Here we write a brief review of the book "The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton's Manuscripts" by Sarah Dry.
The story begins with John Maynard Keynes frantically trying to attend a Sotheby's auction to purchase some of the 300 lots of manuscripts belong to Sir Isaac Newton.
The subject is personally interesting because we ourselves have alot of papers, and we understand their disordered state, but also how much work and creative energy is contained in unpolished form within these papers. When we die, what will happen but all these great ideas will remain hidden. This is why we invest so much energy into writing these posts. We are trying to correct an earlier mistake in our career which involved too much note writing, and not enough synthesis, i.e. actually collecting and editing the notes into a more readable form. Indeed alot of my own manuscripts record my own processes and conversations with myself. Or, and this is why I love writing, the manuscripts record ideas which have freshly arisen in our mind, and we write them to paper to offload them and record them for future study.
Indeed writing gives us great mental relief. Once the ideas are on the page, I don't need to really keep them in my mind. I can move past them, to the next stage of development. In other words, I write my ideas down so I don't have to keep them stored in my mind. And once the ideas are outside my mind and recorded on paper, it's a great relief to my own mental strain.
Now Newton is universally recognized as a great scientific and mathematical genius. However, like most geniuses, he was a peculiar personality. And unfortunately we find the author's book on Newton rather preoccupied with Newton's alchemist and theological interests instead of his more scientific or mathematical research. The book contains very few direct quotations or references to Newton's manuscripts. The book instead makes rather indirect and opaque allusions to certain topics discussed in the manuscripts. We would have enjoyed more direct commentary on specific manuscripts, to hear Newton speak "in his own words" and have commentary to clarify some ideas, expressions, meanings. But the book is again focussed more on the alchemy (and this was JM Keynes' interest in Newton's manuscripts) and the theology than mathematics or physics.
It's possible that Newton later in his life, when he was well established as Treasurer of the Royal Mint and personally liable for all coinage in the British kingdom, was not specially preoccupied with scientific researches. We can understand that his life's work and research in opticks, mechanics, gravitation and motion of the heavens, the calculus, etc., were perhaps less interesting to him in his later years. He surely had a tireless and energetic mind and creative capacity, and it seems natural that he would have wider interests and ambitions.
It seems that Newton's manuscripts were effectively hidden for many years. Firstly, they were in a very disordered state. Newton wrote and rewrote on many different scraps of paper, folded in different ways, unordered and undated, and often times being recycled. We understand this as a mathematician, sometimes we write very nice notes, but more typically we use paper as a scratchpad for calculations, speculations, ideas, etc., all of which are sometimes very disordered.
There is a second reason for the manuscripts being hidden away, and that's largely Newton's extensive theological writings. Basically Newton had a strong anti-Protestant view towards the person of XP. He was a so-called "Anti Trinitarian" arguing that the Son was always subject to the Father, and in no sense "equal with" the Father. Newton also extensively wrote his opinion on corruptions in the translations and transmissions of scripture. In other words, he felt the Bible, say 1611 King James Bible, was corrupted. With Newton being one of the most eminent scientific authorities around the world, but especially on the Continent, these harsh opinions were somewhat scandalous. The trustees of Newton's manuscripts thought it necessary to suppress the public release of these sharp theological criticisms.
Regarding Newton's alchemical works, we are not much interested in this subject. We don't really believe that Newton was dealing with "dark arts" or "magick" of any sort. He was operating in 17th century with very basic chemistry, and he probably had an interest in chemistry and assays being the treasurer of the mint. So our view on his alchemical writings are that they are earnest chemistry researches in a primitive chemical period. If Newton had lived a hundred years later, our opinion is that his alchemical writings would be less speculative. Perhaps we're wrong.
