from New Scientist magazine:

Document reveals Newton's love of alchemy

A recently rediscovered manuscript confirms what has always been something of a dirty secret about Isaac Newton - that the father of modern physics was also a passionate alchemist who longed to find a "philosopher's stone" that could turn base metals into gold.

Newton devoted much of his early life to alchemy. The physicist was fascinated by the prospect of transmuting one metal to another, says Rob Iliffe, head of the Newton Project at Imperial College London. Newton believed that metals were the living opposites of trees, growing underground rather than overground.

The 16 pages of notes on alchemy were thought to have been lost after they were auctioned at Sotheby's in 1936. But in 2004 a librarian at London's Royal Society stumbled across them, among some uncatalogued papers. They have now been transcribed by Imperial College's John Young, as part of the Newton Project (Notes and Records of the Royal Society, DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.2005.0117). They show Newton's thoughts and scribblings about the work of other alchemists.

His ideas concerning alchemy may have inspired some of his later ground-breaking work in physics, says Iliffe. In both cases he was fascinated by similar questions about the building blocks of matter, though his strategy for resolving them changed in later life, he says.

"These pages show us Newton's real working practices," says Iliffe. "We have to accept that he took alchemy seriously, instead of inventing an image of Newton as we'd prefer him to be.