Kepler was wot, you don’t say?

 

The Guardian is making a serious bid for the year’s worst piece of #histsci reporting or as Adam Shapiro (@tryingbiology) once put it so expressively, #histsigh! The article in question has the shock, horror, sensation headline: Groundbreaking astronomer Kepler ‘may have practised alchemy’. Ignoring the fact for the moment that he probably didn’t, given the period and the milieu in which Kepler lived and worked saying that he may have been an alchemist is about as sensational as saying he may have been a human being.

Johannes Kepler Source: Wikimedia Commons

The period in which Kepler lived was one in which the interest in alchemy was very widespread, very strong and very open. For eleven years he was Imperial Mathematicus at the court in Prague of the German Emperor Rudolph II, which was a major centre for all of the so-called occult sciences and in particular alchemy. In Prague Kepler’s original employer Tycho Brahe had been for years a practitioner of Paracelsian alchemical medicine (a very widespread form of medicine at the time), which to be fair the article sort of says. What they say is that Tycho was an alchemist, without pointing out that his alchemy was restricted to medical alchemy.

Tycho Brahe Source: Wikimedia Commons

One of his colleagues was the Swiss clockmaker Jost Bürgi, who had come to Prague from Hesse-Kassel,

Jost Bürge Source: Wikimedia Commons

where the Landgrave Moritz was a major supporter of alchemy, who appointed Johannes Hartmann (1568–1631) to the first ever chair for chemistry, actually Paracelsian medicine, at the university of Marburg. The real surprise is not that Kepler was an alchemist or practiced alchemy but rather that given the time and milieu in which he lived and worked that he wasn’t and didn’t.

Johannes Hartmann Source: Wikimedia Commons

How can I be so sure that Kepler didn’t dabble in alchemy? Simply because if he had, he would have written about it. Kepler is a delight, or a nightmare, for the historian, there is almost no figure that I know of in #histSTM, who was as communicative as Kepler. He wrote and published eighty three books and pamphlets in his lifetime covering a very wide range of topics and in all his written work he was always keen to explain in great detail to his readers just what he was doing and his thoughts on what he was doing. He wrote extensively and very openly on his mathematics, his astronomy, his astrology, his family, his private affairs, his financial problems and all of his hopes and fears. If Kepler had in anyway been engaged with alchemy, he would have written about it. If anybody should chime in now with, yes but alchemists kept they activities secret, I would point out in Kepler’s time the people practicing alchemy, particularly the Paracelsians, were anything but secretive. And it was with the Paracelsians that Kepler had the closest contact.

There are a few letters exchanged between Kepler and his Paracelsian physician friends, which show quite clearly that although Kepler displayed the natural curiosity of a scientific researcher in their alchemistic activities he did not accept the basic principles of alchemy. In his notorious exchange with Robert Fludd, he is very dismissive of Fludd’s alchemical activities. Kepler was not an alchemist.

From a historical point of view particularly bad is the contrast deliberately set up in the article between good science, astronomy and mathematics, and ‘dirty’ pseudo- science’, alchemy. This starts with the title:

Groundbreaking astronomer Kepler ‘may have practised alchemy’

Continues with the whole of the first paragraph:

The pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler may have had his eyes on the heavens, but chemical analysis of his manuscripts suggests he was “willing to get his hands dirty” and may have dabbled in alchemy.

“Kepler, who died in 1630, drew on Copernicus’s work to find laws of planetary motion that paved the way for Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity” is contrasted with “The authors speculate that Kepler could have learned the “pseudo-chemical science.” 

A ‘pioneering astronomer’ with ‘his eyes on the heavens’, serious scientific activity, but ‘dabbled in alchemy’. Whoever wrote these lines obviously knows nothing about Kepler’s astronomical writing nor about early 17^thcentury alchemy.

The article through its choice of descriptive terms tries to set up a black/white dichotomy between the man who paved the way for modern astronomy, good, and the practitioners of alchemy in the early seventeenth century, bad. However if we actually look at the real history everything dissolves into shades of grey.

Kepler was not just an astronomer and mathematician but also a practicing astrologer. People might rush in here with lots of Kepler quotes condemning and ridiculing the nativity horoscope astrology of his age, all of them true. However, he famously said one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water defending the basic idea of astrology and presenting his own unique system of astrology based entirely on aspects, that is the angular position of the planets relative to each other. The author of the piece has obviously never turned the pages of either Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum or his Harmonice Mundi. As I commented on Twitter, during a discussion of this article, Kepler’s cosmological heuristic with which he generated all of his successful astronomy was, viewed from a modern rational standpoint, quite simply bat shit insane. Things are not looking good for our pioneering astronomer.

Kepler’s Platonic solid model of the solar system, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) Kepler’s explanation as to why there are only five planets and their order around the sun! Source: Wikimedia Commons

On the other side, as I have noted on several occasions, alchemy included much that we now label applied and industrial chemistry.  For example, alchemists were responsible for the production of pigments for painters and gunpowder for fireworks and cannons, and were often glassmakers. Alchemists were historically responsible for developing the laboratory equipment and methodology for chemical analysis. In the period under discussion many alchemists, including Tycho, were Paracelsian physicians, who are credited with the founding of the modern pharmacological industry. Historians of alchemy tend to refer to the alchemy of the seventeenth century as chymistry because it represents the historical transition from alchemy to chemistry. Not so much a pseudo-science as a proto-science.

Let us now consider the so-called evidence for the articles principle claim. Throughout the article it is stated that the evidence was found on Kepler’s manuscripts, plural. But when the evidence is actually discussed it turns out to be a single manuscript about the moon. On this manuscript the researchers found:

“…very significant amounts of metals associated with the practice including gold, silver, mercury and lead on the pages of Kepler’s manuscript about the moon, catalogued as “Hipparchus” after the classical astronomer.”

Is alchemy the only possible/plausible explanation for the traces of metals found on this manuscript? Could one suggest another possibility? All of these metals could have been and would have been used by a clock and instrument maker such as Jost Bürgi, who was Kepler’s close colleague and friend throughout his eleven years in Prague. Bürgi also had a strong interest in astronomy and might well have borrowed an astronomical manuscript. Of course such a solution doesn’t make for a sensational article, although all the available evidence very strongly suggests that Kepler was not an alchemist.

One final point that very much worries me is the provenance of this document. It is four hundred years old, who has owned it in the meantime? Where has it been stored? Who has had access to it? Until all of these questions can be accurately answered attributing its contamination to Kepler is just unfounded speculation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you believe in magic?

I’m in a bit of a quandary about this post for two different reasons. Firstly I didn’t really want to write yet another negative post at the moment and was considering various positive options when somebody drew my attention to the article that is going to be the subject of this one. However having once read through it I just couldn’t let it go. On the other hand having always been a powerful advocate of seriously investigating the so-called occult science activities of the scholars in the Early Modern period I find it slightly bizarre to now be giving the Hist-Sci Hulk treatment to an article that appears to do just that. The article in question is posted on the Vox website and is entitled, These 5 men were scientific geniuses. They also thought magic is real.

Before dealing with the ‘5 men’ there are a couple of general points of criticism that have to be levelled at this article. To begin with the whole thing is written in a supercilious tone of superiority. Despite the authors disclaimer, “We have the benefit of hindsight today, which gives us an unfair advantage over these geniuses” he creates the impression the whole time of ‘I’m just a simple Joe’ but I’m way more enlightened than these ‘geniuses’. Not a good way to approach any historical topic. The other major failure that weaves its way through the whole article is the equating of astrology, alchemy and magic, as one and the same thing. This is of course historically a serious mistake and disqualifies the entire article from the start. The grounds for justification, academic status and the levels of acceptance of the three disciplines differ from each other, as well as over time and place. Each one of them has to be dealt with separately within the given context and they cannot and should not be lumped together. This of course relates to the authors supercilious tone of superiority and is typical of the woolly thinking of all too many gnu atheists and adherents of scientism. Anything that doesn’t conform with their, often badly articulated, concept of science is dismissed as ‘magical thinking’ and as worthless. Let us now turn to the ‘5 men’.

First up we have Tuscany’s favourite son, Galileo Galilei who apparently believed “astrology changed everything”:

Today, Galileo (1564-1642) is held up as a paragon of rationality. He advocated heliocentrism — the idea that the sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the solar system — fought an anti-heliocentric church at great risk, and greatly advanced astronomy throughout Europe.

He also was something like a fortune teller.

Galileo didn’t just believe in astrology: he practiced it, conducted it for wealthy clients, and taught it to medical school students. If students at the University of Padua had taken MCATs, Galileo would have included a question about whether a Leo should date a Gemini.

Galileo wasn’t alone in keeping up on his signs. His contemporary, Johannes Kepler conducted his own astrological studies, though more reluctantly (he called people who believed in astrology “fatheads”).

Ignoring the opening paragraph and cutting to the chase a Renaissance astrologer, particularly an academic one, would object intensely to being referred to as ‘a fortune teller’. In the Renaissance astrology was generally accepted as a reputable academic disciple, a science i.e. a system of knowledge, whereas most other forms of divination i.e. fortune telling were frowned on as charlatanry. Here we have historical context, blithely ignored by our author, poking its nose in. Medical astrology, or iatro-mathematics, was a mainstream academic discipline taught at all Renaissance universities in the medical faculty, usually by the professor of mathematics. So if Galileo did indeed teach iatro-mathematics he would have been merely fulfilling the terms of his contract. I say if because it is to be assumed that Galileo did indeed teach such courses, however the proof that he did so doesn’t exists. The comment about ‘whether a Leo should date a Gemini’ is just plain stupid, as iatro-mathematics has nothing to do with judicial astrology, that is the everyday horoscope astrology, a completely different branch of the discipline.

Of course Galileo, who really did accept the truth of astrology, did practice judicial astrology famously casting and interpreting his own horoscope and those of his daughters. He also cast and interpreted the horoscopes not of ‘rich clients’ but wealthy patrons; there is a substantial difference. Rich clients would imply that Galileo’s services as an astrologer were for hire like any other street vendor, this was not the case. Rich patrons sought out Galileo’s company to share in his intellectual talents. Here his abilities to cast and interpret horoscopes became instruments of credit. Galileo entertained his patrons by supplying witty and stimulating after dinner discourses or debates or by providing the required horoscope. In exchange Galileo received favours from his patrons, a case of good wine, help with the cost of publishing his books or introductions to important and influential people such as the Pope.

On the good Johannes Kepler our author walks right into one of the most persistent myths of all in the history of science based on a classic case of quote mining, the claim that he was reluctant about astrology. Kepler was much more concerned about astrology, which he definitely believed in, than Galileo and wrote several books about it. However he totally rejected conventional horoscope astrology believing that the stars signs were artificial constructs with no significance whatsoever. He developed his own system based on planetary alignments, astrological aspects, and directio (directions, which I’m not going to explain!). Not unsurprisingly he didn’t find any takers for his reformed astrology. However his vitriolic diatribes against the conventional horoscope astrology and its practitioners, when quote mined, leads many people to the mistaken belief that he was in some way anti-astrology.

Our author next reveals, oh my god, that Newton was an alchemist. This is probably the most often ‘revealed secret’ about Grantham’s most famous son. This is titled “Isaac Newton thought alchemy was the future”, as we will see Newton was actually much more interested in alchemy’s past.

John Maynard Keynes called Isaac Newton (1642-1726) “the last of the magicians” with good reason. Newton spent half his life obsessed with alchemy, the transformative magic most frequently associated with turning different metals into gold. To make things even more complicated, in 1696, Newton became Warden of the Mint, and he became master of the Mint in 1700. The Royal Mint, of course, makes the coins for the entire United Kingdom. To be clear: an alchemist was the person in charge of making all the money.

Newton wasn’t the only respected mind who had visions of diving into gold coins. Robert Boyle is considered the father of chemistry, but he dabbled in alchemy as well. In fact, he was so committed to the alchemical cause that he fought to make alchemy legal, since Henry IV had banned it (because alchemy wasn’t good for the monetary supply). Needless to say, the repeal wasn’t necessary.

The philosopher’s stone Newton chased after wasn’t only able to “cure” metals that weren’t gold. It also had medical powers that fascinated Newton and his peers. Unfortunately, today you can only find the philosopher’s stone in the British subtitle of the first Harry Potter book.

Alchemy is not magic and any medieval or renaissance alchemist would have been deeply insulted if anybody had accused him of practicing magic. Alchemy as practiced by Newton or Boyle considered itself to be a well-founded knowledge system and it was this that attracted Newton. Newton certainly never had vision of diving into gold coins and neither did Boyle. Newton’s beliefs were in fact even weirder than our author thinks. Newton was an adherent of a widespread Renaissance philosophy known as prisca sapientia.

This theory thought that humanity had been in possession of perfect knowledge of the world shortly after the creation. This knowledge had become lost over time and Newton believed that his scientific discoveries were not discoveries but rediscoveries. He also believed that alchemy was the oldest form of knowledge and that if he could discover the secrets of alchemy he could tap into that ancient source of all knowledge. Pretty bizarre, I know, but it all formed a coherent whole in Newton’s worldview. On a scientific level the Newton experts are now convinced that his belief in alchemy enabled him to develop his theory of universal gravity, which, with its action at a distance, heavily contradicted the prevailing mechanical philosophy. The Cartesian and Leibnizian mechanical philosophers criticised his theory of gravity for exactly this reason.

Our author seems to think that there is something wrong with an alchemist becoming Warden or Master of the Mint. In fact Newton’s extensive chemical knowledge, won through his alchemical experimentation over many years, enabled him to develop and to put into practice new much improved methods of assaying metals to test the purity of coins. A major win for the Royal Mint.

The closing comment about alchemy and Harry Potter is a perfect example of the author’s childish attitude, supercilious superiority. This attitude is displayed to the full in his paragraphs about Tycho Brahe, entitled “Tycho Brahe made everyone believe he was a sorcerer”.

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) created his own model of the universe and, though he didn’t get things quite right, helped advance astronomy and catalogued more than 1,000 stars. He also convinced everyone he was a sorcerer.

He did so from the unique perch of his private sorcerer’s island, Hveen (today known in English as Ven). Fantastically wealthy, Brahe built multiple observatories there, had a squad of astronomical assistants, and he used tiny automata (robots) to convince the locals he had magic powers. It didn’t hurt that he partied hard, had his nose partly sliced off in a duel and got his pet moose drunk at parties.

But Tycho didn’t just hoodwink the public into believing he was magical — he believed it too. He publically lectured against anyone who believed astrology was fake, and he also believed alchemy was the future for mystical discoveries. Brahe even became so synonymous with magic that an entire calendar of magical days was made in his honor (and his name was slapped on to give it magical credibility).

This is a bizarre mixture of half true facts and fairy stories. Tycho only catalogued 700 stars but added 300 more from the Ptolemaic star catalogue to bring his own up to 1000. He did nothing at all to convince anyone that he was a sorcerer. The island of Hven was his fief, awarded to him by the Danish King as his birth right as a highborn aristocrat and to call it a sorcerer’s island is not only wrong but also childish. He only built two observatories, one in his mansion house Uraniborg and the other a sunken observatory in the grounds called Stjerneborg. The story about the automata is a myth created by Pierre Gassendi in his biography of Tycho. The nose and moose stories are actually irrelevancies to the subject under discussion along the lines of, if I show that Tycho was weird then people are more likely to believe the rest of the shit that I’m dishing up.

Once again we have a very fundamental category error. Tycho was a practicing astrologer and a Paracelsian pharmacist neither of which activities is magic. Tycho held an oration at the beginning of a guest lecture course on astronomy that he held at the University of Copenhagen defending the validity of astrology, a not unusual presentation in that age. Rheticus’ public oration on being appointed professor for mathematics in Wittenberg was on the same subject. Tycho an adherent of the Renaissance microcosmos/macrocosmos philosophy, as above so below, also believed that alchemy served the same function on earth as astrology in the heavens but both were in his opinion ‘scientific’ and not mystical. Tycho’s interest in alchemy centred on his belief in and practice of Paracelsian medicine, a leading medical theory in some circles in Europe at the time and consisted mainly of research into and production of medicines.

The Magical Calendar is an engraving not a book and the author, Adam McLean, of the modern book on this object that our author links to writes the following:

“Although his name appears at the bottom right hand corner of the plate, the Magical Calendar probably has no direct connection with Tycho Brahe […] It seems most likely that the well known name of Tycho Brahe was associated with the Magical Calendar in order to gain a degree of publicity and supposed authority for the work. Certainly there is nothing in Brahe’s accepted corpus of writings of a similar nature.” [my emphasis]

Doesn’t quite say what our author wants it to say, does it?

Our author’s next selection is a truly bad example of low fruit. He presents us with Carl Linnaeus with the title “Carl Linnaeus classified magical animals like the hydra and believed in mermaids”.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) imposed taxonomical order on animal and plant life. In his era, scientists were discovering all sorts of new species at a rapid clip (Linnaeus himself thought that pelicans might be a myth). That rapid pace of discovery led Linnaeus to believe, perhaps reasonably enough, that humans would soon find a host of mythological animals.

Linnaeus devoted a whole section of his landmark Systema Naturae to these strange beasts. It was called Animalia Paradoxa and included:

• the hydra
• the satyrus (a monkey-like man, similar to Pan in Greek mythology)
• the phoenix (the bird that rose from the ashes)

Did Linnaeus believe in these animals? It’s hard to know, and some of Linnaeus’s defenders say he only included the animals to point out how absurd they were. In the 1730s, he became famous for debunking a hydra in Hamburg. However, we can reasonably claim that Linnaeus believed he’d found a troglodyte, was pretty confident he’d seen a unicorn horn, and was very excited at the chance to find a mermaid.

Whatever the motivation, Linnaeus wasn’t alone in believing in bizarre, vaguely magical animals. Gottfried Leibniz managed to help found calculus, yet he still wanted to fill a museum with weird (and imaginary) animals like the myrmecoleon (some sort of ant-lion).

The tone of this whole section is concerned with how superior our author is in comparison with the poor benighted Linnaeus; the heavy sent of mockery cannot be overlooked. He gives no consideration to the time in which Linnaeus was working and writing. He also appears to have left his own theme, as there is nothing ‘magical’ about the things he lists Linnaeus as having done.

Linnaeus lived and worked in the eighteenth century there was no Internet, no telephones, no telegraph, not even a reliable let alone universal postal system; a letter to South America, for example, would probably take months to arrive at its destination and quite possibly might not arrive at all. Linnaeus lived all of his life in Northern Europe and was dependent on the reports of others for descriptions of non-European species of plants and animals. If he got no chance to view one personally then a tiger was just as much a mythical animal as a manticore and he had no chance of proving the real existence of the one or the other. What we have here is an eighteenth century natural historian carefully classifying all the plants and animals that are known to him through multiple written sources. It’s worth noting that Linnaeus places those mythical creatures that he classifies into a separate category that he names Paradoxa the Greek pardoxon meaning contrary to accepted opinion, i.e. dodgy. Systema Naturae went through many editions and in the later ones this category was left out. Only one real animal was included in Paradoxa, the pelican, which given the fact that travellers tales described the pelican as cutting its own breast to feed its children was not an irrational decision. None of the mythical animals was included in a category with real animals. What we have here is careful rational scientific behaviour not magical thinking.

Linnaeus included humans as primates, which of course caused a controversy in the eighteenth century. He also included two other species in the genus homo, Homo troglodytes based on the accounts of Jacob Bontius and Homo lar based on other reports. He asked the Swedish East India Company to look for confirming evidence of the existence of Homo troglodytes, which they couldn’t deliver and Homo lar was later categorised as a gibbon, again a good natural historian doing his work. Belief in unicorns, some form of single horned horse, based on the existence of narwhal tusks was still very widespread in the eighteenth century, so to try and ridicule Linnaeus or this is pathetic. The same applies to mermaids.

The author’s attempt to besmirch Leibniz is really clutching at straws. What the hell is ‘managed to help invent calculus’ supposed to mean? That’s not exactly the usual way of talking about one of the greatest mathematical achievements of the seventeenth century. Curiosity cabinets and natural history collections played a central role in scientific activities throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the largest, that of Hans Sloane, forming the basis of the British museum after Sloane’s death. Leibniz’ Drôle de Pensée, amusing thought, was to extend the curiosity cabinet into a much larger public exhibition space with active displays and machines alongside the passive objects displaying the full spectrum of science, technology and medicine, Science Museum anyone? That his long list of potential exhibits contains one mythical animal hardly makes this something to deride.

Our author’s fifth genius is, as would be expected, Paracelsus who apparently “loved natural magic and himself”.

Paracelsus (1493-1541) did a lot when he was alive, including basically inventing toxicology and naming zinc. But when he wasn’t revolutionizing scientific methods and naming metals, he was a big fan of magical things.

Born as Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, he renamed himself Paracelsus, both because it was shorter and it literally meant he was “better than Celsus,” a first century Roman medical researcher (in Paracelsus’s defense, he may have been renamed by his biggest fans). Paracelsus wrote that from an early age the “transmutation of metals” was his obsession, and he pursued it with vigor as an adult.

When he wasn’t traveling the world performing surgeries, he tried to utilize “natural magic” to help patients. He was quoted as saying “magic is a great secret wisdom,” and while his understanding of natural magic occasionally lent itself to scientific inquiry, he also believed that “the soul strongly desires sulphur.” As the scientist on this list closest in time to Aristotle, it makes sense that Paracelsus would indulge in magic and the occult.

In his defense, that belief in magic was grounded in a commitment to inquiry: Paracelsus thought magic was just science that wasn’t understood yet. In a way, that unites all the scientists on this list, who pursued new knowledge even when it meant looking in some very unusual places.

The claim that Paracelsus basically invented toxicology, although not original to our author (who I doubt has any original thoughts), is historically highly dubious as poisons have been studied extensively since antiquity and it is rather strangely based on the legendary Paracelsus quote Dosis sola venenum facit, the dose makes the poison. Paracelsus was not born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, I refer the reader to my earlier post on the subject of his name.

The rest of the paragraphs on Paracelsus are a confused mess of unrelated claims picked at random from other peoples writings and doesn’t earn the right to be analysed so I won’t. I would ask the author why, having suddenly introduced the term, he doesn’t actually explain what natural magic is or was. Possibly the worst single sentence in the whole sorry mess that is this article is, As the scientist on this list closest in time to Aristotle, it makes sense that Paracelsus would indulge in magic and the occult. Anybody who actually knew anything about either Paracelsus or Aristotle could not conceive of writing this sentence, even as a parody.

Returning to my initial criticism of this apology for a historical article, astrology and alchemy are not magic if dealing academically and historically with these disciplines and because he introduces it at the end ‘natural magic’ is not magic as it is generally understood either. As often the case I find it fascinating that people who quite literally don’t know what they’re talking about think that it’s OK to write an article about the history of science on a widely read popular website. If they were to write about something popular, such as football or cars, on the same level no editor in the world would allow them to publish it, so why do they treat the history of science with such disrespect?

 

 

 

The Renaissance Mathematicus Road Show: May 2014

 

The Renaissance Mathematicus is venturing forth once again from the safe environs of his humble abode to terrorise the unsuspecting citizens of Middle Franconia with his warped views on the history of science, in the form of a public lecture.  For those unwary enough to actually wish to confront the man they call the HISTSCI-HULK, he will be lecturing, in German, at Zentrifuge in Nürnberg at 7:30 in the evening of this coming Saturday, 24 May 2014. The title of this highly dubious attack on public decency is Alchemie: Kunst? Wissenschaft? Philosophie? Religion? Should you choose to attend you do so at your own risk and are hereby warned that you might be forced to rethink your opinions on the science of alchemy. Did he really just write “science” of alchemy? Yes, he did!

Was Will a Copernican?

The Will of the title is England’s most notorious playwright and poet, William Shakespeare, who was supposedly born 450 years ago today. The question is the central motivation for the new book by Canadian popular science writer, Dan Falk, The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe.[1] Given that Shakespeare was born just twenty-one years after Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was published and lived through the period in which Kepler and Galileo, amongst others, made the heliocentric hypothesis the hottest item in the European scientific community it is not unreasonable to ask, as Falk does, in the more general sense, whether the cosmological and astronomical upheaval of the age left any traces in Will’s work. Traditional Shakespearean scholarship says no, Falk re-examines the evidence.

I must admit that when I first got offered this book to review I had a sinking feeling that somebody was going down the same garden path that Peter Usher had already trodden. For those readers who are not aware of Mr Usher’s endeavours, he is a retired astronomer who believes that he has found the secret message encoded in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and in all of the rest of his works. Usher believes that Hamlet describes the battle for supremacy between the Ptolemaic, Tychonic and Copernican system of astronomy in the Early Modern Period. What do I think of Mr Usher’s theories? Let’s put it this way, Mr Usher manages to make the Bible decoders look like rational human beings. My feelings about reading Falk’s book where not improved on discovering, upon receiving my review copy, that it was indeed an introduction to Mr Usher’s ideas that inspired Falk to research and write his book; I feared the worst. Fortunately, although I cannot totally endorse the book, Mr Falk did indeed do his research on the whole thoroughly and it turned out to be much better than I had feared. In fact on the whole I found it to be a well-written and entertaining read.

The introduction sets the scene for his book by presenting what are respectively the most expensive science and humanities rare books, Nicolas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and The Shakespeare First Folio, given their proximity in time it is not an unreasonable question to ask if the one influenced the other and whilst acknowledging that the traditional answer is no, Falk already brings here one of the arguments used by more modern researchers, and not just Usher, to claim the opposite. I shall deal with this later along with the other supposed arguments in favour of a heliocentric Bard.

The first five chapters deal with the largely astronomical background giving a quick rundown on ancient cosmology, the emergence of Copernican theory and its reception in late sixteenth-century England. Falk has done his homework well and this part of the book is almost totally satisfying. I say almost because it does contain two serious errors.

Falk manages to walk into a trap that Copernicus laid for the unwary. Falk writes, “and it [the Copernican model] managed to bring the total number of circles down from eighty to thirty-four.” Falk is here paraphrasing a claim that Copernicus makes in the Commentariolus the pamphlet he wrote around 1514, first announcing his heliocentric system. The claim is an estimate and not a fact. Unfortunately for Falk by the time Copernicus had worked out his system in full, in De revolutionibus, he actually needed forty-eight circles, whereas Peuerbach, in his Theoricae Novae Planetarum, the most modern version of the geocentric model, which Copernicus used and consulted himself, only required forty circles. Not a victory for the new astronomy.

Whilst discussing the Copernican reception Falk quite rightly introduces William Gilbert. He goes on to explain that Gilbert, influenced by Copernicus, discusses diurnal rotation in his De magnete, explaining it as the natural motion of a spherical magnet, based on his erroneous view that a spherical magnet left to itself rotates. Unfortunately Falk then goes on to say, “He also believed that magnetic forces emanating from the sun, together with the sun’s rotation, caused the planets to move in their heliocentric orbits”. Gilbert of course believed nothing of the sort. In Book Six of De magnete, where this discussion takes place, he states quite explicitly, “ From these arguments, therefore, we infer, not with mere probability, but with certainty, the diurnal rotations of the earth; […] I pass by the earth’s other movements, for here we treat only of the diurnal rotation [my emphasis], whereby it turns to the sun and produces the natural day (of twenty-four hours) which we call nycthermeron”. Gilbert’s model is in fact not Copernican at all but a geocentric-geokinetic one. I’ve blogged about the history of such systems here. The magnetic force explanation for the movement of the planets in a heliocentric system was hypothesised by Johannes Kepler, first in his Astronomia nova and then again later in his Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, inspired by Gilbert’s work but not taken from him. I have a sneaking suspicion that Falk got his research notes a little muddled up here.

I found it very positive that Falk does not shy away from some controversial topics concerning sixteenth century English astronomy but whilst discussing them retains a level head. For example he looks at the claims made chiefly by Colin Ronan, who strangely doesn’t get mentioned here at all, that the Digges, that’s father and son Leonard and Thomas, invented and constructed a functioning telescope forty plus years before Hans Lippershey in Holland. Whilst quoting all of the original sources that led to these speculations Falk also gives space to those experts who clearly reject Ronan’s hypothesis, as I also do.

Having presented the scientific background Falk now moves on to Shakespeare presenting the reader with an, albeit, brief but adequate biography of the Bard. A necessary section of his book for those who come to it from the history of science rather than from English philology.

We are now half way through and can at last turn our attention to the real subject of the book, Shakespeare and science and Falk dives right in with “The Science of Hamlet”, where a tortuous trail of speculation is constructed. We start with a quote from the opening scene, “When yound same star that’s westward from the pole, Had made its course to illume that part of heaven”. This is a reference to the time of night, it being common practice in the Middle Ages to measure time at night by the position of the circumpolar stars. With a lot of jiggery-pokery we are led to the conclusion that the referenced star must be the Nova from 1572. This is not completely improbable as this Nova was the most significant celestial event during Shakespeare’s lifetime. In a fantasy dialogue Falk has Shakespeare’s father taking the young Will out to view the Nova in a prologue to the book. We now get led on to the fact that this is Tycho Brahe’s Nova. This is a classic bit of presentism. Tycho did indeed observe and write about this Nova but so did every astronomer in Europe and everybody, astronomer or no, with two eyes almost certainly observed it. So why do we need to introduce Tycho?

We now come to the central argument for an astronomical Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tycho Brahe produced an engraving of himself, he did lots of that sort of thing, in 1590, which lists sixteen of his close relatives including a Rosenkrans and a Guildensteren, Q.E.D: Shakespeare took the names from Tycho. It’s obvious isn’t it? But how? Tycho sent a copy of his astronomical letters, his Epistolae, containing said engraving to Thomas Saville, which includes Tycho’s well wishes for John Dee and Thomas Digges. What if Thomas Digges also received a copy? We then get a whole heap of arguments the Shakespeare could have (must have) known the Digges family and through them seen such a Tychonic portrait. Digges, we should not forget was a Copernican. Unfortunately none of these arguments contains a single concrete fact that Shakespeare knew the Digges family. The whole chapter is an untidy heap of unsubstantiated speculations with very little real substance.

Is it possible that Shakespeare came across the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by other means? To be fair to Falk he answers this question in the positive. There was a Danish diplomatic mission to England in 1592 including two delegates bearing the names Rosenkrans and Guildensteren and alone on Frederick II court in Copenhagen there were nine Rs and three Gs so a connection to Tycho is not really necessary.

Because Tycho as the Danish source of Hamletian science is so important both to Falk and Usher I will now point out something that the both either ignore or possibly deliberately sweep under the carpet. In the earlier chapters on Renaissance astronomy, when discussing Tycho, Falk points out that James VI & I actually visited Tycho’s observatory on Hven during a trip to Denmark. What he neglects to mention is why James was visiting Denmark in the first place. James went to Denmark in 1589 to fetch his bride, Anne of Denmark. This means that from 1590 onwards there would have been a strong political interest in Denmark, not only in Scotland but also in England where James was already seen as the most likely heir to the childless Elizabeth. Tycho Brahe was by no means the only reason for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to be interested in all things Danish.

Let us assume that having decided to write Hamlet Shakespeare, a good author, did some research on Denmark and the Danish court. He would discover that Denmark was ruled by an oligarchy of about twenty powerful families of, which the Brahes were one. If he chose at random two names from those twenty from his play then those chosen would have been relatives of Tycho because, as is the nature of oligarchies, the families maintained their hold on power by intermarrying. The fact that two courtiers in Hamlet bear the names of two of Tycho’s relatives thus has, in my opinion, very little significance.

Enter Usher stage right: According to Peter Usher the whole of Hamlet not only contains hidden references to Copernican astronomy but is in fact a dramatic presentation of the intellectual battle between the leading astronomical systems, Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic. Hamlet is the Copernican astronomer embodied by Thomas Digges, Hamlet’s murdered father is Leonard Digges, his uncle Claudius is Ptolemaeus, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Tycho (apparently he has a split personality!), Laertes is Thomas Harriot and so on and so on. Only the women play no role in Usher grand scheme of things, a little strange given Ophelia’s central role in the drama! Apart from the Tycho connection sketched above Usher has discovered two smoking guns in the play that he thinks justify his interpretation. The first of these is Wittenberg. This German university town gets several name checks in the play. Usher sees this as references to Copernicanism because Rheticus, who persuaded Copernicus to publish, had studied and taught at Wittenberg. There are a couple of obvious flaws in this argument. Firstly Rheticus had left Wittenberg before the publication of De revolutionibus, in which he is incidentally never mentioned, to become professor of mathematics in Leipzig. Secondly Wittenberg was by no means a centre of Copernican scholarship, Luther and Melanchthon being both on record as opposing heliocentricity.

Is there another reason for Shakespeare to feature Wittenberg in a play about the Danish court? In fact there is. The court language in Denmark was not Danish but German and although Copenhagen had its own Lutheran university it was common practice for the Danish aristocracy to send its sons abroad for their education. See a bit of the world whilst getting your degree. Because Denmark was a strongly Lutheran country Wittenberg, home of Luther and the Reformation, was the most popular destination for young Danish aristocrats to acquire their foreign university experience. There is absolutely no need to evoke a bogus Copernican connection to justify Shakespeare’s choice of Wittenberg in his play.

Usher’s second smoking gun is the famous hawk and handsaw quote, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw”. (For those not in the know handsaw is thought to be a typo for hernshaw a kind of heron). For Usher this rather enigmatic passage is interpreted to mean that for someone on Hven when the wind comes from north-north-west this means Elsinore the home of Claudius and Ptolemaic astronomy, so madness, whereas a wind from the south means Wittenberg the home of Copernicanism. Having already demolished the theory that Wittenberg is the home of Copernicanism I don’t really need to say more but I do have to ask why Hamlet should be positioned on Hven, Tycho’s realm, whilst making this speech? It really doesn’t make much sense to me Mr Usher.

There are a whole series of even less convincing finds by Usher not only in Hamlet but in all of Shakespeare’s plays to justify his fantasy constructions that I’m not going to go into here, but there is one further issue that I postponed from the introduction, an argument used by those not totally convinced by Usher’s bizarre arguments but willing to accept that Shakespeare’s work possible does contain some hidden references to heliocentricity. The quote in question comes from Troilus and Cressida, “the glorious planet Sol / In noble eminence enthroned and sphered…” We get told that, “by emphasizing the role of the sun, the passage may hint at the new heliocentric astronomy.” Talk about clutching at straws. Within traditional geocentric astronomy, astrology and alchemy the sun played a special role for very obvious reasons. The sun determines day and night, it defines the year, it brings light and warmth, it is by far and away the most prominent body in the sky do I really need to go one. I will add one astronomical note for those philologists who are apparently too lazy to read up on the history of the subject. In geocentric cosmology the sun was regarded as the ruler of the planets because, in the most commonly accepted order of the orbits, it occupies the central position in the heavens with three inner plants and three outer planets below and above it.

At the end of his chapter on Usher Falk tries a bait and switch. He presents a list of off the wall papers presented at a major Shakespearean conference that he attended whilst researching his book with an argument that Usher’s thesis is no crazier than these. Just because other people spout shit doesn’t make Usher’s shit anymore palatable. I will however give Falk credit, although he does present Usher’s garbage with considerably more sympathy than he deserves he also lets Usher’s critics speak for themselves leaving it to the reader to make up her or his mind on the subject.

What now follows in a chapter on Galileo and the telescopic discoveries made around 1610; in itself not a bad retelling of well-known material. This is included because we now have Usher and others trying to convince us that Shakespeare’s late play Cymbeline contain hidden references to Galileo’s (and Marius’ but he doesn’t get a mention) discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter. I leave it to Falk’s readers to find if the arguments are convincing.

Because the book’s title is The Science of Shakespeare and not the astronomy or cosmology of Shakespeare Falk now turns to what are now commonly known as the occult sciences. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have done his homework here anywhere near as well as he did for the astronomy and cosmology in the main part of the book. We start with astrology and here he fall on his nose at the first hurdle. Falk tells us:

In England, astrology came to have two more or less distinct branches, known as “natural astrology” and “judicial astrology”. Natural astrology was, in fact, something like straight-ahead astronomy; it focused on tracking and predicting the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. Judicial astrology was closer to what we think of today as just plain “astrology – the attempt to link celestial happenings to earthly affairs, and to use astronomical knowledge to predict terrestrial happenings.

Wrong! Astronomy focused on tracking and predicting the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. That’s the difference between astronomy and astrology, although in Shakespeare’s time the two words were still used interchangeably. In fact astrology has four major divisions that go back to antiquity and were not first developed in Renaissance England. These are judicial astrology, electional astrology, horary astrology and natural astrology. Judicial or natal astrology is more or less as Falk describes it. Electional astrology is the casting of horoscopes to determine the correct or propitious time or date to start an undertaking. When should one marry, when lay the foundation stone of a building or new town, when to undertake a journey or even when to start a military campaign. Horary astrology is the attempt to answer questions by astrologers casting horoscopes upon receipt of the question. This is the classic detective story astrology used to detect thieves or to discover the hiding place of stolen goods. Natural astrology is the branch of astrology that deals with the things of the natural world i.e. astro-medicine and astro-meteorology. Theses division are important in the history of astrology, as there were extensive debates and disputes as to the validity of each of them, each of the four having its own champions and opponents. Interestingly even the strongest opponents of astrology in general in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance tended to accept the validity of natural astrology whilst simultaneously launching vitriolic invective against the widespread judicial astrology.

Although having got off to a bad start Falk’s discussion of judicial astrology in Shakespeare is reasonably good. He acknowledges that Shakespeare’s work is permeated by astrological references, whilst being a good mirror of his own society he also lets the opponents of astrology speak their piece. Unfortunately I got the feeling that Falk was trying to persuade the reader that Shakespeare was an opponent of astrology and that despite the fact that in his biographical chapter on the Bard he warns the reader against trying to determine Shakespeare’s character or personality from his works. I was particularly irritated by statements that Carl Sagen or Richard Dawkins would find favour with a particular anti-astrology speech or Neil deGrasse Tyson and Laurence Krauss would applaud a piece of scepticism. I found these comments out of place and quite frankly somewhat bizarre.

After astrology we turn to magic. This chapter slightly disturbs me, as it is largely about demonic magic, Macbeth’s witches and all that, which unlike natural magic was never considered scientia and thus not science. Towards the end of the chapter Falk does briefly discuss the difference between demonic and natural magic but his definition of natural magic is even more wrong than his definition of natural astrology. I’m not even going to go there, as an attempt to explain natural magic would probably end up as long as this already over long review. Even worse Falk talks about astrology as being magic. This is within the context of a book on Renaissance history a serious category mistake. Astrology is not a form of magic. Falk makes the same category mistake as he discusses alchemy in this chapter. Alchemy gets dismissed in a couple of short paragraphs somewhat of a disappointment as alchemy played a very central role in Elizabethan learned society, with even Elizabeth herself a practicing alchemist. Falk closes out the chapter by stating that “Astrology, witchcraft, alchemy, magic … and science. It was all part of a package; all were thoroughly intertwined in the sixteenth century, and even into the early years of the seventeenth.” This was indeed true although it went much further into the seventeenth century than the early years. However I find it slightly sad that Falk choses to illustrate this with a quick sketch of the live and work of Johannes Kepler. This sketch whilst basically correct doesn’t do Kepler’s scientific achievements justice. We also get the following old myth dished up, “We might note that Kepler was a practicing astrologer, and that he cast horoscopes for the German nobility. It’s not clear, however, how much faith he put in the power of the starts to influence our lives” [my emphasis]. Just for the record Kepler was a 100% convinced astrologer and any claims to the contrary are wishful thinking from those who would prefer their scientific heroes free of the taint of the occult.

Next up is Renaissance medicine a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays. An adequate treatment of the subject as far as it goes but neither here nor in his discussion of astrology does Falk even mention let alone discuss astro-medicine. This is a strange omission as astrological medicine was one of the dominant directions in medical practice in Shakespearean times. This chapter contains the strangest claim in the whole book. In his discussion of the differences between physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and midwifes Falk produces the following gem, “Since the Middle Ages, the practice of medicine had been associated with the Catholic Church and so physicians were forbidden to shed blood”. Now I’m not a historian of medicine but I’ve read a lot of literature on the history of medicine and I’ve never come across anything of the sort in fact I will go as far as to say that this statement is a total myth of the same sort as the claim that the Church had banned dissection. I’m quite prepared to admit that I’m wrong should any of my highly educated readers show Falk to be in the right but somehow I don’t think I’m going to have to.

In the penultimate chapter Falk takes a sharp left turn. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of Lucretius’ De rerum natura and a free advert for Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve. As Falk correctly says De rerum natura was a highly popular and influential book in Shakespeare’s time so one might well expect to find this popularity reflected in Shakespeare’s writings. All that Falk can deliver is one instance of the word atomi in Romeo and Juliet. This doesn’t stop him discussing Lucretius and recommending Greenblatt’s book. Greenblatt is one of the experts on Shakespeare that Falk consulted for his book, as he tells us on numerous occasions in the text and he gives an enthusiastic endorsement to Greenblatt’s work on the rediscovery of Lucretius’ poem in the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, this high opinion of The Swerve is not shared by many historians of medieval philosophy including one guest author here at The Renaissance Mathematicus.

Falk now introduces us to the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne trying to conceive him as a modern scientific skeptic, again gratuitously name dropping some actual ones, this time Laurence Krauss and Stephen Hawking. He does however admit that the attempt is at best dubious. He lets us know that Montaigne briefly refers to Copernicus, noting that there are now two possible cosmologies however reflecting that maybe in a thousand years a third model will come along and overthrow both of them. For this insight Falk credits Montaigne with being a sixteenth-century Karl Popper. There is however method in all this. We now get shown that Shakespeare was a diligent reader of the English translation of Montaigne’s essays traces of them turning up all over his own writings. This leads Falk to the categorical claim that at least here Shakespeare must have [my emphasis] come across Copernicus and Copernicanism. I always react allergically when somebody writing a historical text having failed to produce a direct link between two things sets up a plausible but speculative link and then says, “must”. There is no must about it. We simply do not know if Shakespeare read all of Montaigne’s voluminous output or only selected essays or if reading the essay in question skipped over the brief lines referring to Copernicus or even reading them gave them no significance and promptly forgot them again. What makes Falk’s last ditch attempt to link Shakespeare and Copernicus all the more questionable, having failed earlier in his book to produce a genuine smoking gun, is that he has spent a lot of words trying to convince the reader that Hamlet is the Bard’s Copernican work, whereas the English translation of the Montaigne essay first appeared in 1603 after Hamlet was written.

The final chapter of the book goes off on another tangent, this time in the direction of atheism. We get a potted history of atheism in the Early Modern Period and parallel to it a synopsis of how lacking in hope King Lear is. Combining this with the fact the Will’s friend Kit Marlowe was accused of atheism Falk ventures the hypothesis that Shakespeare had abandoned a belief in god. At the latest here, it becomes clear that Falk wishes to recreate Shakespeare as a sort of sixteenth-century Richard Dawkins. Enthusiastically embracing, albeit secretly, the new mode of scientific thinking and rejecting humanities dependency on god. However having come this far Falk baulks at the final hurdle hurriedly qualifying his own hypothesis, “We can’t definitely label Shakespeare an atheist, just as we can’t call him a scientist – even if we suspect we are seeing hints of such a world view.” In my opinion Falk has made a valiant effort to find facts to support his thesis but for me his argument is far too full of gaping holes to be really convincing.

Although this is not a an academic book its subject matter is of an academic nature so I think it is fair to ask about the academic apparatus, foot- or endnotes, bibliography and index. The book is equipped with, what I’m told, are hanging endnotes. That is endnotes giving sources for direct quotes in the text but without indications (quote numbers) in the text that they exist. This is possibly the worst solution to the notes problem that exists and I abhor it. I also found several direct quotes in the text for which no endnote exists. What makes this choice even stranger is that the text also has spasmodic footnotes referring to quotes in the text. Why some quotes earn footnotes and others hanging endnotes is not at all clear to me. The bibliography is quite extensive and gives ample evidence of the work that Falk has obviously invested in his book. There is no index! I find the omission of an index in this age of advance word processors, which make the compilation of an index child’s play, unforgivable.

I realise that if anybody has stayed with me up to here that they might think that having made so many negative comments I would not recommend Falk’s book, they would be wrong. On the whole I found the book well written, entertaining and informative. It is not free of errors but very few popular books on the history of science ever are. One of the very positive aspects of the book is that when even Falk presents a speculative theory concerning some aspect of science and a Shakespearean play he makes very clear that it is speculative and also presents alternative explanations for the text in question leaving it up to the readers to decide for themselves whether to accept the proffered hypothesis or not. On the whole I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it as a stimulating read for anybody interested in the subject matter, although they should be on their toes whilst reading.

 

 

[1] Dan Falk, The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright’s Universe, Thomas Dunne Press, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2014.

Alchemical confusion redux.

Yesterday, in my frustration with Mr Campbell’s drivel I missed another reference to Newton towards the end of his post to which Laura has drawn my attention in the comments.  Our Google expert delivers the following gem:

If I have limited time I want to read about Principia, not a failed effort later in Newton’s career. The fact that John Maynard Keynes believed in alchemy does not validate it, it instead shows us what was wrong with Keynes-ian economic beliefs. He believed in eugenics too, that didn’t make it valid.

In theses few lines Mr Campbell truly displays his total ignorance of subject he is pontificating about.  We start off with the classic, ‘Newton’s alchemy was a product of his dotage after he had produced his scientific work, the Principia’. Campbell doesn’t express it quite like that but it’s obvious what he believes. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I stated in the previous post Newton began his intensive study of alchemy in 1666 and continued it till 1696. He wrote the Principia in somewhat of a frenzy between 1684 and 1687, that is in two thirds of the way through his alchemy studies. Worse than this from Campbell’s standpoint Newton’s alchemical studies actually played a significant role in the conception of the Principia!

Newton conceived and wrote the Principia during a period in the history of science when the mechanical philosophy was totally dominant. This stated quite clearly that if object A moved as a result of object B then there must exist a mechanical contact between the two objects. Newton’s theory of gravity functioning through action at a distance was completely inacceptable. Newton was originally a supporter of the mechanical philosophy and as such would have been incapable of accepting his own later theory of gravity. What gave him the ability to go against the trend and embrace action at a distance? You guessed it, his study of alchemy. It has been clearly shown, mostly by Betty Jo Dobbs, that Newton’s acceptance of action at a distance and thus of a mental position from which he could formulate his theory of gravity was his study of the spirit forces in alchemy. Beyond this, Newton’s third law of motion is known to have been based on an alchemical principle.

In fact Newton’s introduction of the force of gravity acting at a distance led to the strongest criticism of and opposition to the Principia by the Cartesian and Leibnizian supporters of the mechanical philosophy. They accused him of reintroducing the occult (meaning hidden) forces into natural philosophy that they had banished. On these grounds whilst admiring the mathematical ingenuity of the Principia they rejected its central thesis.

Just as worrying as Mr Campbell’s total misrepresentation of Newton and his alchemy is his presentation of John Maynard Keynes. Now I’m not in anyway an expert on Keynes, in fact I know more about his father John Neville Keynes who was one of my nineteenth century logicians when I was serving my apprenticeship as a historian of mathematical logic. However I don’t really think that Keynes believed in alchemy. Worse than this, in the comments to his post, in response to just such doubt expressed by a reader, Campbell basically admits that he has no justification for this claim beyond his own personal animosity to Keynes’ economic theories and his support of eugenics as well as the fact that the fact that Keynes donated his personal collection of Newton’s alchemical writings to Cambridge University.

I shall ignore both the economics and the eugenics as non sequitur in a discussion on the history of alchemy. Viewing Keynes’ donation of the Newton papers as somehow damning is to say the least bizarre. This and other remarks scattered around Campbell’s incoherent piece lead me to the conclusion that Campbell is the worst sort of historical presentist.  He seems to be of the opinion that only those aspects of a historical researchers work that are still relevant by today’s standard are worth conserving or investigating, all the rest can be assigned to the dustbin of history. By totally misrepresenting alchemy and labelling it just pseudo-science Campbell thinks we dispense with it once and for all. The whole point of the fascinating and stimulating work of Principe et al is that they have clearly demonstrated that the real historical alchemy, as opposed to Campbell’s mythological version, made very significant contributions to the shaping of modern science.

Alchemical confusion.

On the 11^th February 1144 the Hellenistic science of alchemy entered medieval Europe by way of the Islamic empire. In his translation of Liber de compositione alchemiae (Book about the composition of alchemy) Robert of Chester wrote the following:

I have translated this Book because, what alchemy is, and what its composition is, almost no one in our Latin [that is: Western] world knows finished February 11^th anno 1144.

This was the start of long and popular period for alchemy within Europe, which reached its peak during the Renaissance during which alchemy gave birth to its daughter, modern chemistry. Rejected during the Enlightenment, along with astrology and magic, as a worthless occult science, alchemy was largely ignored by historian as superstitious nonsense not worthy of serious attention. The last decades have seen a rebirth of interest in alchemy by historians of science led by such prominent historians as Lawrence Principe, William Newman, Bruce Moran and Pamela H. Smith as well as a host of less well known figures such as my Internet friends Anna Marie Roos (@roos_annamarie) and Sienna Latham (@clerestories).

In the last few weeks there has been a surge in interest from the general Internet media mostly generated by Lawrence Principe’s recently published semi-popular history of alchemy The Secrets of Alchemy. This has been mostly fairly harmless but one Internet piece that I read last week is so confused that it provoked my inner Hist-Sci Hulk, especially as it totally misrepresents Newton’s interest and involvement in alchemy. The piece Is Alchemy Back In Fashion? by science writer Hank Campbell is on the Science 2.0 website.

Campbell’s piece was not inspired by Principe’s book but by the essay, Alchemy Restored, that Principe wrote for Focus section of ISIS vol. 102, No. 2 Alchemy and the History of Science. This essay is a very much-shortened version of chapter four of his book, Redefinitions, Revivals, and Reinterpretations: Alchemy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

To point out and correct everything that is wrong in Campbell’s piece would turn this post into a minor novel so I shall just content myself with a bit of sniping and correcting his mistaken views on Newton’s relationship with alchemy. The first thing I would note is that before writing his piece Campbell appears to have done his research at the Google University, beloved source of wisdom of vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, anti-evolutionists and other members of the Internet Luniverse. His piece would have benefitted immensely if he had read some of the books written by Principe, Newman, Moran et al. However reading doesn’t seem to be his forte as he doesn’t seem to have actually read the essay by Principe that he heavily criticises in his piece, either that or he maliciously misrepresents Principe’s views.

The whole of the opening paragraphs displays strong Google University influence containing as it does half information that is mostly at least half wrong. There are various conflicting etymologies for the word alchemy or better said the word chemy as al is purely the Arabic definite article. Principe thinks the Greek root cheimeia is the most likely as alchemy in antiquity was Greco-Egyptian, that is it was developed in Egypt but written in Greek. This leading to the Arabic al-kīmiyā of al-Rāzī and the alchemia of the Renaissance adepts. Like those in the eighteenth century who, as Principe tells us, tried to distance chemistry from alchemy Campbell falsely identifies alchemy with the transmutation of metals, correctly called chrysopoeia, whereas seventeenth century alchemy encompassed a wide range of activities including all of that, which in the early eighteenth century became chemistry.

The central point of Principe’s essay is that the chemist of the eighteenth century deliberately misrepresented the scope of alchemy in order to deny that their own discipline was alchemy’s daughter. I find it fascinating that Campbell a science writer with a background in computing, who very obviously knows next to nothing about the history of alchemy and chemistry lectures Principe, who is without doubt one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, on why he is wrong in his analysis of the eighteenth century’s denigrating of alchemy’s reputation. Even more bizarre in the following paragraph:

You know which group was also ridiculed, even until the mid-1800s? Medical doctors. Many people thought Harvard was out of its mind creating a medical school in 1782, but they took it seriously and within a few generations medicine had put quacks on the fringes and adopted evidence-based practices. Before then, legitimate doctors were Ph.D.s and Medical Doctors were that other thing that didn’t count. Today, though, if you say doctor people assume you are an M.D.

The whole of this is so mind bogglingly wrong that it is not even worth criticising except to say that if it were written on paper I would flush it down the toilet. Let us now turn our attention to the good Isaac Newton and his activities as an alchemist. The all-knowing Campbell informs us:

Newton tried alchemy, after all, because he wanted to get to the bottom of it and maybe show chemists he was smarter than they were, just like he showed everyone else he was smarter than they were (I mean you, Hooke.)

[…]

The break between alchemy and chemistry had been happening before Newton, that is why he took a shot at it, but until the 18th century they were interchangeable to the public.

I’ve read many misrepresentations of Newton’s alchemical activities but this has got to be one of the worst that has ever crossed my path. Campbell gives the impression that Newton took a swing at alchemy in passing nothing could be further from the truth. For the record, Newton devoted the winter months of the year to an intensive study of alchemy, in a hut especially specially constructed for the purpose, from 1666 until he departed Cambridge for London in 1696, a total of thirty years in case Mr Campbell can’t count.  He also wrote substantially more on alchemy than he ever wrote on physics and mathematics combined. I would not call that “taking a shot at it”.  Although there is some truth that the break between alchemy and chemistry began in the seventeenth century this is in no way the reason that Newton took up the study of alchemy. He was also not out to show chemists that he was smarter than they were. Apart from anything else Newton knew that he was smarter than everybody else, he didn’t need to show anybody anything. Before dealing with the real reasons for Newton’s intense interest in alchemy I’ll just deal with the ill informed sideswipe at the Hooke Newton conflict.

We’ve been here before but it bears repeating that it was Hooke who attacked Newton, not once but twice, and not the other way round. In fact, if anybody suffered from an intense need to show that he was smarter than everyone else it was the unfortunate Robert Hooke. Intensely jealous of others he, time and again, accused his contemporary natural philosophers of stealing his ideas, discoveries and inventions. He dismissed Newton’s first optics paper claiming that anything novel that it contained he had discovered already and then later he claimed that he should be acknowledge as the true discoverer of the universal law of gravity. It’s not really surprising that Newton disliked him. However I deviate from my purpose.

Why did Newton devote so much of his life to an intense study of alchemy? To understand his motivation one has to examine both his religious beliefs and the governing metaphysics of his whole life’s work, which are in fact two aspects of a single complex. Newton was an adherent of the prisca sapientia. This is the belief that directly after the creation, and Newton was a devote if more than somewhat heterodox Christian, humanity had a complete and perfect knowledge of the laws of nature, a knowledge that had become lost over the millennia as humanity degenerated. Following this metaphysic Newton did not believe that he was discovering the laws or secrets of nature but rediscovering them. In fact based on his reading of the Bible he believed that he had been especially chosen by his God to do so.  In line with the hermeticism of his age he believed that alchemy was the oldest form of knowledge possessed by humanity coming either shortly after Moses, or even from him or before him, and if he could unravel its secrets this would bring him closer to that perfect knowledge of nature once possessed by humanity in its early days. This is not a ‘modern scientist’ investigating the chemical aspects of alchemy, as Campbell would have us believe, but a man, we would have immense difficulty identifying with in anyway what so ever, following a twisted theological, metaphysical path that relates in no way to the world we now inhabit.

[1] This date and the following quote are taken from Aksel Haaning, The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy: The Formative Period c- 1150-1350, in Jacob Wamberg ed. Art & Alchemy, Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2006 pp. 23-40, quote p. 25. When quoting the same date, in his The Secrets of Alchemy, Principe points out correctly that although it might be the first translation of an Arabic alchemy text it’s probably not the Latin West’s first contact with the discipline.

[2] Robert of Chester is well known in the history of mathematics for his translation of Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī’s Al-kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-ğabr wa’l-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) the book that introduced algebra to the Latin West and which gave us both the words algebra and algorithm.