How Alchemy’s Quest for the Philosopher’s Stone Led to Modern Chemistry

While he’s now credited for revolutionizing the world of mathematics and science, Sir Isaac Newton secretly spent decades trying to make the philosopher’s stone. He wrote over a million words on the subject and collected manuscripts as he sought to transmute base metals into gold.

Newton’s fascination with “breaking nature and matter down and then resynthesizing it into its original form gave him this idea that maybe light could be broken down and put together,” says Nummedal, resulting in his corpuscular theory of light, which proposed that light is made up of tiny particles rather than a continuous wave.

Meanwhile, in 1678, Robert Boyle—often regarded as the founding father of modern chemistry—anonymously published a piece entitled Of a Degradation of Gold Made by an Anti-Elixir. The research detailed how gold was degraded into salt, says Greenberg. “He made the point that if you could go one way, you could presumably do a reverse transmutation in the right direction.”

Boyle spent 40 years investigating the properties of mercury and performing experiments to make metals into gold, according to Lawrence M. Principe, author of The Secrets Of Alchemy. Boyle even reportedly believed the philosopher’s stone could help people interact with spirits.