December 27, 2011 • 28 mins
You are unprepared for the awesomeness of Sir Isaac Newton. Sure, he contributed to science, but a deeper look into his life shows just how Chuck Norrisy the man was. Plug in your headphones and prepare to enter the obsessive mind of a scientific master.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name to Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Uglars. Julie.
Has the end of the world occurred yet? The apocalypse?
The Twilight of the Gods? Let me get my calendar out.
(00:24):
Hold on, Oh, here's my Mayan calendar and it says
that it will actually occur on December. Okay, so we
have a little more time to freak out about it
and for people to publish books about it, and and hey,
do podcast about it? Right exactly, all right? So here's
the thing people have always been doing this is we've
discussed We did a whole episode on on why we're
(00:46):
in love with the idea of the end of the
world and how how we just can't get enough of it.
We love an apocalypse so so for ages we've had
quacks stepping out and saying I looked at a text,
or I I stared at the sun, or I or
I I ate some sort of plant I shouldn't have,
and now I have inside information on what is going
(01:06):
to happen to our planet in the next year, And
would you consider buying this pamphlet right exactly, or in
the case that we have coming up with a mind
calendar running out, do you want to book a package
to say bellies for the end of the world. I'm
not getting there are end of the world packages U
in Central America. There are. But but here's the thing.
(01:27):
This is nothing new. It's been going on for ages,
and it was definitely going on during the lifetime of
one Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, the
Englishman who lived from sixteen forty three to seventy seven,
whose tomb actually makes a statement in Latin, of course,
about how he was basically the best man that ever lived. Yeah,
(01:48):
please read that statement because I love it. Yeah, Yeah,
here's the here's the right up translated mortals rejoice that
there has existed such and so great an ornament of
the human race, which which that you gotta admit, even
for someone like Sir Isaac Newton, who is pretty big
medicine when it comes to science, that's kind of absurd,
like like who who is who is deserving of that?
(02:10):
Maybe Sir Isaac Newton. That's the thing, because because it's
easy to dismiss him as the gravity and apples guy,
but when you really start looking at his life, a
he he accomplished so much, and he was so focused
and in a little crazy one more than a little crazy.
I mean, just the mind of this guy is pretty amazing.
(02:32):
And so so he's living, you know, he's doing his thing.
He's uh, he's just throwing his his considerable intellected at
various problems that come along as well as the end
of the world, right right, right, yeah, because he's he's
going out in the street and this is a dude
that is uh, you know, he's laying out the laws
of motion, he's figuring out universal gravity. He's he's laying
down some of the physical laws that that in our understanding,
(02:53):
of these physical laws that will allow us to go
to the moon. Uh, I mean, we're He spoke of
standing on the shoulders of giants, but he's one of
the giants that the modern stock could stand upon. And
so he hears these these louts talking about the end
of the world and they're talking about how they read
it in the Bible, and he's like, WHOA hold on
a second, I know a thing or two about theology.
(03:13):
I've read the Bible. I've I've i've looked through and
glimpse the the hidden truths in it. Let me take
a look at this and I'll get back to you.
So he goes home, he analyzes the Book of Daniel.
Daniel Old Testament had these visions of four beasts and
all and it's and it's great, uh, you know, apocalyptic
gravy for for people who are into into that sort
of thing. Yeahah. And so so he looks at it
(03:36):
and he's like, all right, Uh, I looked at it.
I looked at the data. I I sort of weaved
around in the Bible codes. And you don't have anything
to worry about. The end of the world is not
happening until at least twenty six maybe after, but not until.
So everyone shut up, right, just keep keep walking. Nothing
(03:56):
nothing to see here. And that is something we thought
so amazing. Think about this guy is not just the
common things that we know about him, that he has
um contributed to society and to mathematics and physics and
so I want and so forth, but um that this
guy was obsessive on on all points and he could
sort of bend the time space continuum seemingly to his will. Uh.
(04:19):
You know whether or not he was, you know, meditating
on gravity or perhaps even creating cat flap doors. Yeah,
that one's we're not sure on that one, but there's
there is there. There is the theory that he invented
the cat flap because he didn't want his cats constantly
asking to be let into because you know how it is,
you're in your lab figuring out how the universe works,
(04:39):
and the cat wants the scratching on the door. You
let the cat in, and you're like all right, yeah,
and you're like, all right, you're in. Let me get
back to work. Then the cat wants out. This is
important when you're thinking about gravity, right, can not be interrupted? Um?
And so yeah, he's he's he's working on that, and
he is making the public feel safer and and re
forecasting the apocalypse for right. So yeah, here here we
(05:01):
have the Chuck Norris of science. Yeah. Yeah, it's like
the Chuck Norris thing because it's like when I was
reading about it and I was researching it for work,
you know, his various accomplishments. I kept finding these amazing
things because I mean, my understanding Newton was a little
deeper than than the gravity and Apple's guy. But but
I didn't know about some of these details of the
(05:22):
man's life, or just or I didn't have a good
grasp for how his brain worked. But when you when
you really look at what he did, he does come
off like this Chuck Norris character, you know, and you're
reminded of these lists the you know, the the Internet
lists of the things Chuck Norris has done, like the
idea that Chuck Norris has counted to infinity twice, or
that the Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer, but since he's
never cried, um that you know, we're not able to
(05:45):
cure cancer, that kind of thing. Um. And you look
at Newton's life and some of this stuff is is
that outlandish? It is, in fact, before we get to
some of the other um, maybe not as widely known
information and more Chuck Norris information lists talk really quickly
about what we what we think of when we think
of Newton. Okay, um, Well, for starters, there is the
(06:05):
law of universal gravitation. This like basically strikes at the
heart of how gravity works and how the universe is
held together by gravity. Now, one thing we we often
don't remember is that one of the ways that Newton
expressed this uh in his in his writings, was to
create a thought experiment in which you had a mountain
that was higher than the clouds, higher than the atmosphere,
(06:28):
and had a giant cannon on top of an orbital cannon.
They could fire a cannonball at just the right velocity
that it would go into orbit around the planet. Like
that's the way that the man thought. That's what he
was daydreaming about, right right. Most famously, he he laid
down the three laws of motion, and these were this
was six seven and uh and and these will sound
familiar to everybody. And object will remain at rest or
(06:50):
or moving in a straight line unless acted upon by
an external force. When forces applied to an object, it
will accelerate. So we get force equals mass times acceleration.
And here's a big one. For every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction and uh. Which seems all
very obvious now, but obviously back in the day this
was scholars used to wrestle with this um. For instance,
(07:13):
the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that smoke moved upwards because
the smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding
to go into the sky to hang out with the
rest of its air bodies. Um, you know which I
kind of love. Yeah. Yeah. And then he had other
people in reneed de carts who still identified God as
the prime mover behind everything. Newton came down and you know,
he laid he laid down the loss and these are
(07:34):
these are the fundamental laws that we we we based
on modern understanding on. Uh. In addition to that, he
looked at rainbows and figured out how rainbows worked. Um
that that the prism or the rain drop was not
changing or color. It wasn't coloring, but at the time
they thought that it was like the sun's rays were
dying the light, right. And from there actually leads to
(07:55):
his development of the reflecting telescope. Before that, everyone used
the refracting telescope, which wasn't as powerful it it could.
It could add various tints of color that weren't weren't
disruptive to when you're trying to look at um and uh,
and they were, they were larger. So he comes along,
he in it. He invents the reflecting telescope because his
mirrors and uh, and this becomes the standard. Yeah, this
(08:17):
is really cool. This was in your article. Um, your
article's name again. Uh ten Top ten Isaac Newton inventions.
A large mirror would capture the image than a small mirror,
a smaller mirror would bounce it into the viewer's eyes,
which I think it's really cool. Uh. Not only does
this method produce a clear image, it also allows for
a much smaller telescope. So I just think it's cool
(08:38):
that he had that perspective back then to say, how
can I improve upon this? You know, let's not refract,
let's reflect. And he actually grinded the mirrors himself and
assembled a prototype and then presented it to the Royal
Society in sixteen seventy. So let's talk about some of
the the other stuff that is just so amazing that
this guy is sitting around and accomplishing so much um
(09:00):
in such a small amount time. Really, all right, well
here's one, all right. So, and again you've got to
think about Newton's mind. Is it just this obsessive thing,
this engine that in any kind of data comes its
way and he has to solve it. He's going to
figure it out. And he's a bit of a madman too.
And we'll talk a little bit about this how how
it might have affected his perspective. Yeah, he never married.
(09:20):
He he didn't have much in the way of friends.
Like this was a man who would have lat himself
onto a riddle or a puzzle. Like I keep coming
back that I've mentioned this before, the old idea that
the vampire you leave a knot out for a really
complex knot, and it would set there trying to untie
it until the sun came up. Like that's that's Newton's brain, um,
and and so like for instance, sixteen sixty five, plague
(09:44):
has has hit Debonnet plague has hit England, and it's
a it's a huge problem. And so Newton uh sees it.
He's o Rick Cambridge and he decides to figure this
out because it's actually shut down the university, right, and
that's where he needs to be to think such shut
down the university for eighteen months, so he's he's got
some time on his hands, right right, right, So he's like,
all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna fix this. Here's the thing.
(10:05):
Math wasn't sufficient at that time for him to study this.
He needed a school of of mathematics that would allow
him to calculate problems that involve changing variables, so he
invented one. He invented calculus. Like, okay, he needed calculus.
It didn't exist. He made it. Math was insufficient for
his needs, so he just created his own, his new
school of it. So normous, right, Um, again, we're talking
(10:27):
about calculations concerning the angle of cannonballs and a ship's
rate of acceleration. And that's just so that it could
fuel his daydreaming, right right, right, yeah, and and and
allow him to understand what was happening in the world.
He was like, like, I'm having trouble understanding how this
is spreading, how this is working. Um, Math, you're not
helping me. I'm going to have to do all the
(10:47):
work for you. And so he created calculus. It's the
father of calculus. It should also be noted that German
mathematician got Free Leadness independently developed calculus around the same time. Yeah.
Actually sort of. What has compounded this this question about
question mark about who created calculus is the fact that
Newton was really private, um, and some would even say secret,
(11:07):
and he didn't publish a lot. He might have written
down quite a few things and presented them in various
academic institutions, but he wasn't someone who was sort of,
you know, gunning to get published and get and become
known for something. And in fact, some of the things
that he obsessed about and wrote about certainly didn't really
enter the public eye. Told quite a while later and
(11:28):
we're kind of a dirty secret for for a bit,
Are you talking about alchemy? I am talking about alchemy. Yes, yes, alchemy,
as we've discussed I think we discussed this in the
Frankenstein podcast a bit. This is, of course the the
old typically thought of as medieval bastardization of chemistry and
occultism and philosophy and trickery, and just you know that
(11:50):
there is there's chemistry bound up in it, but there's
just a lot of mess I mean kind of like,
just to to be uh, not very kind about it,
it's basically taking a pile of dog crap and spinning
into gold, right, or turning one's urine into gold and
accidentally discovering phosphorus, that kind of thing. Right. The thing is,
though there was a lot of real chemistry there, there
was some there was some real science going on in
(12:11):
the world of alchemy. And if you were interested in
in the chemistry of the world, this was for the
most part the only game in town. Um and as
far as the west goes. So, so of course he
studied it. And uh. And the thing is that alchemy
only became this sort of dirty word later in his
life and after his death. And and also he was
(12:33):
not afraid of looking into something that was kind of crazy.
And he I mean, he really believed that there was
there was hidden truth to be found in alchemy. Well
and during his time to wasn't an alchemy punishable by law? Yeah,
it became so, right, So it's something that he kind
of squirreled away because obviously he didn't want to um
to have any sort of negative repercussions from it. But
(12:55):
it wasn't until the nineteen thirties when I believe that
was a auction house that's someone found a huge bomb
volume of his writings and it was discovered to the
extent to which he had dedicated really his life to alchemy. Yeah,
and that he was serious, like it wasn't just a
this is all nonsense, but I'm kind of interested in
the chemistry. No, he was trying to create the Philosopher's Stone.
(13:16):
Yet the Philosopher's Stone, Uh, it's exact description varies from
texts at texts, but it's clearly like a man made
stone or a man made a lixir. Uh, And it
has this power of universal transmutation, so it can turn
lead into stone, it can cure illnesses that can transform
a headless cow into a swarm of bees, or allow
(13:37):
you to throw some wizard semen um, you know, in
a jar and add a few other ingredients and make
a homunculous Yeah. So it's uh, it's like the the
ultimate power. And that's that's why he was interested in it,
because ideally this would give him power over life and death. Well,
and you know, it turns out that he is really
interested in this mystical realm, and so the idea something
(14:00):
people have said. Some historians have looked back at the
way his mind works and said, you know, he may
not have been able to discuss um the laws of
motion or discover them, name them um if he didn't
have this particular mystical bent, because he's thinking about the
forces of the universe, right and trying to harness them.
So I think that's really interesting and thinking about that
(14:21):
when you think about Newton, he wrote more than one
million words on the subject of alchemy, which is amazing
much more than he ever dedicated to um, you know,
his stalwart uh science. Of course, you could look at
it in this sense that science for Newton was a
problem that he was not that he was eventually able
to untie in many cases. Alchemy ultimately proves that not
(14:45):
that never completely untied for him. So it was probably
the kind of thing where you just keep writing and
writing about it because you're never going to reach that
point with alchemy that you're like, all right, philosopher's stone
case closed, now, let me move on to something else, right, Yeah, Yeah,
And the same thing as we discussed in this doom
Stay stuff. He was interested in theology. He was interested
in discovering the coded secrets of the Bible, the wisdom
(15:07):
of the ancients. And you can set there all day
looking for these secret codes, and you're just gonna end
up writing more and more words about it because you're
not gonna find you're not gonna uncover this this hidden
equation in the in biblical text, and you're not going
to find it in alchemy either. But don't tell that
to Dan Brown. Well, no, he did find the hidden
the hidden equations. But that's right. It had to do
(15:30):
with the publishing dollars. Um. Yeah, that's his own kind
of alchemy. But you know, and we will talk a
bit more about his sort of obsessive quest for religion,
thinking about religion and uh in the Bible. But before
we do that, I really want to talk about how
he was fighting crime in Melton money, all right, sir
(15:50):
Isaac Newton crime finder. And this was an area that
I before I was researching in this for work, I
I really didn't know anything about this this corner of
his life. Well, he was a bit of a politician,
although kind of a backseat politician. I guess you could say, yeah,
so you have to you have to go back to
England's financial system is in full blown crisis mode. Okay Um,
(16:12):
the currencyat consisting entirely of silver coins, and the silver
was often worth more than the value stamped on it
due to the economic situation. So people start We're often
melting the chok coins down or chipping the silver from
the edges and selling them to France. So pretty soon
the coinage just looks like crap. It's mangled. People have
(16:34):
been melting this stuff down, They've been chipping off the corners.
So you can imagine at the counter someone goes into
a store to buy something around this time and they're
just dumping just a handful of mangled bits of silver
and counterfeit mangled bits of silver, because how difficult is
it to counterfeit a mangled lump of of shiny metal?
(16:55):
Right when I was just thinking, like, think of the
US dollar and just maybe the only thing that's left
is the eye and the pyramid and presenting that. I mean,
obviously it's going to be a lot easier to to say,
you know, to sort of put together something that looks
like money. Right, So the powers that be they know
Newton is a is a smart cookie. Uh. They have
an idea that he's the kind of guy that likes
(17:16):
to throw himself at a at a problem. Probably looks
good to throw Newton at a at a problem. I'd
like to think of them all sitting around a table,
all all wearing black and and saying we need to
bring Newton in, yeah, or or they have the Newton
signal on the on the roof, um and uh. And
it's also worth noting that, you know, we're talking about
counterfeiting a little here, and alchemy has in uh in
(17:38):
many places been tied to to counterfeiting because alchemy often
involved the creation of dies and uh, and since it
couldn't actually change something one medal into another, you could,
it did involve sometimes the technique of creating like fool's
gold or disguising one medal as another. Um. But but
that's that's kind of incidental. They so they bring Newton
(17:58):
in and and and it's largely ceremonial. Nobody really expects
Newton to solve the problems, and they gave him a
real title, right, Like, yeah, and so what does Newton do?
He throws on a diskise, Yeah, heads out into the
mean streets of London, like down into like just the
(18:19):
poverty and crime ridden alleys, and he starts hanging out
with the counterfeiters. And then of course he has them
arrested and subsequently executed, because it was a major offense
in those days to counterfeit currency. But yeah, like how
amazing is that? I mean, he's essentially the Batman of
the seventeen hundreds, right in the sixteen seventeen hundreds, He's
he's wearing the skies, going out there fighting crime, then
(18:42):
coming back to his scientific layer and developing um, uh,
milled edges for coins. And these are if you if
you get a quarter out you find or any coin
where you look at the edges and if you see
little lines, those are milled edges. And the idea here
is you're gonna if you're gonna clip the lane and
try and sell the silver to France. Um, it's going
(19:03):
to be very noticeable and then you'll be arrested and
possibly executed. Of course. The the other part of that
is that it took him a year to create that
particular currency, right, and um, I mean the conies on
this guy he gathered up well not just he but
uh you know, I'm sure he advocated this and they
adopted it, but they gathered up all of the currency
(19:24):
and melted it down. So then he could then spend
like eighteen hours a day, you know, working on this
problem and creating a new currency. Yeah, he was like
money is canceled for the next year or so and
and then we're gonna have new money. I hope everybody's
cool with that, which sounds like it probably wasn't as
big of a problem as it would seem like today,
because um, you know it was the economy was a
mess anyway, and there was a lot of rioting before
(19:45):
this even happens, So I mean, wow, yeah, he but
he he reorganized the the mint, uh, their system of
creating the coins. Like he went in there and he
just kicked button the factories and the next thing, you know,
you have this new model and standard of what a
coin is, you know, all in the day's work, right. Yeah,
And I like to I just made this part out,
(20:06):
But I like to joke too that he put his
own scowling face on each coin to h to convince
people that counterfeit. Counterfeiting was a bad idea. He probably
did put some sort of code in there, for sure.
And let's talk about that, um, And specifically, let's talk
about whether or not he may have been suffering from
mercury poisoning. Yes, so, so how would he have been
(20:28):
pro poisoned by mercury? Are we suspecting that someone? No? Actually,
because he was using mercury quite a bit, um. And
we know that he had a couple of very serious
mental breakdowns in the sixteen nineties, um, and you know,
sort of had fevered writings from him, would send letters
to his friends. Didn't make any sense. We already know
(20:51):
that he was an obsessive guy UM and that he
was trying to find hidden meeting in the Bible. He
learned Hebrews spent half of his life really devoting himself
to trying to figure this out. So there's this idea
that his sleeplessness, his digestive upset, his loss of memory,
his paranoid delusions could have been mercury poisoning. Because we know,
(21:12):
and this is from the chemistry chronicles Newton's Hair by
Mark f Lesnie Uh. They know that that from a
hair sample that he had a high amount of mercury
in his system, and that he attempted to extract mercury
from various medals during his alchemy UM. And and again
we know that he spent a good deal of time
(21:33):
trying to work his magic on this in dealing with
with with mercury. So it's very possible that Um, at
least some of his obsessive nature, not so much as
obsessive nature, but some of him sort of going off kilter,
could have been delusions that were inspired by mercury poisoning.
(21:53):
Now here's another possibility. He actually succeeded in creating the
Philosopher's Stone became an immortal, used homunculous technology to clone himself,
which involved mercury, and that is what is actually buried
at Westminster and that is what they got the hair
sample for. And he's been he's been locked up in
(22:13):
his lab ever since, his secret lab, of course, working
on how to prevent apocalypse. Okay, so if he's a
homunculous now no, no, no, he created the homunculous and
that's what was buried. Oh right right, I mean undoubtedly
he would have Homunculi working for him now as his age,
an army of yeah manculi of course. Um, this sounds
like a pretty uh pat answer to the mysteries of Newton. Yes,
(22:39):
I'm gonna have to see if they'll let me add
that page to the article that they will They probably will. Yeah,
I think I make a pretty strong case. Um. You know.
It turns out though again his his his devotion to
religion in the Bible could have had something to do
with his own, um personal biography which he viewed himself. Again,
this is from that paper Chemistry chronicles quote a Christian
(23:00):
opposit it and adhere to the then prescribed Aryan heresy
that Christ was not divine. Newton still took very seriously
his own birth on Christmas Day. He felt that it
gave him a level of prophetic reasonable responsibility, that, if
not equal to Christ, was certainly cut from the same cloth,
and that it was his own particular role from the
start to reveal God's universal laws to all humankind or
(23:24):
to justify God's waste a man. Right, yeah, yeah, there
you go. Wow. So and and you know, actually that's interesting,
Like maybe we should get be more into the idea
of celebrating Sir Isaac Newton like Christmas, like you just
completely like retool the holiday, you know, where the tree
is all Newton based instead of like a major scene. Well,
you know, we've talked about this poopoo platter of religions before,
(23:45):
in which we I think we were going to call
it saganism after Carl second, right, and everybody wears turtlenecks.
Why not, why not to celebrate Sir Isaac Newton on
Christmas Day? Yeah, just a celebration of physics, alchemy, crime fighting, um,
and possibly cat doors depending on where you fall on
(24:06):
that particular controversy. Right, And I can see it now,
like the rainbow is a is a sort of logo
for this holiday. Uh, everybody constructs these sort of paper
mache rainbows in their houses instead of Christmas trees. I'm
up for it. Yeah. Well, hey, if you want to
know more about Sir Isasing Newton in his life, you
can check out that article that I wrote on the
(24:26):
ten inventions of Sir Isaza Newton. Just searched for that
on the House Stuff Works homepage. Also how Isaac Newton worked.
We have a great article about that. And uh and
if you really want to know more about the the
alchemy to uh do uh, just do a quick search
for Newton alchemy and Nova because pbs is nova has
a rich website with a lot of resources about what
(24:47):
we know about his alchemyical side. Indeed, does that mean
that we should roll out robot get some mail? Yeah,
let's get the robot out here, share some mail with us.
All right, here's one for Crystal. Crystal rites then, and
Crystal actually wrote in with with a number of thoughts
on some past episodes. I'm going to read what she said,
um about our our episode that we did about a
(25:10):
world without Men, about the men going extinct, and she says, uh,
for the past six years I've been self employed in
such ways that I work infinitely with families. I've seen
many different kinds of families and lifestyle, and I have
come to the following conclusion about men and women. Okay,
she says, this is this is their opinion. Without women,
men are somehow quite not quite fully developed adults, although
(25:33):
they are perfectly happy in their lives at that point,
men need women to take that last step into adulthood.
And then she says, without men, women are fully functional adults,
but don't pursue happiness, letting responsibilities overshadow it. Women need
men to be reminded to value happiness for its own
sake and hence to be happy. Obviously, this only applies
to heterosexual relationships. I haven't had a large enough sample
(25:55):
size of homosexual marriages to make any hypothesis. Yet I
think any humans somehow evolved past men women would keep
them around to remind us happiness should be sought after.
I love the podcast, Thanks Robert, Julie and everyone else
who makes it happen. Well. I think it's that's interesting.
In the podcast, we talked about whether or not men
might go extinct and whether the world will be better
(26:18):
for a particular reason, you know, not just us making
that up, but yeah, yeah, whether and you know what,
it would be a unless violent world, more of a
light world, a prettier world. Huh. Well, and you know how,
you know how I always feel about it, like, I
think that's interesting. I think that she talked about it
being a cultural norm. So for me, uh, you know,
when when we talk about women and we um we
(26:39):
talked about them being the better angels of our nature,
always feel like that sort of makes women even more
one dimensional. Yeah, I gotta say, I'm not saying that
that we're not great. I'm just saying that, you know,
taking that other side of it is not giving you know,
full complexity to women out there. I think that's fair.
I think it's fair. Right. So again it should be
noted Newton didn't have any time for him. Yeah, can't
(27:02):
time for cats, So cat flaps, Yeah, possibly possibly cats
and dogs. Though Tho's is weird because there people are
divided on the whole pet issue. There are some people
who say, yeah, he definitely kept a cat, he kept
a dog. Some there are some stories that say that
he had a dog named diamond In. There were all
sorts of lacky adventures, and then other people were like,
Newton had no dogs or cats, so I don't know,
(27:23):
you know, we just don't know for sure. Well, also,
pet ownership was a very different thing tacum out there, right, so, um,
I can't imagine that he was going to target and
probably getting them cute little halloween os. Yeah, Diamond wasn't
setting in his lap wearing a little sweater mounted things.
So alright, So hey, if you have anything you would
like to share about, well, about Sir Rising Newton, about alchemy,
(27:43):
about the idea that he's still out there in his
layer and Homunculi perform as every bidding as he tries
to prevent the end of the world. In um, let
us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can
always find us on the social media platforms. We were
on Facebook as stuff to Blow Your Mind, and we
are on Twitter as blow the Mind, and you can
always drop us a line at blow the Mind at
how staff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(28:11):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name to Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Uglars. Julie.
Has the end of the world occurred yet? The apocalypse?
The Twilight of the Gods? Let me get my calendar out.
(00:24):
Hold on, Oh, here's my Mayan calendar and it says
that it will actually occur on December. Okay, so we
have a little more time to freak out about it
and for people to publish books about it, and and hey,
do podcast about it? Right exactly, all right? So here's
the thing people have always been doing this is we've
discussed We did a whole episode on on why we're
(00:46):
in love with the idea of the end of the
world and how how we just can't get enough of it.
We love an apocalypse so so for ages we've had
quacks stepping out and saying I looked at a text,
or I I stared at the sun, or I or
I I ate some sort of plant I shouldn't have,
and now I have inside information on what is going
(01:06):
to happen to our planet in the next year, And
would you consider buying this pamphlet right exactly, or in
the case that we have coming up with a mind
calendar running out, do you want to book a package
to say bellies for the end of the world. I'm
not getting there are end of the world packages U
in Central America. There are. But but here's the thing.
(01:27):
This is nothing new. It's been going on for ages,
and it was definitely going on during the lifetime of
one Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, the
Englishman who lived from sixteen forty three to seventy seven,
whose tomb actually makes a statement in Latin, of course,
about how he was basically the best man that ever lived. Yeah,
(01:48):
please read that statement because I love it. Yeah, Yeah,
here's the here's the right up translated mortals rejoice that
there has existed such and so great an ornament of
the human race, which which that you gotta admit, even
for someone like Sir Isaac Newton, who is pretty big
medicine when it comes to science, that's kind of absurd,
like like who who is who is deserving of that?
(02:10):
Maybe Sir Isaac Newton. That's the thing, because because it's
easy to dismiss him as the gravity and apples guy,
but when you really start looking at his life, a
he he accomplished so much, and he was so focused
and in a little crazy one more than a little crazy.
I mean, just the mind of this guy is pretty amazing.
(02:32):
And so so he's living, you know, he's doing his thing.
He's uh, he's just throwing his his considerable intellected at
various problems that come along as well as the end
of the world, right right, right, yeah, because he's he's
going out in the street and this is a dude
that is uh, you know, he's laying out the laws
of motion, he's figuring out universal gravity. He's he's laying
down some of the physical laws that that in our understanding,
(02:53):
of these physical laws that will allow us to go
to the moon. Uh, I mean, we're He spoke of
standing on the shoulders of giants, but he's one of
the giants that the modern stock could stand upon. And
so he hears these these louts talking about the end
of the world and they're talking about how they read
it in the Bible, and he's like, WHOA hold on
a second, I know a thing or two about theology.
(03:13):
I've read the Bible. I've I've i've looked through and
glimpse the the hidden truths in it. Let me take
a look at this and I'll get back to you.
So he goes home, he analyzes the Book of Daniel.
Daniel Old Testament had these visions of four beasts and
all and it's and it's great, uh, you know, apocalyptic
gravy for for people who are into into that sort
of thing. Yeahah. And so so he looks at it
(03:36):
and he's like, all right, Uh, I looked at it.
I looked at the data. I I sort of weaved
around in the Bible codes. And you don't have anything
to worry about. The end of the world is not
happening until at least twenty six maybe after, but not until.
So everyone shut up, right, just keep keep walking. Nothing
(03:56):
nothing to see here. And that is something we thought
so amazing. Think about this guy is not just the
common things that we know about him, that he has
um contributed to society and to mathematics and physics and
so I want and so forth, but um that this
guy was obsessive on on all points and he could
sort of bend the time space continuum seemingly to his will. Uh.
(04:19):
You know whether or not he was, you know, meditating
on gravity or perhaps even creating cat flap doors. Yeah,
that one's we're not sure on that one, but there's
there is there. There is the theory that he invented
the cat flap because he didn't want his cats constantly
asking to be let into because you know how it is,
you're in your lab figuring out how the universe works,
(04:39):
and the cat wants the scratching on the door. You
let the cat in, and you're like all right, yeah,
and you're like, all right, you're in. Let me get
back to work. Then the cat wants out. This is
important when you're thinking about gravity, right, can not be interrupted? Um?
And so yeah, he's he's he's working on that, and
he is making the public feel safer and and re
forecasting the apocalypse for right. So yeah, here here we
(05:01):
have the Chuck Norris of science. Yeah. Yeah, it's like
the Chuck Norris thing because it's like when I was
reading about it and I was researching it for work,
you know, his various accomplishments. I kept finding these amazing
things because I mean, my understanding Newton was a little
deeper than than the gravity and Apple's guy. But but
I didn't know about some of these details of the
(05:22):
man's life, or just or I didn't have a good
grasp for how his brain worked. But when you when
you really look at what he did, he does come
off like this Chuck Norris character, you know, and you're
reminded of these lists the you know, the the Internet
lists of the things Chuck Norris has done, like the
idea that Chuck Norris has counted to infinity twice, or
that the Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer, but since he's
never cried, um that you know, we're not able to
(05:45):
cure cancer, that kind of thing. Um. And you look
at Newton's life and some of this stuff is is
that outlandish? It is, in fact, before we get to
some of the other um, maybe not as widely known
information and more Chuck Norris information lists talk really quickly
about what we what we think of when we think
of Newton. Okay, um, Well, for starters, there is the
(06:05):
law of universal gravitation. This like basically strikes at the
heart of how gravity works and how the universe is
held together by gravity. Now, one thing we we often
don't remember is that one of the ways that Newton
expressed this uh in his in his writings, was to
create a thought experiment in which you had a mountain
that was higher than the clouds, higher than the atmosphere,
(06:28):
and had a giant cannon on top of an orbital cannon.
They could fire a cannonball at just the right velocity
that it would go into orbit around the planet. Like
that's the way that the man thought. That's what he
was daydreaming about, right right. Most famously, he he laid
down the three laws of motion, and these were this
was six seven and uh and and these will sound
familiar to everybody. And object will remain at rest or
(06:50):
or moving in a straight line unless acted upon by
an external force. When forces applied to an object, it
will accelerate. So we get force equals mass times acceleration.
And here's a big one. For every action there is
an equal and opposite reaction and uh. Which seems all
very obvious now, but obviously back in the day this
was scholars used to wrestle with this um. For instance,
(07:13):
the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that smoke moved upwards because
the smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding
to go into the sky to hang out with the
rest of its air bodies. Um, you know which I
kind of love. Yeah. Yeah. And then he had other
people in reneed de carts who still identified God as
the prime mover behind everything. Newton came down and you know,
he laid he laid down the loss and these are
(07:34):
these are the fundamental laws that we we we based
on modern understanding on. Uh. In addition to that, he
looked at rainbows and figured out how rainbows worked. Um
that that the prism or the rain drop was not
changing or color. It wasn't coloring, but at the time
they thought that it was like the sun's rays were
dying the light, right. And from there actually leads to
(07:55):
his development of the reflecting telescope. Before that, everyone used
the refracting telescope, which wasn't as powerful it it could.
It could add various tints of color that weren't weren't
disruptive to when you're trying to look at um and uh,
and they were, they were larger. So he comes along,
he in it. He invents the reflecting telescope because his
mirrors and uh, and this becomes the standard. Yeah, this
(08:17):
is really cool. This was in your article. Um, your
article's name again. Uh ten Top ten Isaac Newton inventions.
A large mirror would capture the image than a small mirror,
a smaller mirror would bounce it into the viewer's eyes,
which I think it's really cool. Uh. Not only does
this method produce a clear image, it also allows for
a much smaller telescope. So I just think it's cool
(08:38):
that he had that perspective back then to say, how
can I improve upon this? You know, let's not refract,
let's reflect. And he actually grinded the mirrors himself and
assembled a prototype and then presented it to the Royal
Society in sixteen seventy. So let's talk about some of
the the other stuff that is just so amazing that
this guy is sitting around and accomplishing so much um
(09:00):
in such a small amount time. Really, all right, well
here's one, all right. So, and again you've got to
think about Newton's mind. Is it just this obsessive thing,
this engine that in any kind of data comes its
way and he has to solve it. He's going to
figure it out. And he's a bit of a madman too.
And we'll talk a little bit about this how how
it might have affected his perspective. Yeah, he never married.
(09:20):
He he didn't have much in the way of friends.
Like this was a man who would have lat himself
onto a riddle or a puzzle. Like I keep coming
back that I've mentioned this before, the old idea that
the vampire you leave a knot out for a really
complex knot, and it would set there trying to untie
it until the sun came up. Like that's that's Newton's brain, um,
and and so like for instance, sixteen sixty five, plague
(09:44):
has has hit Debonnet plague has hit England, and it's
a it's a huge problem. And so Newton uh sees it.
He's o Rick Cambridge and he decides to figure this
out because it's actually shut down the university, right, and
that's where he needs to be to think such shut
down the university for eighteen months, so he's he's got
some time on his hands, right right, right, So he's like,
all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna fix this. Here's the thing.
(10:05):
Math wasn't sufficient at that time for him to study this.
He needed a school of of mathematics that would allow
him to calculate problems that involve changing variables, so he
invented one. He invented calculus. Like, okay, he needed calculus.
It didn't exist. He made it. Math was insufficient for
his needs, so he just created his own, his new
school of it. So normous, right, Um, again, we're talking
(10:27):
about calculations concerning the angle of cannonballs and a ship's
rate of acceleration. And that's just so that it could
fuel his daydreaming, right right, right, yeah, and and and
allow him to understand what was happening in the world.
He was like, like, I'm having trouble understanding how this
is spreading, how this is working. Um, Math, you're not
helping me. I'm going to have to do all the
(10:47):
work for you. And so he created calculus. It's the
father of calculus. It should also be noted that German
mathematician got Free Leadness independently developed calculus around the same time. Yeah.
Actually sort of. What has compounded this this question about
question mark about who created calculus is the fact that
Newton was really private, um, and some would even say secret,
(11:07):
and he didn't publish a lot. He might have written
down quite a few things and presented them in various
academic institutions, but he wasn't someone who was sort of,
you know, gunning to get published and get and become
known for something. And in fact, some of the things
that he obsessed about and wrote about certainly didn't really
enter the public eye. Told quite a while later and
(11:28):
we're kind of a dirty secret for for a bit,
Are you talking about alchemy? I am talking about alchemy. Yes, yes, alchemy,
as we've discussed I think we discussed this in the
Frankenstein podcast a bit. This is, of course the the
old typically thought of as medieval bastardization of chemistry and
occultism and philosophy and trickery, and just you know that
(11:50):
there is there's chemistry bound up in it, but there's
just a lot of mess I mean kind of like,
just to to be uh, not very kind about it,
it's basically taking a pile of dog crap and spinning
into gold, right, or turning one's urine into gold and
accidentally discovering phosphorus, that kind of thing. Right. The thing is,
though there was a lot of real chemistry there, there
was some there was some real science going on in
(12:11):
the world of alchemy. And if you were interested in
in the chemistry of the world, this was for the
most part the only game in town. Um and as
far as the west goes. So, so of course he
studied it. And uh. And the thing is that alchemy
only became this sort of dirty word later in his
life and after his death. And and also he was
(12:33):
not afraid of looking into something that was kind of crazy.
And he I mean, he really believed that there was
there was hidden truth to be found in alchemy. Well
and during his time to wasn't an alchemy punishable by law? Yeah,
it became so, right, So it's something that he kind
of squirreled away because obviously he didn't want to um
to have any sort of negative repercussions from it. But
(12:55):
it wasn't until the nineteen thirties when I believe that
was a auction house that's someone found a huge bomb
volume of his writings and it was discovered to the
extent to which he had dedicated really his life to alchemy. Yeah,
and that he was serious, like it wasn't just a
this is all nonsense, but I'm kind of interested in
the chemistry. No, he was trying to create the Philosopher's Stone.
(13:16):
Yet the Philosopher's Stone, Uh, it's exact description varies from
texts at texts, but it's clearly like a man made
stone or a man made a lixir. Uh, And it
has this power of universal transmutation, so it can turn
lead into stone, it can cure illnesses that can transform
a headless cow into a swarm of bees, or allow
(13:37):
you to throw some wizard semen um, you know, in
a jar and add a few other ingredients and make
a homunculous Yeah. So it's uh, it's like the the
ultimate power. And that's that's why he was interested in it,
because ideally this would give him power over life and death. Well,
and you know, it turns out that he is really
interested in this mystical realm, and so the idea something
(14:00):
people have said. Some historians have looked back at the
way his mind works and said, you know, he may
not have been able to discuss um the laws of
motion or discover them, name them um if he didn't
have this particular mystical bent, because he's thinking about the
forces of the universe, right and trying to harness them.
So I think that's really interesting and thinking about that
(14:21):
when you think about Newton, he wrote more than one
million words on the subject of alchemy, which is amazing
much more than he ever dedicated to um, you know,
his stalwart uh science. Of course, you could look at
it in this sense that science for Newton was a
problem that he was not that he was eventually able
to untie in many cases. Alchemy ultimately proves that not
(14:45):
that never completely untied for him. So it was probably
the kind of thing where you just keep writing and
writing about it because you're never going to reach that
point with alchemy that you're like, all right, philosopher's stone
case closed, now, let me move on to something else, right, Yeah, Yeah,
And the same thing as we discussed in this doom
Stay stuff. He was interested in theology. He was interested
in discovering the coded secrets of the Bible, the wisdom
(15:07):
of the ancients. And you can set there all day
looking for these secret codes, and you're just gonna end
up writing more and more words about it because you're
not gonna find you're not gonna uncover this this hidden
equation in the in biblical text, and you're not going
to find it in alchemy either. But don't tell that
to Dan Brown. Well, no, he did find the hidden
the hidden equations. But that's right. It had to do
(15:30):
with the publishing dollars. Um. Yeah, that's his own kind
of alchemy. But you know, and we will talk a
bit more about his sort of obsessive quest for religion,
thinking about religion and uh in the Bible. But before
we do that, I really want to talk about how
he was fighting crime in Melton money, all right, sir
(15:50):
Isaac Newton crime finder. And this was an area that
I before I was researching in this for work, I
I really didn't know anything about this this corner of
his life. Well, he was a bit of a politician,
although kind of a backseat politician. I guess you could say, yeah,
so you have to you have to go back to
England's financial system is in full blown crisis mode. Okay Um,
(16:12):
the currencyat consisting entirely of silver coins, and the silver
was often worth more than the value stamped on it
due to the economic situation. So people start We're often
melting the chok coins down or chipping the silver from
the edges and selling them to France. So pretty soon
the coinage just looks like crap. It's mangled. People have
(16:34):
been melting this stuff down, They've been chipping off the corners.
So you can imagine at the counter someone goes into
a store to buy something around this time and they're
just dumping just a handful of mangled bits of silver
and counterfeit mangled bits of silver, because how difficult is
it to counterfeit a mangled lump of of shiny metal?
(16:55):
Right when I was just thinking, like, think of the
US dollar and just maybe the only thing that's left
is the eye and the pyramid and presenting that. I mean,
obviously it's going to be a lot easier to to say,
you know, to sort of put together something that looks
like money. Right, So the powers that be they know
Newton is a is a smart cookie. Uh. They have
an idea that he's the kind of guy that likes
(17:16):
to throw himself at a at a problem. Probably looks
good to throw Newton at a at a problem. I'd
like to think of them all sitting around a table,
all all wearing black and and saying we need to
bring Newton in, yeah, or or they have the Newton
signal on the on the roof, um and uh. And
it's also worth noting that, you know, we're talking about
counterfeiting a little here, and alchemy has in uh in
(17:38):
many places been tied to to counterfeiting because alchemy often
involved the creation of dies and uh, and since it
couldn't actually change something one medal into another, you could,
it did involve sometimes the technique of creating like fool's
gold or disguising one medal as another. Um. But but
that's that's kind of incidental. They so they bring Newton
(17:58):
in and and and it's largely ceremonial. Nobody really expects
Newton to solve the problems, and they gave him a
real title, right, Like, yeah, and so what does Newton do?
He throws on a diskise, Yeah, heads out into the
mean streets of London, like down into like just the
(18:19):
poverty and crime ridden alleys, and he starts hanging out
with the counterfeiters. And then of course he has them
arrested and subsequently executed, because it was a major offense
in those days to counterfeit currency. But yeah, like how
amazing is that? I mean, he's essentially the Batman of
the seventeen hundreds, right in the sixteen seventeen hundreds, He's
he's wearing the skies, going out there fighting crime, then
(18:42):
coming back to his scientific layer and developing um, uh,
milled edges for coins. And these are if you if
you get a quarter out you find or any coin
where you look at the edges and if you see
little lines, those are milled edges. And the idea here
is you're gonna if you're gonna clip the lane and
try and sell the silver to France. Um, it's going
(19:03):
to be very noticeable and then you'll be arrested and
possibly executed. Of course. The the other part of that
is that it took him a year to create that
particular currency, right, and um, I mean the conies on
this guy he gathered up well not just he but
uh you know, I'm sure he advocated this and they
adopted it, but they gathered up all of the currency
(19:24):
and melted it down. So then he could then spend
like eighteen hours a day, you know, working on this
problem and creating a new currency. Yeah, he was like
money is canceled for the next year or so and
and then we're gonna have new money. I hope everybody's
cool with that, which sounds like it probably wasn't as
big of a problem as it would seem like today,
because um, you know it was the economy was a
mess anyway, and there was a lot of rioting before
(19:45):
this even happens, So I mean, wow, yeah, he but
he he reorganized the the mint, uh, their system of
creating the coins. Like he went in there and he
just kicked button the factories and the next thing, you know,
you have this new model and standard of what a
coin is, you know, all in the day's work, right. Yeah,
And I like to I just made this part out,
(20:06):
But I like to joke too that he put his
own scowling face on each coin to h to convince
people that counterfeit. Counterfeiting was a bad idea. He probably
did put some sort of code in there, for sure.
And let's talk about that, um, And specifically, let's talk
about whether or not he may have been suffering from
mercury poisoning. Yes, so, so how would he have been
(20:28):
pro poisoned by mercury? Are we suspecting that someone? No? Actually,
because he was using mercury quite a bit, um. And
we know that he had a couple of very serious
mental breakdowns in the sixteen nineties, um, and you know,
sort of had fevered writings from him, would send letters
to his friends. Didn't make any sense. We already know
(20:51):
that he was an obsessive guy UM and that he
was trying to find hidden meeting in the Bible. He
learned Hebrews spent half of his life really devoting himself
to trying to figure this out. So there's this idea
that his sleeplessness, his digestive upset, his loss of memory,
his paranoid delusions could have been mercury poisoning. Because we know,
(21:12):
and this is from the chemistry chronicles Newton's Hair by
Mark f Lesnie Uh. They know that that from a
hair sample that he had a high amount of mercury
in his system, and that he attempted to extract mercury
from various medals during his alchemy UM. And and again
we know that he spent a good deal of time
(21:33):
trying to work his magic on this in dealing with
with with mercury. So it's very possible that Um, at
least some of his obsessive nature, not so much as
obsessive nature, but some of him sort of going off kilter,
could have been delusions that were inspired by mercury poisoning.
(21:53):
Now here's another possibility. He actually succeeded in creating the
Philosopher's Stone became an immortal, used homunculous technology to clone himself,
which involved mercury, and that is what is actually buried
at Westminster and that is what they got the hair
sample for. And he's been he's been locked up in
(22:13):
his lab ever since, his secret lab, of course, working
on how to prevent apocalypse. Okay, so if he's a
homunculous now no, no, no, he created the homunculous and
that's what was buried. Oh right right, I mean undoubtedly
he would have Homunculi working for him now as his age,
an army of yeah manculi of course. Um, this sounds
like a pretty uh pat answer to the mysteries of Newton. Yes,
(22:39):
I'm gonna have to see if they'll let me add
that page to the article that they will They probably will. Yeah,
I think I make a pretty strong case. Um. You know.
It turns out though again his his his devotion to
religion in the Bible could have had something to do
with his own, um personal biography which he viewed himself. Again,
this is from that paper Chemistry chronicles quote a Christian
(23:00):
opposit it and adhere to the then prescribed Aryan heresy
that Christ was not divine. Newton still took very seriously
his own birth on Christmas Day. He felt that it
gave him a level of prophetic reasonable responsibility, that, if
not equal to Christ, was certainly cut from the same cloth,
and that it was his own particular role from the
start to reveal God's universal laws to all humankind or
(23:24):
to justify God's waste a man. Right, yeah, yeah, there
you go. Wow. So and and you know, actually that's interesting,
Like maybe we should get be more into the idea
of celebrating Sir Isaac Newton like Christmas, like you just
completely like retool the holiday, you know, where the tree
is all Newton based instead of like a major scene. Well,
you know, we've talked about this poopoo platter of religions before,
(23:45):
in which we I think we were going to call
it saganism after Carl second, right, and everybody wears turtlenecks.
Why not, why not to celebrate Sir Isaac Newton on
Christmas Day? Yeah, just a celebration of physics, alchemy, crime fighting, um,
and possibly cat doors depending on where you fall on
(24:06):
that particular controversy. Right, And I can see it now,
like the rainbow is a is a sort of logo
for this holiday. Uh, everybody constructs these sort of paper
mache rainbows in their houses instead of Christmas trees. I'm
up for it. Yeah. Well, hey, if you want to
know more about Sir Isasing Newton in his life, you
can check out that article that I wrote on the
(24:26):
ten inventions of Sir Isaza Newton. Just searched for that
on the House Stuff Works homepage. Also how Isaac Newton worked.
We have a great article about that. And uh and
if you really want to know more about the the
alchemy to uh do uh, just do a quick search
for Newton alchemy and Nova because pbs is nova has
a rich website with a lot of resources about what
(24:47):
we know about his alchemyical side. Indeed, does that mean
that we should roll out robot get some mail? Yeah,
let's get the robot out here, share some mail with us.
All right, here's one for Crystal. Crystal rites then, and
Crystal actually wrote in with with a number of thoughts
on some past episodes. I'm going to read what she said,
um about our our episode that we did about a
(25:10):
world without Men, about the men going extinct, and she says, uh,
for the past six years I've been self employed in
such ways that I work infinitely with families. I've seen
many different kinds of families and lifestyle, and I have
come to the following conclusion about men and women. Okay,
she says, this is this is their opinion. Without women,
men are somehow quite not quite fully developed adults, although
(25:33):
they are perfectly happy in their lives at that point,
men need women to take that last step into adulthood.
And then she says, without men, women are fully functional adults,
but don't pursue happiness, letting responsibilities overshadow it. Women need
men to be reminded to value happiness for its own
sake and hence to be happy. Obviously, this only applies
to heterosexual relationships. I haven't had a large enough sample
(25:55):
size of homosexual marriages to make any hypothesis. Yet I
think any humans somehow evolved past men women would keep
them around to remind us happiness should be sought after.
I love the podcast, Thanks Robert, Julie and everyone else
who makes it happen. Well. I think it's that's interesting.
In the podcast, we talked about whether or not men
might go extinct and whether the world will be better
(26:18):
for a particular reason, you know, not just us making
that up, but yeah, yeah, whether and you know what,
it would be a unless violent world, more of a
light world, a prettier world. Huh. Well, and you know how,
you know how I always feel about it, like, I
think that's interesting. I think that she talked about it
being a cultural norm. So for me, uh, you know,
when when we talk about women and we um we
(26:39):
talked about them being the better angels of our nature,
always feel like that sort of makes women even more
one dimensional. Yeah, I gotta say, I'm not saying that
that we're not great. I'm just saying that, you know,
taking that other side of it is not giving you know,
full complexity to women out there. I think that's fair.
I think it's fair. Right. So again it should be
noted Newton didn't have any time for him. Yeah, can't
(27:02):
time for cats, So cat flaps, Yeah, possibly possibly cats
and dogs. Though Tho's is weird because there people are
divided on the whole pet issue. There are some people
who say, yeah, he definitely kept a cat, he kept
a dog. Some there are some stories that say that
he had a dog named diamond In. There were all
sorts of lacky adventures, and then other people were like,
Newton had no dogs or cats, so I don't know,
(27:23):
you know, we just don't know for sure. Well, also,
pet ownership was a very different thing tacum out there, right, so, um,
I can't imagine that he was going to target and
probably getting them cute little halloween os. Yeah, Diamond wasn't
setting in his lap wearing a little sweater mounted things.
So alright, So hey, if you have anything you would
like to share about, well, about Sir Rising Newton, about alchemy,
(27:43):
about the idea that he's still out there in his
layer and Homunculi perform as every bidding as he tries
to prevent the end of the world. In um, let
us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can
always find us on the social media platforms. We were
on Facebook as stuff to Blow Your Mind, and we
are on Twitter as blow the Mind, and you can
always drop us a line at blow the Mind at
how staff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(28:11):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
staff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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Robert Lamb
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