  about when it ha- [beep] But real life alchemists weren’t  fighting the forces of evil, they were conducting experiments,   making observations, and drawing  conclusions based on what they observed.

They were building up a body of knowledge based on  those conclusions and passing it along to others. Which almost sounds like science. Because it is. [♪ MUSIC] So Newton was working with  a good but wrong theory.

Fair enough. So are a lot of  theories in the history of science! Still, how did alchemy get his  attention in the first place? [NEWMAN] Well, it appears to me that Newton got  interested in alchemy at a pretty early age.

I think it's actually an outgrowth of  his adolescent interest in the field   that in the 17th century was called natural magic, which is something that we know  he had an interest in as a youth because he took notes on two different  books that fall into that general category. [TOM] His interest seems to deepen when   he goes off to college and starts  reading the work of Robert Boyle. If you’ve studied much chemistry, you  might be going, wait, that Robert Boyle? The guy who came up with  Boyle’s Law?

From the textbooks? I thought that guy was a real chemist who didn’t  believe in superstitious junk like alchemy! Well, Boyle wasn’t a chemist, he was a  chymist, and chymistry included alchemy. [NEWMAN] Yeah, this is a complicated matter,   but it turns out that Boyle  was far friendlier to alchemy than 20th century historians  would have led us to believe.

And that was, interestingly, something  that was aided and abetted by the title of one of Boyle's most famous  works, namely The Skeptical Chymist. If you don't read beyond the title, it sounds as  though [laughs] Boyle is skeptical about alchemy. The skepticism really had nothing to do with  whether metals can be transmuted into one another or whether other things can be transmuted. [TOM] Boyle was actually taking issue with  certain details of the sulfur-mercury theory.

Transmutation, that he had no problem with. In fact, he claimed to have seen  it performed with his own eyes. So it really was taken seriously  by most chymists of the day.

Boyle – an important figure in modern science,   and your chemistry homework – was  a significant influence on Newton. But Newton also did a ton of  reading beyond just Boyle. He studied the “adepts” – alchemists who claimed  to have performed transmutation successfully.

And naturally, he aspired to join their ranks. Newton had access to a basic chymical  laboratory as early as 1669, when he was 26, but his notebooks don’t record a ton of  experimental work until a decade later. Why not? [NEWMAN] I think because these texts were  written in a kind of a riddling style.

I mean, some of them are literally riddles. And Newton understood that in order to  perform the practices recorded in the text,   you had to decipher the text first. So throughout his alchemical career,  he begins typically by synopsizing, that is writing a kind of an  abridgment of an alchemical text.

And then he'll write commentaries on it  in which he tries to decipher the riddles. [TOM] But Newman also says Newton could have   been doing more experiments we  just don’t have notebooks for. It sounds simple, but the historical record often  looks more like Swiss cheese than a Kraft single. Anyhow, one of these adepts wrote under  the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes.

No one had ever met the guy, but his  writing was circulated to a select few, and Newton, as a big alchemy fanboy,  managed to get his paws on it. Newton devoted a lot of time to trying  to understand Philalethes’ procedures. He ran in circles trying to figure out   the correct starting material to  produce the Philosopher’s Stone.

And he deduced that the  key was starting with lead. But it wasn’t working out for him. And it was  contradicting what other adepts were writing.

He was also, uh, probably wrong  about Philalethes saying it was lead. This problem was driving him nuts. Philalethes  was an adept!

He had produced the Stone already! So how could he possibly be wrong? One issue might have been that Philalethes’   text was adapted from another  alchemist, called Sendivogius, so there might have been  some telephone game going on.

It was like reading a fan  translation of Fullmetal Alchemist. Although you do really have  to hand it to the fanlations,   especially when the series  wasn’t as popular overseas because they didn’t have as  many resources to work with and they were really doing it  from the love of the– [BEEP] Anyway … There was another bigger  issue here. Namely that, umm … Philalethes never existed.

He  was the OC of one George Starkey,   the so-called American Philosopher. He was called this because  it was pretty unusual for   a philosopher to have come  from America in the 1600s. In fact, he was one of the first few graduates of  a new school that had opened up called Harvard. [NEWMAN] I would argue he's really the  unsung hero of early American science because this is a guy who was born  in Bermuda of all places in 1628.

Starkey claimed that this Eirenaeus  Philalethes was still living in New England, and Eirenaeus Philalethes had given  Starkey permission to circulate these   manuscripts to a restricted  circle of intelligent people. Starkey then was claiming that he was   the middleman. And this put  him in a very good position because as a middleman, he couldn't be held  accountable for failed attempts at transmutation, which of course all such attempts  would have been, ultimately. [TOM] So Newton was working from a  set of pretty flawed instructions.

Eventually, he course-corrected and came up with a  different plan, and around 1678 at the age of 35, it seems like he was ready to start trying to   produce the Philosopher’s  Stone for real this time. That’s nearly ten years after  he first gained access to a lab. And like I said, maybe he was doing some  stuff before that we just don’t know about.

But it seems like it should be easier  to start just following a recipe, right? Put some stuff in a flask, heat it up, and  you’re off. What was taking him so long?

Well the answer to that riddle is, more riddles. But before I get to that, I  have to pause for a quick ad   about this cool shirt the SciShow team gave me. [SAVANNAH] It’s me! I’m from the SciShow team!

Alchemy was a weird time for science,   thanks in part to all the funky  drawings in alchemical texts. Which you have already seen  sprinkled throughout this episode. We loved these drawings so much - I mean  how could we not, just look at them - that we put some of them on a shirt!

Which  you can purchase at Complexly.store/scishow. We’ve got the sun, the moon,  some alchemical symbols,   and of course a green lion devouring the sun. What do all these mean?

No spoilers.  Tom will tell you in just a bit. Our graphic designer Elliot  Zheng also did a great job of incorporating the other visual elements from  this episode into the design, like the stairs! Which are reminiscent of the stairs we made  Tom sit on for an entire half day of recording.

This shirt will only be available for two weeks!  From today, October 17th, to October 31st. After that, it’s gone forever. To get yours, again go to Complexly.store/scishow.

And now back to Tom for more about  what all these drawings mean. [♪ MUSIC] [TOM] Just because alchemy was science, doesn’t mean it wasn’t weird –  in a beautiful, bewildering way. Remember how I said those  texts were written as riddles? That wasn’t an exaggeration.

In fact, it might be  more accurate to call them full-on escape rooms. A lot of alchemical information was in code. The names of various chemicals were usually  replaced by metaphors called Decknamen, a German word that means “cover names.” One common example is that the sun and moon almost  always refer to gold and silver, respectively.

And other metals got the planets. In fact, one of these has even  stuck with us to the present day. As cool as the name quicksilver is, we  still call that shiny liquidy metal Mercury.

Not that Decknamen were consistent, like how  in modern chemistry mercury is always Hg. Even the same author could switch  between Decknamen if they felt like it. For example, in the book The  12 Keys of Basil Valentine,   gold is the King in the first key,  but in the second one, it’s Apollo.

Why? Maybe the author wanted a new metaphor, maybe  they just wanted to keep people on their toes. Strategically leaving out or moving  around information was a trick alchemists   often used to make their procedures  just a little bit less accessible.

A lot of manuscripts also used  elaborate images used to refer   to procedures, ingredients, you name it. You get green lions eating the sun  and serpents biting their own tails   and sun-headed dudes climbing out  of Mario pipes and it’s just great. Alchemists got to be scientists AND artists.

But it’s also pretty tough to work out what  you’re looking for under all this metaphor. Like, there’s a wolf jumping over  a fire and you’re supposed to just   know that that means you need to  purify gold with antimony ore. People joke that memes these days are cryptic,  but alchemists were cooking back then too.

And just like a cryptic meme, there were ways to   decipher rhyme and reason in these  messages. Like the green lion one. [SLEDGE] The green lion is aqua regia. Because the only thing capable of attacking  the sun, i.e. gold, is aqua regia, which is a combination of nitric  acid and hydrochloric acid.

And those two put together will dissolve gold.  There's always a little bit of copper in there. Again, we're not dealing with modern  labs where you have pure gold. You're dealing with alchemical labs where  you have always some degree of contamination.

And if you've ever done it right, you'll  see that you're going to get some green. [TOM] In other words, as strange and  mysterious as these images seem to us now, alchemists of the day would have been terminally  online enough to infer what they meant. Also, there were usually corresponding  instructions written down somewhere, even if they used a bunch of Decknamen and stuff. But what was the point of these cryptic  puzzles?

Besides being cool and fun. [SLEDGE] There's multiple redundant reasons why  the alchemists relied on these kinds of symbols. It's everything from just being a good  shorthand to hiding their trade secrets to obliterating the fact that frankly,   you just can't transmute lead into  gold. It's just chemically not possible.

So what better way of hiding  that than dragons eating stuff? [TOM] And there were other reasons  why alchemists operated in secrecy. They dealt with constant accusations of  fraud and grift, not to mention greed. When in fact, many alchemists actually  considered transmutation a solemn responsibility.

It was known to many in the Middle Ages  and the early modern period as a Donum Dei, Latin for “gift of God” – one he’d  bestow if you were worthy of it. Newton himself shared this view.  And because it was so important,   it needed to be kept between  those who could handle it. He even called Boyle out once for  discussing alchemy too publicly. [NEWMAN] Newton thought that alchemists  had acquired tremendous power over nature and that they had both a moral  obligation to keep it secret and also fear that they would be themselves  attacked if their secrets were revealed. [TOM] And that’s why we had to  protect the identity of this very   special interview we conducted with a real adept. [ADEPT] If you say you’re  working on transmutation,   now all of a sudden every king and  their cousin wants you to do it for   them!

They’ll scoop you right off  the street if you’re not careful! [TOM] That’s what happened  to poor old Johann Böttger, who got himself arrested by the elector of Saxony  and spent a good chunk of his life in prison. He did figure out how to make  porcelain, though, so good for him. [ADEPT] Second, have you  read an economics textbook? What do you think is going to happen when  we can turn anything into gold?

Pandemonium! You think bitcoin is bad? No, this  secret is staying safe with me. [TOM] And while some alchemists took these   responsibilities and vows  of secrecy very seriously, there were of course others who  had, uh … fewer moral qualms. [NEWMAN] So you have to bear in mind, this  was long before there were organizations   like the National Science Foundation  that supported basic chemistry, right?

So in order to attract a patron,   one had to typically present  oneself as successful in that area. So basically, you can see these  alchemical demonstrations where people we nowadays would call charlatans traveling  from city to city performing transmutations as grant proposals, early grant proposals.  [laughs] That's the way I look at it. [SLEDGE] I think my favorite  example of someone who was   probably an alchemical grifter was Edward Kelly. Ultimately, Edward, and he was famous because  his ears had been cut off for forgery.

So he was a con man, de-eared on account of it. And at any rate, he made big claims that he could   do transmutation and Rudolph  II invited him into his court. Rudolph II was probably the most welcoming of   people interested in the occult  sciences anywhere in the world.

But this is always a problem. You make  the big promise and can you do it? And if you make the promise,  you become very dangerous because the more likely that you  are able to produce silver and gold,   the closer the local monarch needs to keep you.

Because if you can do it, you  can destabilize their economy. And if you can do it, they want you under  their beck and call. It's Oppenheimer, right?

You’re the Oppenheimer. And so basically what ends up  happening, what transforms from   an invitation to be an alchemist, a  court alchemist, becomes imprisoned. And of course, Edward Kelly is very  famous because that is how he dies.

He attempts to escape from basically   an alchemical prison and he falls  and badly breaks both of his legs and this leads to some kind of infection  and he ultimately dies a couple days later. [TOM] But, in spite of all the zany stories,   there were loads of people who took the whole  gift from God thing completely seriously. People who were doing serious,  rational experiments on transmutation. And the wild thing is that by sometime in  the early modern period, around the 1500s, they had worked out what they thought was a   canonical process to making  the Philosopher’s Stone.

THE thing in alchemy, the macguffin, the holy  grail, the philosopher’s stone – literally! Sure they hadn’t figured it  out down to the microgram,   but people at this time widely agreed  that these were the steps to make it. It goes like this.

First you put a bunch of [BEEP] in an  oval flask with a long neck. Then – [DIRECTOR, OFFSCREEN] What was that? [TOM] You know some [BEEP]. It’s not  important, we’ll get back to that.

Then you seal the flask according to  the principles of hermetic wisdom. It’s hermetically sealed. Yes, that’s where  that expression comes from.

Next you heat it up. Quick advice for any aspiring  transmuters out there. Um,   don’t heat up sealed flasks,  unless your goal is explosions.

Which it shouldn’t be! After a month or so of heating, the  substance inside will turn black. Then it will flash through a series of  colors compared to a peacock’s tail,   until eventually, it turns white.

Now, if you’re tired at this  point you can actually stop here and get a perfectly usable white version of the   stone that can turn base metals into  silver which is, hey, not too shabby. But for the real Adepts watching, you can  crank up the temperature and keep heating. The substance inside will turn yellow, then red.

Crack open the flask and carry out a few  more steps, and bada bing, bada boom, you’ve got yourself a handy  dandy Philosopher’s Stone. A deep red substance that can  penetrate metals and turn them to gold. Sounds pretty easy, but of course if it  was, somebody would have done it by now. [SLEDGE] And my favorite thing to  do in any alchemical experiment where they're attempting to do a transmutation  of silver or gold is to very carefully follow.

And at some point in every alchemical experiment   there’s...and then a miracle  happens. The hand-wave moment. And then you get gold and you can transmute  it and project it and all this sort of stuff.

And it's always interesting  following it up to that point. Because there’s, there is  chemistry, there is science,   there is experimentalism until,  you know, a miracle happens. [TOM] Everybody was really sure that this  was totally going to work eventually. The problem was that mysterious  “something” at the start of the recipe.

The first material that you put in that  flask. The seed of the Philosopher’s Stone. Nobody knew what the “something” was.  But everyone was trying to find it.

Because if you could, well,  you could change the world. [♪ MUSIC] Newton devoted decades to  alchemical experimentation,   from his 30s to his 50s, until he moved to  London to work for the Royal Mint in 1696. And he was always in pursuit of that “something.”   That precursor ingredient  to the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s too complicated to get into what  exactly he thought that “something” was.

There are flowcharts, I am not kidding. In fact, it seemed like he thought he needed  to produce quite a few “somethings,” and put them through a bunch of complicated steps,   before anything ever went into  that hermetically sealed flask. So what were those ”somethings” that he made?

Well, spoiler alert, not the  Philosopher’s Stone. Sorry. But he did produce quite a few interesting things.

One of them was called “liquor of antimony,”  based on work by Boyle, the Skeptical Chymist. Newton also produced something  he called “sophic sal ammoniac.” Sal ammoniac normally  referred to ammonium chloride,   but Newton’s version seems  to have involved antimony. He made a compound described by Starkey as  “Vulcan’s net,” an alloy of copper and antimony.

And yes, in case you’re sensing a pattern here, he  really liked antimony. A number of alchemists did. While some thought mercury or salts were the right  starting material for the Philosopher’s Stone, antimony was also a popular  choice due to what we’d now   call its properties as a semimetal or metalloid.

It’s brittle like glass, but shiny like a metal. It clearly had “in-between”  properties that made it seem   like it could hold some kind of key to metal-ness. None of these “somethings” were  themselves the Philosopher’s Stone, but all were attempts to discover the  perfect candidate for becoming the Stone.

And all this work culminates in  Newton’s unpublished work called Praxis. This text is so wildly imaginative that  it has been interpreted as either a   masterpiece or the result of a nervous breakdown. Newman argues it’s the former.

And it does seem to be a  pretty systematic attempt to   lay out exactly how to get  to the Philosopher’s Stone. In fact, for all practical purposes, what  Newton is doing here is just… chemistry. You can see him doing things like  mass balance and qualitative analysis that are totally familiar to anyone  who’s seen the inside of a chemistry lab.

He even had many of the same  problems. In his own words: “Well, I was so close to producing the oak   described by Philalethes …  and then ye glass broke.” Oh, buddy. We’ve all been there.

Please don’t send  me to ye principle’s office, t’was an accident! But joking aside, that does bring us to the really   big question. One we’ve been  circling around all this time.

Why? Why is Newton, by all accounts a pretty  smart guy, spending decades of his life, using real chemistry procedures and  methods for the Philosopher’s Stone? [♪ MUSIC] Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Yes, the goal of the Philosopher’s  Stone was to produce gold. [SLEDGE] Yeah, you're trying to make gold.

And it's not to say that you're not trying  to make gold because you're not greedy. I'm sure every alchemist, if they could make gold,   they would have been more than happy to  have a little bit more gold in their pocket. [TOM] But there’s so much more to it than that,  more than the greedy, or even the moral reasons. If the sulfur-mercury theory is  the Standard Model of physics,   then transmutation is the  Higgs boson.

Lemme explain. The finer details of particle physics  are too much to get into right now, but a few years back researchers found  a particle called the Higgs boson that demonstrated that our understanding of the  universe is at least mostly on the right track. It was this big hole they needed to plug.

A big thumbs up and sigh of relief that we  don’t need to throw out every physics textbook. In a similar way, the sulfur-mercury theory was  also a kind of theory of everything for metals. [SLEDGE] But they are, in some sense,  trying to think about how to perfect nature. And in order to perfect nature, you need to  be able to control how nature produces itself.

And if nature can produce gold, you  should be able to do it as well. And so, yeah, it's about bringing  nature to its completion. [TOM] Folks up to and including Newton believed  that metals were in some sense a living thing. That they were growing deep within the Earth,   being produced by these  principles of mercury and sulfur.

And again, this theory isn’t  as far-fetched as it sounds. If you look at the inside of a  mine, or just open up Minecraft,   you can see ores winding their way  through the rock like tree roots. If the alchemists could recreate in the lab  what nature was always doing on a grand scale,   that would prove that they were right.

It would show that their understanding of  nature was correct. Just like the Higgs boson. And so, re-enter Isaac Newton,  the last of the magicians.

He could also be called an occultist –  in the sense that occult means hidden. He sought to unveil the forces that  he believed God had hidden in nature. After all, gravity is invisible,   and the component colors of light were  obscure until Newton revealed them.

And in alchemy, he was trying  to decipher the hidden processes   occurring deep underground – the  fundamental nature of the metals. Alchemy is, in many ways, right up his alley. Just  the next item on his checklist through nature. [SLEDGE] Newton was like, “I think God  has hidden a lot of things from us.” And it's the task that you'll  find those hidden things.

And so Newton in that way, as an  occultist, is much closer to a   modern physicist for whom it's obvious  that there are hidden forces in nature. And I think that rather than running  away from Newton the occultist, scientists should be like, “Yeah, he was more  right than you could have ever imagined.” [♪ MUSIC] [TOM] So let’s flip the question  on its head. You might be feeling   pretty alchemy-pilled at this point in the video.

But if alchemy was so important to  Newton’s understanding of the universe,   why did he ever stop? Newton went off to London to work at  the Royal Mint in 1696 at the age of 53, and we have very little evidence for him  doing much alchemical stuff after that. This was the time of his life when much  of his greatest scientific work was done,   and he didn’t pass away  until 1727 at the age of 84.

So… what changed? One possible  reason he quit is simple. [SLEDGE] I think that it is not  a good look if the head of your   mint is secretly trying to produce gold and silver because what separates a successful alchemist  from a counterfeiter? And again, it's dangerous.

If you can actually produce gold and silver  at will, what's the value of gold and silver? [TOM] And it wasn’t just the Mint.  Newton’s star was rising in a big way, from becoming president of  the English Royal Society,   joining the French version, to the whole  knighthood thing. Lots of eyes were on him. Other theories have been proposed,  up to and including a messy breakup.

Newton was collaborating  with a dashing young Swiss   alchemist named Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1693, and the idea is that Fatio  got alchemy in the divorce. But the historical evidence seems to contradict  the idea that they broke things off abruptly. In fact, others think that  Newton never quit alchemy at all.

Newman has published evidence that Newton  was still corresponding with colleagues   about alchemy during his time at  the Mint… just on the down low. Also, the dating of Newton’s  unpublished Praxis isn’t clear. The earliest possible year is 1693,   since it mentions Fatio, but it  actually could have been later.

And even as an old man, Newton once observed to   his nephew-in-law that he’d like to go  back and have “another touch at metals.” Basically, there’s no reason to think  Newton gave up on alchemy entirely. But the same can’t be said for Europe as a whole. [♪ MUSIC] The year for the death of transmutational  alchemy is sometimes given as 1722,   just five years before the death of Newton. That’s when a talk was given at  the French Academy of Sciences   condemning fraudulent practices in transmutation.

If you look closely, the  author technically doesn’t   ever dismiss the idea of real transmutation. And there’s evidence people were still practicing  it on the sly at the Academy up until the 1760s. Still, even if this time period wasn’t  when people stopped doing transmutation,   it’s when they stopped doing it out loud. [NEWMAN] If you mean by alchemy,  transmutational alchemy, it comes   into disrepute beginning really widely  in the first quarter of the 18th century.

But their basis for doing this was  purely empirical. It wasn't theoretical. There was no theoretical reason  why eighteenth century chemists   should have rejected transmutation.

It simply had to do with the fact  that they couldn't make it work,   and they didn't know anybody who could. So 18th century chemistry is still doing alchemy,   but without the open attempt to  transmute base metals into gold. [TOM] It’s kind of simple, really. People were finally starting to catch on  to the idea that transmutation just wasn’t   getting anywhere, and science  marched on, as science does.

The scholar Lawrence Principe at Johns  Hopkins has made the argument that   alchemy had to go to clear the way for  chemistry as a respectable profession. Alchemy was greedy, fraudulent,  and above all, dirty. But chemistry?

That was where the good  stuff was, from medicines to gunpowder. And so, this smear campaign  resulted in the split we have now. No longer chymistry, now there was fake,   superstitious alchemy, and  proper scientific chemistry.

Alchemy was the scapegoat left holding all the  mistakes that are a natural part of real science. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries,  that unfair reputation remained stubbornly intact. But now, scholars – including Newman  and Principe – are fighting to give   alchemy its rightful place  in the history of science.

And the way they’re doing it is by,   of all things, actually recreating  experiments done by the adepts. [♪ MUSIC] See, one way to study the history of alchemy  is to sit down at a lab bench and do it. Alchemists weren’t just making stuff up and  writing it down. At least, not entirely.

We’ve shown that in trying to  produce the Philosopher’s Stone,   they were doing real experiments. But the best way to prove that is to  actually follow their instructions. [NEWMAN] Well, I think the  short answer to the question   of why we try to replicate alchemical experiments is that there's just no other way to understand   the text unless you try to see  what people were actually doing. Anybody who's studied chemistry today  can tell you that reading a chemistry   book is a very different thing from  doing a chemical laboratory course.

But, you know, even somebody who  hasn't taken chemistry courses,   someone who has tried using  a cookbook can tell you this. I mean, what does it mean when they  talk about folding the egg whites   into a mixture. [laughs] This is not obvious. You may think you know what it means,   but when you actually try it out,  you'll find that you may have trouble breaking the very eggs and  separating the whites and the yolks before you can even whip the whites  separate from the yolks to make that. [TOM] Consider the time Principe tried to recreate  a medicine from an early 17th century work by someone writing under  the name of Basil Valentine,   whose book 12 Keys we’ve already mentioned.

This work follows an idea that  you can purify the poison out   of a material in order to turn it into a medicine. In this case, the recipe once again  calls for every alchemist’s favorite,   say it with me: antimony! And says a red solution will be the end result.

If you were just to read this,  you might think it was bogus. Antimony is a) always poisonous  and b) never red in solution,   so this recipe can’t possibly have worked. And it didn’t work, not when Principe tried  it with modern pure lab reagents and tools.

But then he realized the author of  the text didn’t have those things. So he tried again, with intentionally contaminated   reagents and iron tools.  And it worked like a charm. The final product didn’t  actually contain antimony.

It was iron acetate, which isn’t  terribly medicinal but is a step   up in the poison department.  So in a way, the recipe worked. It demonstrated what its author meant to,   which was removing the poisonous  properties from the starting material. An even more shocking development  comes from Newton’s own notebooks. [NEWMAN], Newton was doing chemistry, I  think, in the strictest sense of the term.

And in some respects, he was even doing  new chemistry because his processes   are things that chemists don't typically do today. For example, I recently wrote an article  with two X-ray diffraction crystallographers,   David Bish and Morin Pink at Indiana University, where I recreated one of Newton's  compounds and they analyzed it. And it turns out that the product was  something that no one had made before,   at least since Newton. [TOM] This paper is still making its way through  the publication process at the time we’re filming, but Newman kindly provided us an  advance copy and it is a page-turner.

They followed a procedure from  one of Newton’s letters to Fatio,   and obtained a greenish mix of solids. One of these was the new compound,   which seems to be a complex mix  of ammonium, copper, and chlorine. And it doesn’t even seem to  be the only novel compound   obtained from recreating Newton’s experiments.

The authors say we should be taking notes. Newton’s old alchemical methods could give   us hints toward new ways of  synthesizing chemicals today. [♪ MUSIC] Alchemy was science. It always has been.

Maybe not in the sense we know it now. That wasn’t a thing until Newton’s time,   and you can’t expect people to follow  rules that haven’t been invented yet. But it was founded in  observation and experimentation.

In failing and trying again. In drawing  conclusions and sharing them with others. And it was born of a sincere desire to  understand the way the world worked.

The alchemists were wrong about a lot of stuff,  but being wrong sets you up to be right later. They were secretive, but it  was because they believed in   the solemn responsibility bestowed on them by God. And if they were mysterious and mystical  at times, well, that just adds to the fun. [SLEDGE] We should be much more open to the fact  that the history of science is a messy history.

And that just because the alchemists had  a fundamentally flawed theory of nature,   which we probably also still  have a flawed theory of nature. We have no combined theory for quantum mechanics  and gravity. We know our theory is wrong.

The alchemists, I think many of them must  have also known something was wrong too, because everyone claims to be  able to do this and no one could. And so I think that what we should-  the way we should approach alchemy   is with a great deal of intellectual humility. It’s that even if they were laboring under  a fundamentally false theory of nature,   they were still careful experimentalists.

They were still attempting to try to reproduce  what they observed in nature in a lab and record those results and try  to get them reproduced and even   publishing them so that other  people could reproduce them. So to draw a line that says, before this  was superstition and after this was science, I think is a misunderstanding of what science is,   how knowledge production happens, what  empiricism looks like in practice. [TOM] And that brings us back to Newton.  The first scientist, and the last magician. The occultist who revealed what was hidden  – who brought light even to light itself.

The man whose pursuit of the  Great Work of transmutation   was the capstone of fifteen hundred  years of rational experimentation. He never did turn lead into gold. But he did help transform the obscured elements of   nature into something that  could be seen and studied.

Alchemy led to chemistry,   which led to medicine and agricultural  advances and a million other things. Which if you ask me, is not  too bad for a magic trick. [♪ OUTRO] This video was made possible by  the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.   To learn more, visit the link in the description.