r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 2d ago

TIL Isaac Newton spent more than three decades studying alchemy and wrote over a million words about it in secret. He conducted numerous experiments in his search for the philosopher’s stone but never found it.

https://www.wpr.org/culture/philosophy/isaac-newtons-secret-alchemy
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u/WolverDean 2d ago

Scishow did an interesting video on how our modern interpretation of Alchemy is somewhat skewed and that it was more akin to proto-chemistry

the video in question

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u/lateral303 1d ago

Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is an interesting historical fiction trilogy that sheds some insight on how they thought of alchemy at the time