I wonder how many historical figures went through the same thing? Who do we know for their contributions to field X, when 99% of their life was spent contributing to field Y?
Isaac Newton spent most of his life pursuing alchemy and obscure theological ideas, and found it a real nuisance whenever anyone pestered him about math or physics.
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage."
"Researchers in England may have finally settled the centuries-old debate over who gets credit for the creation of calculus.
For years, English scientist Isaac Newton and German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz both claimed credit for inventing the mathematical system sometime around the end of the seventeenth century.
Now, a team from the universities of Manchester and Exeter says it knows where the true credit lies — and it's with someone else completely.
The "Kerala school," a little-known group of scholars and mathematicians in fourteenth century India, identified the "infinite series" — one of the basic components of calculus — around 1350."
However, calculus proper (derivatives and integrals of general functions, and the connections between them) did not exist until Newton and Leibniz. Other mathematicians made important steps towards it earlier in the 1600s, and if Newton and Leibniz had not existed, others would have figured it out around the same time.
These are interesting articles that seem to agree with what I said. The first one defines calculus in a much more limited way, and refers to some of the earlier basic components I mentioned.
I'm not a historian, but a few months ago I spent some time analysing one of Fibonacci's trigonometric tables (chords, not sine or sine-differences). Aryabhata's sine-differences were much earlier.
Very true. Newton was an alchemist first and foremost and spent the vast majority of his time practicing alchemy rather than -what today one would call- science. One has to wonder what private reasons/results a genius of his magnitude had, in order to do that.
This little known fact is so embarrassing to some institutions [2], that they made up a new word "chymistry" in order to further obscure the issue and not outright admit the obvious.
> One has to wonder what private reasons/results a genius of his magnitude had, in order to do that.
Is there a reason to expect that someone who wanted to investigate the laws of the composition and reactivity of matter, in the late 1600s/early 1700s, would end up studying chemistry rather than alchemy? Sure, Boyle had introduced “chemistry” as an idea in 1661 (before Newton was born), but I imagine that alchemy would still be quite active in the late 1600s as an academic “field”, with many contributors already late in their careers studying it; whereas chemistry would have been just getting off the ground, without many potential collaborators.
Alchemy was never an academic field. It was a tradition veiled in secrecy, requiring years of private work and knowledge transmission through strict and very narrow (typically teacher-student) channels.
Your point has been brought up before -usually as an attempt by established institutions to whitewash and explain away Newton's idiosyncrasies- but there is no evidence whatsoever to back it. On the contrary, what we know (and there is a lot we do know thanks to his writings) about Newton and alchemy absolutely indicates him being immersed in the Hermetic worldview and alchemical paradigm. Clearly, Newton was practicing alchemy not as a way to look for novel techniques or as a way to bridge the old and new worlds together, but primarily because he was a devout believer.
Newton -a profound genius- stood at the threshold of two worlds colliding. He was also a groundbreaking scientist in optics/mechanics/mathematics. He was aware of Boyle's chemical research. Knowing all of that, he _absolutely_ chose to dedicate his life to alchemy. That is immensely interesting.
"Much of Newton's writing on alchemy may have been lost in a fire in his laboratory, so the true extent of his work in this area may have been larger than is currently known. Newton also suffered a nervous breakdown during his period of alchemical work, possibly due to some form of chemical poisoning (perhaps from mercury, lead, or some other substance)."
(Not OP) I don't think it does. It backs you up (barring quibbles on what you mean by "most"; years active or hours spent): "Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology".
Very few, at least for STEM fields. If you look at notable scientists in any given field, their main contributions were in their expertise area before the thing that made them famous. Teller had already made serious contributions to physics before the atom bomb. Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR, CAS9) was the first to see the structure of RNA (except for tRNA) using an innovative crystalline technique. Planck is mainly known for quantum physics, but made huge contributions to the field in general.
It's hard to think of many famous scientists that weren't already well known in their field. Some stand out. Einstein, for example, had a fairly lackluster career until his Annus Mirabilis papers. Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves) bounced to and from various jobs. But largely, the idea of the brilliant outsider is like the 10x engineer. It exists, but is rare.
Even Einstein I would not say didn't have formal training. He had been in and around academia for most of his life. He was obviously far ahead of the curve, but he did accumulate the formal training. His stint in a regular job was more of an anomaly than his affinity to academia and physics.
Right, even Einstein had some serious academic training and mathematical chops. But I would argue that he was a bit of a wild card, because he was unable to secure a teaching positions and looked very mediocre from an academic perspective. But fair point, even the geniuses had formal training and instruction.
Not an extreme example, but Albert Szent-Gyorgi is known for his work with Vitamin C, when his work on bioenergetics and cancer are more interesting and possibly more promising.
