Newton ACTUALLY Discovered the Philosopher's Stone | History Camp

Isaac Newton had a secret name, and he wrote it on his notes about turning metal into gold. For decades, the man who explained gravity kept a secret fire burning in his laboratory, copying out the greens about dragons and doves and decoding hidden recipes from a famous alchemist who never actually existed. He begged other scientists to keep his findings hidden. He had a mental breakdown so bad that people said that he had finally gone insane, and when he died, someone went through his papers and wrote "Not fit to be printed." And today's scientists and historians are still trying to figure out the truth of what magic he was trying to create or maybe actually created in secret. So what was one of the greatest minds of all human history really hiding, and how close did he actually get? Well, did everyone find it. So sit back, relax, and welcome to history. What's up, dude? Welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagdon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting fascinating and controversial stories from all time forever and always. Yes, that is what I do here. So I try to figure out everything that's ever happened, and today we have a fascinating story. Talking about Isaac Newton, one of the most fascinating minds in all of human history. But before we jump in, I just want to say thanks to you. Yeah, dude. Every time you click comment, like, or interact with our content, you help keep the lights on in the tent, you keep the fire burning here at the campsite, and you just make it all possible. Now, it's not just you that I need to thank. I need to thank my good bout. Grease, dost, gambada, blah, blah, blah. How are you? Doing great. What is your last name? Pop. I don't even really care, dude, because I feel like I'm crushing it with my pronunciation. I'm sorry to cut you off, but I'm not sorry. Grease, as I'm just goofing around, if you've never been to the show before, well, get ready for more of that. Now, today we're talking about Isaac Newton because if you asked Isaac Newton in his lifetime, "Hey, what are you?" You might expect him to say, like, "Oh, I'm a physicist. Oh, I'm a mathematician. Oh, I'm a spy asset for the queen, and I work at the mint." No. He may have told you, "Oh, I'm a theologian. Maybe." Again, I'm kind of speculating here. But if you look at the totality of his work, he might tell you, "Oh, I'm actually an alchemist." He might not say any things you expected, because Isaac Newton was into all sorts of crazy stuff. Not only did he develop laws of physics and the father of calculus and just a genius mind in general and celebrated in his lifetime, rightly so, but he was fascinated by the mystical and the ethereal and the things that are unexplainable in nature. Now, let's go to 1669, a 26-year-old Cambridge scholar's going shopping. Now, you probably know who this guy is. His groceries are this, "I need two furnaces, I need mercury, I need intimity, I need nitric acid, I need pure silver, any massive multi-volume encyclopedia of alchemy." And that shopping list still exists. It's tucked inside a little notebook in his handwriting, and that notebook is going to show up again at the very end of this story, so don't forget it. And that student is exactly what we've been talking about in Isaac Newton. Now, at this point, 26-year-old Newton is not famous. He showed up at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1661 as a subsisor, basically a scholarship kid who paid his way by doing chores for like richer students. It was the thing they did back in the day, it was pretty crazy, but he got to go to college because he was willing to like, pay his way through literal labor. He graduates in 1665, and that same year, the plague shuts down the university. Yeah, you thought COVID was bad? Imagine trying to graduate, and there's a plague. So he goes home to his family farm, and over the next couple of years, mostly alone, he lays the groundwork for calculus, his theory of light, and for his first big ideas about gravity. He was like in his 20s, like early 30s when he was doing this stuff, I mean, truly a prolific genius. I mean, understatement of the year, but you know what I'm saying. Now, by the end of 1669, he's named the "Lucasian Professor of Mathematics," one of the most prestigious academic jobs in all of England, again at the time, like one of the preeminent kind of powers of the world. That's the Newton that everyone knows, the genius, Apple hitting the head, laws of motion. So what's that guy got to do with two furnaces in a jar of mercury? Like why is like a book on alchemy in his personal notebook? Well, for that, we have an eyewitness, a young man named Humphrey Newton. Now coincidentally, no relation, just a coincidence. Now Humphrey Newton came to Cambridge from Grantham. As the town where Isaac went to school, and he worked as his assistant for about five years in the 1680s. Now decades later, after Isaac Newton died, Humphrey wrote down what he remembered. Below Newton's room, at Trinity, was a private garden. Walden perfectly kept, and Newton couldn't stand to see a single weed in it. I mean, he was meticulous. And at the far end of that garden near the cottage chapel, was his laboratory. He built the brick furnace himself. And twice a year, about six weeks, every spring, and six weeks, every fall, the fire in that lab in Humphrey's words scarcely went out either night or day. Newton would sit up with it one night. Humphrey would take it the next, and then back and forth in shifts, like they were keeping watch over something they couldn't be left alone. Well, what is he keeping this fire for? Humphrey admits he has no idea. He literally says, "What his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into." But from how hard Newton worked, he guessed his boss was reaching for something beyond the reach of human art and history. In a later letter, Humphrey gets more specific. He, basically, he suggests the transmuting of metals, turning one metal into another was Newton's chief design. And the ingredient that he kept going back to was intimony. Now Humphrey is the same assistant who hand copies Newton's masterpiece, the principia, the book that basically laid out the laws of motion and gravity before it ever went to a printer in 1687. So while Newton was writing the book that would define physics literally to this day, his assistant was pulling night shifts at a furnace in the garden, helping him transform metals. So this guy was around for Newton's, like, most major works and his most secretive ones. So that brings me to a question about Newton's secret experiments. How does one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived take alchemy seriously? Well, he didn't think of it as alchemy the way that we do. When we talk about alchemy today, we're talking about, like, wizards and potions, and, you know, like, maybe if you're a little bit more, if you have more ballinology, you think in, like, oh, you're turning, like, lead into gold. Well, for Newton, it's very possible that alchemy just meant chemistry. Like in Newton's world, the line between alchemy and chemistry didn't really exist yet. Historians actually use an old spelling. You can see it on the screen here. It's called chemistry to describe the whole field the way that it existed back then. And it had three sides. First there was industry, so, like, making dyes and paints and, like, acids and, you know, like, liquor and all sorts of stuff. And then you had medicine, so it's basically, like, cooking up, like, mineral-based remedies. And then the craziest and most interesting one, transmutation, turning a cheap metal into a precious one. That one even had its own name. They literally called it chrysopia, which literally means gold-making. Now, to be clear, plenty of people back then thought that gold-making was a scam. But plenty of serious respected thinkers did not. Robert Boyle, one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry, also was chasing this. And the miracle at the end of this road, at the other end of transmutation, had a name. They called it the Philosopher's Stone. Now, you probably know this from Harry Potter or something. But in the books that Newton read, the stone was a substance, often described as a powder that could turn ordinary base metals into gold. Over the centuries, legends piled on extra powders, like curing diseases or extending life, like in the first Harry Potter book that I mentioned, thus Philosopher's Stone or the Sorcerer of Stone, if you're in America, was supposed to make you be able to live forever. But most of what Newton left behind was not about that stuff. It was mostly about the metals, like how to purify them and break them down, and maybe transform them. So just a quick recap so far. Newton is a rising star at Cambridge, behind a wall in his garden, he has a furnace burning for weeks at a time, chasing something that his own assistant didn't really know. And in his words, that didn't make him crazy, it just made him ambitious. But no one just wakes up knowing how to make the Philosopher's Stone or even knowing how to start. You need a teacher. And Newton found his in books. And his favor was written by a legendary alchemist who claimed that he had already done it, who had already made the Philosopher's Stone. And Newton copied his words and studied them and built experiments around them for decades. There's just one problem about Newton's mentor. That alchemist never existed. So, if you were serious about alchemy in the late 1600s, there was one name that you had to know. And his name was Irenaeus Philolithes. It's Greek, roughly a peaceful lover of truth. How was my pronunciation on that, Christus? Pretty good. Thank you very much. And if you were an alchemist in the 1600s, he was a legend. People call him an adept, someone who had supposedly already cracked the code and made this remarkable transmutation, this Philosopher's Stone. And his books were mysterious and technical, and everybody. who mattered in that day who was interested in this stuff read them meticulously. Robert Boyle, who he mentioned, Isaac Newton, and then even later the German chemist George Ernst Stahl. Newton copied his work and annotated it and kept coming back to it for decades. But the issue here is that no one ever actually met Philolithes. The man everyone did meet was his supposed middleman, a young chemist named George Starky. Now Starky's life is honestly a movie in its own right. Okay. Starky was born in Bermuda in 1628. His father dies when he's nine and he gets shipped off to New England. He enrolls at Harvard at 15 years old, graduates in 1646 and practices medicine around Boston, making one of the first scientists trained in colonial America. Okay. So far, pretty normal life. In the 1650s though, he sales for London, looking for better lab equipment and like a bigger platform and he finds both. Within a couple of years, he's Robert Boyle's personal tutor in alchemy. He's making medicines and dies and perfumes and he refines ores. He's constantly broke and ends up in a debtor's prison, literally a prison for people that can't pay their debts. And the whole time, he's passing around these incredible manuscripts that he says comes from a secretive friend. This guy, Philadelphia's, the adapt to it already found the secret and cracked the philosopher's stone. And then in 1665, the great plague hits London. Starky stays to treat the sick as a doctor would do and the plague winds up killing him. But of course, his manuscripts outlive him. Some get printed and a few years later, they land on the desk of a young professor at Cambridge. Now, if this is true, this means that one of Isaac Newton's most important teachers was a dead man named Starky writing under a name that wasn't his about some amazing alchemist that cracked the greatest code ever and maybe wasn't even real. And it took historians 300 years to prove that Philadelphia's was George Starky, an alter ego like a mask. Scholars had suspected it for a while, but in the 1990s, a historian named William Newman nailed it down by comparing Starky's private letters with the books published under the pen name. Now, to be clear, there's no sign that Newton ever figured all this out. As far as we can tell, he trusted Philadelphia's as the real deal. He thought that he was a genuine alchemist that actually cracked the code. And to be fair, to Starky, a pen name doesn't automatically make you a con man. He was a talented hands-on chemist and physician. The real question is whether his receipts actually worked and we'll get there in a second. But what's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee and then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things I'm lifting, I'm eating protein, I'm taking creatine, I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good, but sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. And that is what got me thinking so seriously about testosterone. Like I think about testosterone a lot because it's the thing that makes me feel amazing. And that's why I've been taking Mars men. Here's what I learned. Your body can be making testosterone, but a portion of it gets bound to a protein called SHBG. It's literally like the testosterone's there, but you can't use it. It's in jail. Marsmen is designed to help you free up that lock testosterone so your body can better utilize what it's already producing. And what's great about Mars men is there's no needles, no synthetic hormones. Marsmen uses eight natural clinically-dosed ingredients that help support healthy testosterone levels, energy and stamina. You can buy all of these supplements independently, but what I love about Marsmen is they put it all into one very simple dose. For me, it's just a steady sense of drive. I feel more locked in during the day. I recover faster. I feel better and more motivated to train. And some men report more consistent energy, stronger physical performance and improved recovery, 91% of users report higher energy levels. And there are thousands of reviews on the Marsmen website from actual dudes sharing their experience. It's made in the USA, third party tested and it's available at GNC's nationwide. And it comes with a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can try it and pay attention to how you feel and see whether Marsmen fits your routine. And for a limited time, the listeners of this show, if you are a camper, you are going to get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts when you go to men, go to Mars.com. That is men go to Mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Make sure you tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite sentia. Now let's get back to the show. First off, why the secrecy, like, why would Starkey write under a code name in the first place? Like, why would he write under a code like a fake name and also like in this vague mysterious way that almost no one could even read? Well, part of it was philosophy, okay? Philadelphia said his strange symbolic language was a filter. It was supposed to keep the secret away from people who were uninitiated. That just wanted to get rich. That were greedy. And the text would basically reveal it to people who were worthy. Part of it was also practical. It was survival all over Europe. Kings and princes would hire alchemists hoping for like some type of bottomless supply of gold. And if you were a king and like, you know, medieval France or something, you got an alchemist who was able to just keep on turning coal into gold, you could fund wars and conquest and you basically control the whole world. Now the ones who couldn't deliver went into prison or they would die. Now in England, making gold like doing this kind of alchemy was literally a crime. In 1404, King Henry IV signed the act against multipliers. Multiplier means like making more gold and silver and anyone caught doing it was guilty of a felony. And the law actually stayed on the books for almost 300 years until it was repealed in 1689. And according to Newton himself in a letter to the philosopher John Locke, the man who got it repealed was Robert Boyle. That same chemist alchemist guy that I was talking about before that was friends with Starkey. So think about that. Newton took the secrecy very seriously. And in 1676, Boyle published an account of a special kind of mercury that heated up when you mixed it with gold. To us, it's like a cool little like lab results, right? Like, oh, interesting. All right. You know, you have this type of mercury. You heated it up when you mix it with gold. Like, that's an interesting reaction. To Newton, it was extremely alarming. On April 26, 1676, Isaac Newton writes a private letter to Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, basically urging that Boyle keep high silence over this new discovery. Because Newton warned, publishing it might cause immense damage to the world if there should be any verity in the hermetic writers, hermetic writers as in the alchemist. And then he signed off, pray, keep this letter private. So think about what that actually means. Newton wasn't just curious about alchemy. He was worried like, hey, if alchemy is real and it gets in the wrong hands, there's going to be hell to pay. He even gave himself a secret alchemist name. So Isaac Newton starts playing around with anagrams of the Latin version of his name. Literally, you could see it on the screen here. Isaac Newtonus. And the one that seemed like was the best was Yehovah Sanctus Unus. Literally, Yehovah the Holy One. And that's kind of important to the story. And it'll tie in in just a second. But just to make sure everyone's on the same page here, Newton's favorite alchemist was really a Harvard kid from Bermuda that wrote under an alter ego, making gold could get you charged with a felony in England at this time. And Newton was so serious about this secrecy that he begged one of England's top scientists to keep his discovery quiet, which leaves us with a question, what were these secrets that he was protecting? Like picture Newton sitting at his desk and you have a candle that's burning nearby and he's copying out a page that reads like a fairytale, a fiery dragon and doves of agatus and eagles made of mercury. Every word to him is a puzzle. And Newton spent decades hunting for the key. So if you open up one of Newton's alchemy notebooks, it honestly reads like like you're reading like Greek mythology or something. It's like Neptune's trident, the green lion, gods and beasts and planets all doing strange things to each other. It's tempting to read it all as like magic spells. But most of the time, it was probably code. Code names for real materials and real laboratory steps like the mythology was the lock and the chemistry was behind the door and understanding the code. That was the key. Now the best way to see how it works is something that Newton called the net. You might remember this story from our episode on Zeus or Pandora's Box, but basically Vulcan, the Roman version of Hephaestus, the blacksmith who built Pandora, is married to Venus, the goddess of love and Venus is having an affair with Mars, the god of war. I know there might be a lot to take in, but those are the versions you need. You need Vulcan. This is basically the blacksmith who builds all sorts of things. He's married to Venus and Venus is having an affair with Mars, the god of war. So what does Vulcan do? Vulcan forges a net that is so fine. It's practically invisible and he basically puts it over the bed and catches the two of them tangled up together for every god on Olympus to laugh at them. The Roman poet Ovid tells the story in Europe loved it. Now read it the way that an alchemist would read it, okay? The alchemist would look at this and say, hey, these are, this is not actually a metaphor. This is not like a funny story about infidelity. This is it. actually a secret code. So in the old system every planet god stood for a metal. Mars was iron, Venus was copper. So read it now as an alchemist. The Vulcan's net catches Mars and Venus is a recipe. You work iron and copper together with intimini and you get a purple alloy of intimini and copper and when it cools its surface is covered in tiny regular crystals that look like a net. So if you knew the myth and you knew your metals then you could follow along and if you didn't it just sounds like you know a funny scandal on Mount Olympus but the code has traps. Traditionally Saturn meant lead but Starkey quietly used Saturn to mean something completely else. Stibnite the ore that intimini comes from and early on Newton read it the normal way and he missed it. He missed the switch but his later lab notebooks show that he eventually cracked it. And some of what came out of these experiments was kind of beautiful. So on the star regulus was intimini a lump of metal whose surface crystallizes into the shape of a star. Newton also wrote over and over about metallic vegetation, strange branching plant-like growths that could form out of metals and their salts. Now imagine at 1680 you're sitting there by the candlelight. The metal you're working with suddenly sprouts this star or grows branches like a tree. You might start to wonder like is this alive too? Which brings us back to that page from the very beginning of the episode. It's a manuscript in Newton's handwriting copied from Philolythes and it explains how to prepare something called "Softic Mercury". Softic being an old way of saying philosophical and it's the one with the fiery dragon and doves of Diana and the eagles of Mercury. Now to be clear, Softic Mercury was not the floss for stone. It was supposed to be an ingredient, a key step on the road to it. Think of it like a sourdough starter. You get the starter right and the bread hopefully follows but it's not the only thing that you need to get right. Historians have pieced it together. The process meant treating Mercury over and over then working it together with gold until the mixture grew delicate branching shapes like a tiny metallic tree. And Starkey had an explanation of that tree to him. It meant the material had come to life. But there's a catch here. The gold was already in the mix from the start. So even if you pulled this off properly, you didn't make any new gold. You just rearranged the gold that you already had. So this manuscript sat in private hands for decades until February of 2016 when the Chemical Heritage Foundation, now the Science History Institute, actually bought it. Experts say that Newton got hold of the recipe years before it's ever formally published probably through some type of underground trade and handwritten copies. And when they flipped the page over, they found Newton's own notes and his own words about drawing a volatile spirit out of lead war. That's not a copy. That's Newton, literally like working and trying to figure this stuff out. But what the manuscript doesn't prove matters just as much. There's no evidence that Newton ever decoded this recipe correctly, or that he ever grew that golden tree himself. So let's kind of slow down because these steps are easy to blur together. Newton copying a recipe is one thing. Newton running an experiment is another. Newton getting the result that the recipe promised is a third thing and that result actually producing the philosopher's stone. That is a fourth thing. The evidence backs up the first two that Newton was copying a recipe and that Newton was running an experiment. But the evidence that we have doesn't necessarily back up that the result was what he was promised and that this result was actually the philosopher's stone, which is why many modern historians took it one step further. At Indiana University, William Newman's team has been taking Newton's recipes into a real lab and then running them. And that's how we know the net and the star regulists are real physical things. And it's harder than it sounds. Old recipes will skip steps that the writers thought were super obvious. Like, you know, if your grandma has like a recipe that just says like, add flour until it looks right. And you know, if you're in the modern day, you're like, well, I don't know exactly what that means. And Newton also didn't have modern tools like a thermometer that could survive the heat of a furnace. So scientists today are still trying to crack the code that Newton was using centuries ago. So think about it. Newton's code was real chemistry hiding in the language of mythology. Some of it actually made real, gorgeous results. But the recipe that promised the big secret, we don't have proof that he ever finished it, which kind of makes all of this way stranger. If Newton couldn't prove any of it was working, what kept that fire burning for 30 years? Why was he so focused on this? Was it just getting rich or was it something bigger? Something tangled up with a prism in the book of Revelation and a breakdown that's so bad that word ends up spreading across Europe that Newton lost his mind. Now, here's a strange detail about Newton. A man supposedly trying to like get rich and make gold or find the philosopher's stone. He kept forgetting to eat. Humphrey Newton says that he walked into Isaac Newton's room and found his dinner sitting there completely untouched. And some mornings the old woman who cleaned his rooms would happily care off his lunch and his supper both barely tasted. So for Newton, was it really just about money? We can't really rule it out. The philosopher's stone promised like unimaginable wealth and scholars who knew these papers best don't pretend that it never crossed his mind. But I don't think money alone explains decades of these sleepless nights. Like, let's look at the other three answers from the most solid to the most debated. So outside of money, answer number one is matter itself. In the books that Newton was studying, "Sophic Mercury" wasn't just a shortcut to get rich, it was supposed to break gold all the way down into its most basic primordial ingredients and basically make it able to ferment kind of like how like, you know, like you need yeast to make dough rise. In other words, alchemy came with a theory that metals had had had a hidden internal structure that they could be taken apart and rebuilt and that they could maybe even grow. And for a guy obsessed with how the universe works at its deepest level, it was just an irresistible question. What if I could get the actual essence out of these metals? What if I could understand their basic theory? Now, answer number two is god. As we know, Newton was intensely religious, but in a way that he kind of kept hidden. Hey guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by mod. Mod prescribes a once or twice daily, but definitely a drink that can keep you energized, focused, and alert throughout the entire day. And here's how it works. Energy drinks with caffeine, temporarily block adenosine. This is the chemical that makes you feel tired. And it builds up. And when the caffeine wears off, you get that crash. But Modaphanol works differently and engages multiple pathways in your brain, including dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine, and erection to achieve steady energy and alertness for 10 to 12 hours. Modaphanol was invented in the 1970s. And since then, it's been used by some of the highest performers on and off the planet. Yeah, soldiers, pilots, and even astronauts aboard the international space station have used medicinal and high-stakes situations where concentration and alertness literally could cost you your life. And now it's available through mod.com to qualifying patients. Visit mod.com. That is mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order, plus free shipping with the promo code Gagnon. That is the promo code Gagnon G-A-G-N-O-N at mod.com. See their website for important safety information. And we thank mod for sponsoring the pod. Now let's get back to it. He poured an enormous chunk of his life into studying scripture and religious prophecy. One of his untitled treatises on the book of Revelation, now held in Jerusalem as Yehuda MS1, it's roughly 318,000 words. That one manuscript is longer than like most big books that you would find. And in it, Newton writes out rules for decoding prophecy, then tries to match revelation's beasts and symbols to real kingdoms and wars and events in Christian history. He also privately rejected the Trinity, the belief that God is three persons in one, and Newton's England, saying that out loud, probably would have ended his career, like being a prominent person that rejected the Trinity would have been massively sinful in the 1600s. And remember that secret alchemist name Yehuda Sanktus Unus, Jehovah the Holy One? Well, for a man who quietly believed that God was one, not three in one, it's a pretty loaded name to sign. An alchemist often described their secret as a gift from God, revealed only to the chosen few, only to the scientific prophets of the day. So it's tempting to say that Newton's alchemist was really a spiritual quest into skies, but we should pause for a second and kind of look at the skeptics point of view. So William Newman, the historian who spent decades on these papers, specifically does not argue that Newton's alchemy was just a religious search for God in the physical world. Newton's faith and his alchemy clearly were hand in hand, right? They were both going on in his brain, but that doesn't mean that every experiment was religious. Now answer number three for why he was doing all of this is perhaps the most surprising one, and that's light. One of Newton's notebooks holds his early account of how white light is made of separate colors. And in that very same notebook, he also has alchemy recipes. That's not a storyteller like forcing these ideas together. They're literally bound in the same book. And Newman argues that alchemy actually helped Newton's work on light. And here's what he means. Think about what a chemist does all day. Take a substance apart into its pieces and then put the pieces back together to rebuild the original. Now think about Newton's most famous experiment. He shines sunlight through a prism and it splits white light into a rainbow and then bring those colors back together into white light. You take it apart and you put it back together. It's the same move but just different material. Now to be clear, that's Newman's interpretation. It's not a settled fact. It's just what this one guy who spent a lot of time studying him has come to. And you'll sometimes hear an even bigger claim that Newton got gravity from alchemy. Some historians have floated versions of this over the years, but Newman doesn't make that argument. The evidence doesn't support a neat like, hey, the study of alchemy gives us gravity story. So just to sum up what we've learned thus far, Newton's furnace was not necessarily just a get rich quick machine. It was wrapped up in his ideas about matter and God and maybe even his discoveries about light. And by the early 1690s, Newton was on top of the world. The principia had made him the most celebrated thinker in England. He'd made powerful friends in London and he was angling for a big government job that would get him out of Cambridge. And then in 1693, something in Newton just broke. That September he wrote to the famous direst Samuel Peppies that he had neither eight nor slept well this 12 months nor have my former consistency of mind. He told Peppses he never wanted to see him or the rest of his friends ever again. Days later, he wrote to the philosopher John Locke, one of his closest friends, accusing Locke of trying to "embroil him with women." Then he confesses something very chilling. When someone told him Locke was sick and might not live, Newton had answered "Tor better if you were dead." Damn, it's crazy to think he's writing all this stuff to a really close friend. In that same letter, he asked Locke to forgive him. So as you can see from this letter, he's saying very strange things. He's telling his friends that he doesn't want to see him and then he's writing that he wishes that John Locke were dead, but then he's also asking him to forgive him. And as a result, word traveled fast across the channel, the great Dutch scientist Christian Huygens heard the rumor that basically Isaac Newton had gone insane. So what happened to him? Was it exhaustion or heartbreak or stress or was it something that he'd been breathing in for 20 years? Because nearly three centuries later, scientists got their hands on a few strands of hair said to be Isaac Newton's and they tested them for a specific substance. They wanted to see if it was tainted with mercury. And then in 1979, the results came back. Researchers analyzed a few strands of this hair and they found mercury, a lot of it, far before the normal levels plus elevated lead. That same year, two separate research teams made the same argument. Newton's 1693 breakdown may have been mercury poisoning. And on paper, it just fit perfectly. I mean, decades of heating mercury and lead over these open fires in a small room with no idea how toxic these fumes were and his symptoms, the sleeplessness, the paranoia, lashing out of his friends, they really overlap with what mercury poisoning can do to a person. But as we always do, let's look at the skeptics. No one can be 100% sure that those hairs are actually Isaac Newton's or at what point in his life they came from critics also argue his symptoms don't line up neatly with mercury poisoning and Newton bounced back within months and then lived to be 84 sharp enough to actually run a major government office for decades. Plus, there were plenty of other reasons to crack. He was exhausted. He wasn't sleeping. His job hunt in London kept going nowhere. In 1963 is also the same year that his intense friendship with a brilliant young Swiss mathematician, this guy at Nicholas, Fattio, Didouille suddenly just fell apart. So did Newton's furnace poison him? It's possible, but no one can diagnose a man who's been dead for 300 years just from like a couple pieces of hair. But what we do know is what happened next. Newton apologized to his friends. And then in 1696, he finally got the job that he had always been chasing. Warden of the Royal Mint. Think about that for a second. The man who spent decades trying to make gold is now in charge of protecting England's actual precious materials. He's literally protecting England's actual money and he went after it with the same obsession that he brought to the furnaces and to his alchemy. He helped oversee a massive overhaul of the country's battered coins. Then he started hunting counterfeiters personally, like interviewing witnesses and working with informants and building cases. Some people say that he built like the first intelligence network trying to take down these counterfeiters of British coins. His great nemesis was a slick forger and con man named William Shelenar. A guy so bold, he tried to get himself appointed to inspect the mint. Newton spent months building a case against him. Shelenar was convicted of high treason and he wrote Newton a desperate letter begging for mercy. And Newton didn't budge. Shelenar was hanged at Tyburn in March 1699. And that same year, Newton became master of the mint. He kept that job for the rest of his life. He got very rich and became president of the Royal Society. The quiet professor attending a fire behind a garden wall was now one of the most powerful men in all of England. And he never published his alchemy and he died in March of 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. That September, a physician named Thomas Pillay, went through Newton's mountains of papers and decided what could be published. I remember that little notebook from the very beginning, the one with the 1669 shopping list, the furnaces, the mercury, the intimony. Well, on the back fly leaf, pellet wrote a note. And it's still there to this day. It says right at the top, not fit to be printed. That was the verdict on Isaac Newton's secret life. Hey, pack it up, hide it. The papers passed to Newton's niece, Catherine and her husband, John Condit, and then down to the family line to the urls of Portsmouth. And in 1872, the family sent the whole collection to Cambridge to be sorted. The university kept the math and science, and all the other stuff, the alchemy, the theology, the mythology trying to understand the Venus and Mars. Well, that got sent back. And it sat there until July 13th and 14th, 1936, when Viscount Limmington put it all up for auction at Sotheby's in London. 329 lots, more than a third of them about alchemy, and the entire collection went for just over 9,000 pounds, scattered between dealers and collectors. That little notebook with pellets not fit to be printed, that sold for 180 pounds. And by the end of the month, it had been donated to Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, right back where that first fire started. And then the famous economist, John Maynard Canes, heard about the sale late, so we went on a buying spree, tracking down Newton's alchemy manuscripts one by one. Meanwhile, a scholar named Abraham Yahuda was scooping up all the theology, and the two of them even traded papers so that they could complete each other's collection. Canes spent years reading what he bought, and it completely changed how he saw Newton. And he wrote all of it up in an essay called Newton, The Man. He died in April 1946 before he could ever deliver it, so his brother Jeffrey read it aloud at the Royal Society's Newton celebration that summer. And in it was the line that would define Newton's secret life for generations. It says this, Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians. For decades, that was the whole story. Even the man who wrote that line waived off the alchemy itself as wholly magical and devoid of any type of scientific value, but modern historians actually push back really hard. William Newman's chemistry of Isaac Newton project at Indiana University has put Newton's alchemy manuscripts online for anyone to read. And as we saw, they've been rebuilding his recipes in the lab and showing off what a lot of a lot of what he was doing was real careful chemistry. So let's finally answer the question that we started with. How close did Newton get to developing or finding the philosopher's stone? Well, based off what's available, there's no evidence he ever made it or that he ever turned any metal into gold. Not like he almost did it or he almost found it and he hid it. There's no demonstrated success at all. And there's a reason why. One, Newton probably never knew. Lead and gold are different elements. And what makes an element what it is lives deep inside the atom at the nucleus. Lead has 82 protons and gold has 79 protons. No fire on earth can change how many protons there are. No furnace, no mercury, no fermenting. Chemistry can rearrange the atoms, but it can't rebuild the literal nature of what an atom is. But nuclear physics can. And in 1919, Ernest Rutherford pulled off the first artificial transmutation of one element into another. In 1980, a team led by Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seabor turned a few thousand atoms of bismuth into gold. Bismuth has roughly 83 protons. Like I said, gold has 79. So by taking this supercharged energy and blasting it into the atom, they were able to remove some of the protons and turned some of those atoms into gold. They achieved the alchemy that Isaac Newton was so eager to do. Now the issue with that, why they don't do it all the time, is the amount of equipment and the cost of the equipment to actually charge these particles is so enormously expensive. They were only able to do it to a couple thousand atoms and turn it into gold. But in order to get an ounce of gold, it would probably cost roughly a quadrillion dollars an ounce. That's so expensive it is to run this machinery to actually transmute this into gold. And then in May of 2025, physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider reported that lead atoms whipping past each other at nearly the speed of light can get three protons. knocked loose. Now, you knocked three of those protons loose, what do you get? You get gold literally led into gold. That was Newton's dream done for real. But once again, the catch here over the colliders entire 2015 to 2018 run, the total came out to 29 picograms. That's 29 trillions of a gram. And each atom lasted a fraction of a second before smashing into the machine. The alchemist dream had technically come true, and once again, no one could get rich. Which leaves just one thing left to figure out. Not what Newton found, but what it means that he was even looking. In 1676, Newton begged for high silence. He warned that if the alchemists were right, if one element could truly become another, letting that secret loose might do immense damage to the world. We usually remember the part that he got wrong. The furnace, the mercury, the golden tree, they never grew, but think about what he was actually afraid of because the alchemists were right. One element really can become another. It just took cracking open an atom to prove it. And when we finally figure out how we didn't get rich, less than 20 years after Rutherford's first transmutation, scientists learned not how to knock a proton off, but how to actually split the uranium atom, turning one element into others and releasing a kind of fire that no furnace on earth could ever touch. The real secret was never gold. It was power. And maybe on one of those long nights in the garden, the fire low, the metal sprouting branches in the dark, maybe Newton just knew it. Maybe he intuitive. Maybe it was from God that whatever was hiding inside this matter wasn't something that the world was ready to hold. And he kept his secret, but we didn't keep ours. And the fire he lit in that garden became bigger than we could have possibly imagined. And that's ladies and gentlemen, is a brief summary of Isaac Newton and the search for the philosopher's stone. I mean, I'll be honest doing research on this. Crazy. Isaac Newton was right. I don't know if he was right about the alchemy, like, I mean, technically he was. Yeah, we can turn elements into other elements. Like we can turn bismuth into gold. We can turn lead into gold. It's possible. They did it. But the issue is that it's kind of hard to make a lot of it. But he was right about the warning. That's the most fascinating part. He tells Robert Boyle, hey, you're onto something here. There's something in these metals that has unknowable power. And if we figure it out, it could be disastrous for all of humanity. And he was right. And then after rough it for what did they discover? Nuclear bomb. I mean, dude, Isaac, I don't like, he was on it. He was right over the target. He didn't live long enough to truly figure it out. But he was on it. And the fact that he was so interested in like the revelations and end times and all that stuff, I mean, just fascinating. And he was going off of this random guy from Bermuda, not this random guy, a physicist and a doctor from Bermuda and like using all of his stuff, like what a compliment, give her a starkey or Phileath of fleas or whatever his name was. Pretty crazy. It also sounds like England thought he was onto something and then shut him up with money and a job. Right. You almost got a wonder like, yo, did they have like their royal appointers be like, yeah, Newton's on to something like he's a smart guy. Let's get him working for us. Because if he just, you know, toils away on his own, he's either going to lose his mind or you know, he's going to discover something that we don't want him to discover. Pretty crazy. Then on top of that, all of his discoveries of mercury probably ended up killing him. I fully believe that. Right. Like you've heard of madhatters. The madhatters come from mercury poisoning. Like the fact that you're just like using this glue that has mercury in it all day makes you crazy. That's where the madhatter comes from. Does mercury stay in your hair for years and years after when they would have been heavy metals? Yeah, for sure. I'm assuming. And then on top of that, one of the guys that tried to kill Andrew Jackson was this guy who was a painter and one day he goes crazy and is convinced that the king of England owes him money that Andrew Jackson is owes him a part like a patronage or a patronage within his cabinet like to be like a diplomat to like France or something. And then Andrew Jackson's like, dude, you're crazy. I don't know who you are. You're a painter and he like paints houses for a living. And then they surmise later, oh, the mercury in the paint and he's painting inside these houses all the time was secretly poisoning him and then made him go crazy. So there's like so many documented stories of people that go crazy for mercury. And I wonder if like the craziness helped Newton. Like obviously it was sabotaging his friendships. But then how does he get better? Like he's going crazy and when he's like 50 or 60 and then pulls it together at the end of his life and just like lives in normal life working for the government running a massive agency, developing a spy network and then also getting knighted. Pretty crazy. I think he's like the first scientist to get knighted. I remember reading that. I forgot to bring it up, but he's like one of the first scientists like ever get knighted. He surrising Newton. Pretty, I mean, just an insane life. Now, did he develop the philosopher's stone? I don't know, but then you just got to wonder like how did he have the intuition to know that there was something so important hiding the atoms of these metals. Right? Like atomic theory wasn't even developed at this point. So he just had a hunch. And his hunch was right. Born too early. I don't know. What did you learn? Christos anything cool? Sir, for instance, Bacon was the first knighted philosopher and influential pioneer of the scientific method. So respect. Yeah. But Newton was not far after. Right. Where was Newton? Was he like the third? So, uh, France Bacon was 1603. Newton was 1705. 100 years later. Yeah. No big deal. Pretty good. I'm gonna get for him. And now we got Sir Elmjohn. Really? All my favorites are getting knighted. Love Newton, love Elmjohn. Paul McCartney, and Paul McCartney. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, different types of philosophers, different types of artists, both doing important things. Tell me those songs aren't philosophy. I'm not gonna even say that like developing laws of physics and like writing yesterday are different. I think those are the same. Right. I mean, yet I'll be honest, the Beatles mean more to me than Isaac Newton. But what did Isaac Newton really do? Oh, stuff falls down. Come on, bro. Paul McCartney, though. Paul McCartney learned how to raise your spirits up to fight gravity. I don't think you believe that. Okay. What do you guys think? What did you learn from this? Anything interesting? Any takeaways or tidbits that made your noodle scratch or itch? Let me know what you think. Drop a comment. You two Spotify read all of them. Also, we have a secret society ourselves. A little bit of our own cult. So over at patreon.com/campgadon. That's where we do monthly meetups. No, monthly zooms with the squad.