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Isaac Newton’s greatest scientific achievements might have had their
origins in alchemy. Newton’s attempts to fit historical events to biblical
prophecies and his writings on alchemy amounted to far more than his scientific
output.

Embarrassed biographers from the 18th century onwards have explained
away these alchemical leanings as ‘the result of nervous collapse that crippled
his mental faculties’ or as activities that ‘relieved the fatigue of severer
studies’. In 1946 the economist John Maynard Keynes described him, notoriously,
as ‘the last of the magicians’. But according to Piyo Rattansi, professor
of history and philosophy of science at University College London, Newton’s
interest in alchemy was crucial to the development of his law of gravitation.

‘Alchemy was not a mere curiosity,’ Rattansi told the BA. ‘It freed
him from the straitjacket of mechanistic theory.’ Contemporary European
intellectuals had difficulty accepting Newton’s theory – even though the
mathematics worked beautifully – because it seemed to resurrect the discredited
theory of attraction between distant objects. They regarded explanations
not based on their strict criteria of ‘push and pull’ as unscientific.

Rattansi argues that Newton was opportunistic. ‘He had a foot in both
camps – one in the alchemists’, and one in the mechanists’.’