The Last Alchemist: A Biography of Newton

Author: White
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Recreates a real Newton, who believed that in addition to universal gravitation, there was a more powerful force in the universe! Michael White paints an enlightening picture where a genius stands at the historical juncture where witchcraft ends and science rises. The author, with a deep background in the history of science, explores the life of Newton from a highly humanized perspective—his melancholic childhood, fortunate youth, productive middle age, and powerful old age. What sets this book apart from other biographies of Newton is the author's perspective based on the genesis of science, which proposes a significant connection between Newton's obsession with alchemy and the foundation of modern science. Newton left behind over 500,000 words of alchemical manuscripts and over 1 million words of theological manuscripts. Could this work be entirely unrelated to his scientific discoveries? Past biographers often deliberately avoided discussing Newton's alchemy and heretical beliefs to mythologize his image as a "scientific genius." However, Michael White, with his unique intuition and historical research, uses Newton's important letters and several unpublished notes to explain the close relationship between his alchemical and theological studies and his discovery of universal gravitation, as well as his later work on unified field theory.