Technical Difficulties

Now that I'm not in a hurry, I've finally pegged what your post was trying to connect to in my brain: one of the books I read on Newton and alchemy for A Star Shall Fall. The author was doing good work in that he didn't, as many do, try to sweep Newton's alchemy under the rug as irrelevant to his science (not to mention embarrassing); instead his thesis was that alchemy shaped Newton's thought in ways that contributed to science. Good as far as it goes -- but in the course of doing this, the author tried too hard to cram the alchemy into a scientific frame, and it was clear he fundamentally could not understand why this brilliant man, one of the bedrock foundations upon which our rational world stands, could believe in something like alchemy. He could only explain it in terms that would be convincing to himself. (One wonders what the guy would have done if he had to bring Newton's Christianity into the picture, too. That's another one that often gets swept under the rug.)