Newton, the alchemist

John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, once described Issac Newton and physicists of his time as “not the first of the scientists, but the last of the sorcerers”. The British economist, rather uncharacteristically, did not substantiate. But in The Clockwork Universe, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and the Birth of Modern Science, American science writer Edward Dolnick demonstrates the veracity of Keynes’ remark.