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Isaac Newton in persistence. His small, crabbed handwriting fills notebook after notebook with the records of his alchemical experiments. In all Newton lavished some half million words on alchemy, about as many as in War and Peace .
    He and countless other researchers spent long hours at their flasks and fires mixing potions according to closely guarded recipes. (Leibniz’s only fear was that if gold became too readily available its price would fall.) An assistant watched Newton’s experiments with reverence but without understanding. “Whatever his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his Pains, his Diligence at those Times made me think he aimed at something beyond the Reach of human Art & Industry.”
    A peek inside Newton’s notebooks would have left an observer scarcely more enlightened. He never spoke of anything as crass as growing rich; his focus, it seems, was solely on uncovering nature’s secrets. In any case, alchemical formulas were too valuable to state openly. All the language was encoded—“Saturn” stood for “lead,” for instance—and the procedures sound like something from an X-rated Hogwarts spell-book. Newton jotted down recipes with such ingredients as “the Green Lion” and “the menstrual blood of the sordid whore.”
    The language is so strange, and Newton’s scientific reputation is so high, that the temptation is to assume that the odd phrases merely indicate the difficulty of describing new techniques in an antique vocabulary. And it is true that in time al chemy gave rise to chemistry, and that Newton’s approach to alchemy was methodical and absolutely rigorous. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Newton was a chemist in a sorcerer’s hat.
    On the contrary, Newton started out by studying chemistry but abandoned it in favor of what he saw as the deeper mysteries of alchemy. This was effectively a return to the past. Chemistry dealt with matter-of-fact questions like what salt is made from. Alchemy sought to explain the invisible forces of living nature. This was sacred, secret research. Throughout his long life Newton hardly breathed a word of what he was up to, and no wonder. “Just as the world was created from dark Chaos . . . ,” he confided in a notebook, “so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos.”
    Newton’s theological and alchemical writings went largely unexamined for two centuries after his death. In 1936, John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Newton’s notes at auction. He read aghast. Newton was not the first inhabitant of the modern world, Keynes declared, but “the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.”
    Scientists tend to have little interest in history, even the history of their own subject. They turn to the past only to pluck out the discoveries and insights that turned out to be fruitful—Boyle, for instance, is known today for “Boyle’s law,” relating pressure and volume in gases—and they toss the rest aside.
    In fields where the notion of progress is indisputable, such disdain for the past is common. The explanation is not so much anti-intellectualism as impatience. Why study ancient errors? So scientists ignore most of their forebears or dismiss them as silly codgers. They make exceptions for a tiny number of geniuses whom they treat as time travelers from the present day, thinkers just like us who somehow found themselves decked out in powdered wigs.
    But they were not like us.

Chapter Ten
The Boys’ Club
    Science today is a grand and formal enterprise, but the modern age of science began as a free-for-all. The idea was to see for yourself rather than to rely on anyone else’s authority. The Royal