Book details of 'Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Helix Books)'

Title	Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Helix Books)
Author(s)	Michael White
ISBN	0201483017
Language	English
Published	January 1998
Publisher	Perseus Publishing

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Helix Books)':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Science writer Michael White's subtitle, The Last Sorcerer, echoes John Maynard Keynes's assertion in 1942 that Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was not the Olympian rationalist portrayed by his worshipful early biographers. Newton was a great scientist, the author acknowledges; he was also an "obsessive, driven mystic," deeply involved in the pseudoscience of alchemy, subscriber to a heretical sect of Christianity, and damaged survivor of childhood traumas that rendered him a difficult, egotistical, quarrelsome adult. White makes recent research accessible to the general reader in lucid prose that knocks the academic dust off a towering historical figure.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
The research materials used in this study are extensive, but not uncommon. The narrative, eminently readable, can be seen to be accurate by the frequent situations to books, published papers, or available correspondence. On occasion White obviously wants to theorize beyond the source materials (as in the case of the "missing years" between Newton at age three and eleven), but, to be strictly fair, White makes usually it quite plain when he has done so, even if the reader has to pay attention to wording. One aspect of the book is quite problematic, and that is the chronology. The sequence of events is often unclear, due to his attempt to divide the book by topics of Newton's interests, which often overlapped, the author's aversion to giving frequent specific dates, and the book's frequent jumps from one event to a subsequent one that may have post-dated the first by some years. White places great emphasis, and invests tremendous importance, in the fact that Newton studied alchemy. The author also considers it highly significant that Newton held beliefs about Christianity that the very orthodox would consider heretical. However, White appears to expect the reader simply to agree with these positions. His propositions fail to take into account the facts that scholarship, in Newton's time, was not as strictly divided as it is today (everyone was a polymath); and that in the early days of the Enlightenment, following the Reformation, pretty much everyone had a favorite heresy. Indeed, in giving the history of alchemy, the book shows that just about every major scientific figure (and not a few churchmen) up to Newton's day were involved in the art, and that many major alchemists made contributions to science as well. In fact, while chapter six is dedicated to a definition of alchemy, the book overall does not do a very good job of stating what it is. White stresses the "dark side" of field, pointing out that the lore of the alchemist is not that of the chemical engineer, but his first attempt to distinguish the topic does so in terms of chemical lab equipment. The problem is exacerbated since, as with any arcane or occult field, the subject tends to be rather loosely defined by the individual alchemists interests. White's research into alchemy itself seems to have rather more breadth than depth: while practitioners may have felt that there was some virtue in using reflected light or moonlight it certainly wasn't because of polarization since the discovery of the multidimensional wave nature of light postdates the period under discussion. White is also surprised at the number of "intelligent" people who "wasted their lives" in alchemical pursuits. When you are working on a purely experimental basis, with no reliable theoretical background to direct your research, how do you know that religious, astrological, or other factors do not influence the results? Before smugly assuming superiority over the troglodytes of the Dark Ages it is best to lend a more critical ear to the enormous number of myths commonly assumed to be true in any modern intellectual conversation. Jung's interest in alchemy is not surprising: his archetypes may eventually be regarded with the same condescension we bestow upon tales of the philosopher's stone. Or maybe not. A further oddity is White's attitude towards religion, especially in relation to science. His contention that quantum theory somehow inherently eliminates the possibility of belief in God demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of either Christian theology, or quantum theory, or both. Certainly he seems to have mistaken the important theoretical insights provided by quantum mechanics for some kind of technological underpinning of pretty much all of modern engineering. (In fact, a mere four pages apart, he describes the heart of both quantum theory and alchemy almost identically since in the first "the experimenter plays a role in the experiment" [page 129] and the second "requires an interaction between experiment and experimenter" [page 133].) White's insistence on alchemy as a major formative force in Newton's thinking rests on extremely flimsy evidence. He makes the claim that the theory of gravitation would not have been fully formed had it not been for alchemical ideas. What alchemy informed the theory of gravitation? White insists that it comes from a single experiment that produces a metallic crystal with a radiating form, thus paving the way for the idea that gravity attracts towards the object doing the attracting. This proposal is, frankly, a lot less credible than the legend of the apple. For one thing, the idea of attraction to a central object was starting to be realized even before Newton. For another, Newton's basic work was already underway in the mid-1660s, and the experiment noted did not take place until around 1670. A third point is that there is not a single reference in Newton's writings, reported conversations, or correspondence to back up the idea: the apple legend at least has three references crediting Newton with reporting it, however suspect Newton's report may be. Finally, White later uses the fact that radiating lines can be drawn through the concentric squares (a rather obvious artefact) of Newton's mid-1670s plan of Solomon's Temple to make the same point. Sometimes radiating forms are just radiating forms. To be strictly fair, at one point White raises one other possible influence from alchemy, in the concept of a force that acts without touching the object. However, Newton is known to have experimented with both windmills and magnetism prior to his serious researches in the alchemical field, so this idea would have been no great surprise. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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