William Newman, Indiana University
Columbia University
Time: 6pm
Location: Fayerweather 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, Columbia University
Speaker: William Newman, The Chymistry of Newton Project, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University
Despite the fact that Isaac Newton’s alchemy has been a matter of common knowledge since the famous Sotheby’s auction of 1936 when the bulk of his chymical manuscripts were sold, we still have a very weak understanding of precisely what Newton was trying to accomplish in the laboratory. He left behind two extensive laboratory notebooks that are found in the Portsmouth Collection at the University of Cambridge, but the experimental portions of these notebooks consist almost entirely of laboratory protocols without any indication of Newton’s goals for the extensive operations found there. These experimental collections stand in striking contrast to Newton’s reading notes and epitomes, which form the largest component of the million or so words that he wrote on alchemy. In the current scholarly climate, with its emphasis on the importance of material culture, making sense of Newton’s alchemy by actually doing it, and not just reading about it, should provide a timely new historiographical approach. At the same time, it is possible to combine this “replication approach” with techniques drawn from Digital Humanities, such as Latent Semantic Analysis. This talk will describe my ongoing attempts to decode the manuscripts by employing a battery of laboratory and computational methods, focusing both on the problems and the solutions that this new hybrid approach provides.