When it came to Isaac Newton, the first thing that comes to mind is a fallen apple and the law of universal gravitation discovered by him. This scientist discovered the fundamental laws of gravity and physics. But, unfortunately, half a step from genius to madness. And over time, the scientist's mind began to falter, and the circle of interests smoothly shifted from physics to mysticism. Most of these works were devoted to alchemy, mysticism and prophecy, and these are not the greatest oddities of the great scientist.
1. Isaac Newton threatened to burn his mother
Isaac Newton was very religious. He studied the Bible with no less passion than science. At the young age of 20, when his sanity was still intact, Newton compiled a list of his 57 worst sins. He saw it as a kind of remorse. Some of these are minor offenses. So, the scientist admitted that he once ate an apple during a service in the church. But other confessions were clearly forerunners of the mental instability that overtook Newton many years later.
Portrait of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Artist Barrington Brumley.
The brilliant scientist asked God for forgiveness for hitting his sister and beating a man named Arthur Storr. It turns out that his mother and his stepfather, Barnabas Smith, also did not escape Newton's anger. The future genius threatened his stepfather and mother to burn them along with the house.
2. Isaac Newton and the Philosopher's Stone
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In the last years of his life, Isaac Newton began to actively search for the Philosopher's Stone. As some people believed at the time, it was a mystical substance capable of transforming one metal into another (for example, lead into gold) and providing everyone who drank it with eternal life.
Newton rewrote the texts of the American alchemist George Starkey with his own hand.
For Newton, this was not superstition, in his opinion, alchemy was a real science. He believed that the Philosopher's Stone was real. He studied every article on alchemy that he could find and conducted constant experiments in his own laboratory, trying to create an elixir that would give him eternal life. Apparently, the key, in the creation of such, Newton considered mercury.
For years, he inhaled toxic fumes from mercury in the laboratory during experiments and even drank it. Some people think that this was the beginning of his madness, that mercury damaged the scientist's brain and led him to madness. In the 1970s, tests on a sample of his hair showed mercury levels 40 times the normal level.
3.2060 - the end of the world
The end of the world will come in 2060 - so Isaac Newton said in his treatise. This year, supposedly, an angel should fly through the sky, announcing to everyone that the empire of Babylon will fall, and Christ will return, marking a new era of a God-fearing and spiritualized world. Moreover, interestingly, Newton did not think that there would be some kind of metaphorical angel, he insisted that a real angel would appear in the sky in 2060, and was quite sure that he was right.
Newton was sure he knew the exact date of the apocalypse.
After all, he even wrote a complex mathematical proof of this, based largely on Daniel and Revelation. In essence, Newton provided the world with a more rational, carefully calculated prediction of the end of the world.
4. The Catholic Church and the Beast of the Apocalypse
The beginning of the end, according to Newton, has already arrived. The famous scholar, in a long treatise on the apocalypse, claimed that some of Daniel's prophecies had already come true. The eleven-year-old beast of the Day of Judgment, who, according to the Book of Daniel, will rise up and utter blasphemy against the Lord and force the rulers of the world to bow before him, has already gained strength. It was … the Catholic Church.
Newton considered the church to be a world dictator.
Newton wrote a whole document in which he argued that the Church "provides laws to rulers and peoples as an Oracle, claims to be infallible, and her dictate is mandatory for the whole world." In the treatise, he accused the Catholic Church of preaching blasphemy, supporting "the calling of the dead and the veneration of their images," presumably referring to the veneration of saints.
5. The magical properties of "menstrual blood"
Isaac Newton tried to keep his search for the Philosopher's Stone a secret. But after his death, among the things of the scientist, some of his recipes were found and published today. In many of the experiments that the scientist conducted, such an ingredient as "dirty whore menstrual blood" appeared. However, it is possible that you should not take everything literally. Alchemy was a secret occupation, and the alchemists themselves encrypted their records as best they could. Professor Bill Newman, as Newton called metallic antimony.
The same metallic antimony.
6. Isaac Newton and the mystery of the emerald tablet
Among Newton's notes after his death, a handwritten translation was found that Isaac Newton made for himself from the Emerald Tablet, a mystical text that was supposed to provide the key to vitality. According to legends, the Emerald Tablet was made by Hermes Trismegistus, "the greatest of the great" pagan prophet, who was supposed to be something like the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.
An engraving of the emerald tablet translated by Newton.
It was argued that the Emerald Tablet taught the secrets of primal matter: the formless substance of which everything consisted at the beginning of time. Newton seems to have believed that there was a coded message in this text that allowed him to control primordial matter and transform any element into any other.
7. Temple of Solomon: a miniature version of the universe
Another of Newton's favorite projects is the extremely long and extremely detailed analysis of Solomon's Temple. It is an incredibly meticulous work in which Newton tried to measure the exact dimensions and use of every room in the temple of the biblical king Solomon. Such a large-scale project of the scientist was led not only by his passion for architecture. Newton was convinced that the Temple of Solomon held the key to God's purpose for the universe. He believed that the Bible was filled with coded clues that only the wise could decipher, and if he could understand what Solomon's temple looked like, he would figure out the nature of the entire universe.
The Temple of Solomon is a miniature version of the universe.
For Newton, this was not a passing fad. He learned Hebrew and Latin so that he could familiarize himself with the original translations of the Bible and Hebrew texts and make sure he didn't miss a beat.
8. Seven mystical colors of the rainbow
Isaac Newton was the man who came up with the seven colors of the rainbow familiar to everyone today: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, blue and purple. According to Newton, the number seven was sacred. He followed the old, mystical belief that the number seven was "the spirit of everything." This number, after all, is found throughout the Bible: God created the world in seven days, Joseph predicted seven years of famine, Jesus fed people with seven loaves, and the apocalypse was to be announced with seven seals and seven trumpets.
People owe the colors of the rainbow to Newton.
9. Isaac Newton and the fate of Atlantis
Newton didn't just write about Christian beliefs. He also created an entire treatise on the lost city of Atlantis, analyzing the works of Plato and Homer in order to try to figure out where the sunken city is hiding. Atlantis, as Newton argued, was a fairly ordinary city-state, the legend of which was greatly "inflated" over time. It was destroyed by a large flood that swept the entire world, but the city was not completely flooded and not everyone died.
Calypso. Artist Karl Rudolf Heinrich Lehmann.
Newton wrote that the princess of Atlantis survived. It was allegedly Calypso, a nymph from the Odyssey. When Odysseus landed on the island of Calypso, he found the remnants of Atlantis and met with the last survivors. Based on Newton's calculations, Atlantis sank in 1796 BC, and Ulysses landed there in 896 BC, that is, at that time Calypso would have been at least 900 years old.
10. Complete mental disorder of Isaac Newton
Newton's mental disorder grew worse. He sat at home all the time, writing strange, mystical treatises, and less and less often left the house to chat with friends who found him simply unbearable.
Sir Isaac Newton. Artist Enoch Siman.
For 12 months, beginning in 1693, Newton barely slept - an hour at best. Newton hardly touched food, and somehow spent five nights without sleep. He began to have crazy, paranoid thoughts that his friends wanted to capture him or even kill him. Once, when he discovered that his friend, the philosopher John Locke, was ill, Newton exclaimed: "It would be better if you died!" After all, John Locke, according to Newton, “had an insidious plan to draw him into relationships with women,” or, in other words, to force Newton to end his chaste life.