The Alchemies of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton: Alternate Approaches and Divergent Deployments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is clear that at present there is a growing interest in alchemy. This new attention to a subject long dismissed out of hand as a field for serious scholarly inquiry is in large part due to the successful linkage of alchemy with prominent figures of early modern science, especially Sir Isaac Newton. Once the extent of Newton's involvement with traditional alchemy was made manifest by the labors of B. J. T. Dobbs, Karin Figala, Richard S. Westfall, and others, alchemy could no longer be uncomplicatedly rejected as mere fraud or gullibility without impugning Newton himself. Thus, whereas Newton's status as the rationalist par excellence initially made his alchemical involvement seem unbelievable, that status helped to rehabilitate the much-maligned subject of alchemy. Since the revelation of Newton's alchemical interests, other figures of the early modern period have begun to reveal their own alchemical dimensions. Most notable among these is Robert Boyle. Recent studies demonstrate that the “Father of Chemistry” was equally a son of traditional alchemy. Far from repudiating traditional alchemy, as is commonly believed, Boyle pursued it with great avidity. He strove, for example, to discover the secret preparation of the transmutatory Philosophers' Stone, of whose real existence and powers he was certain. Significantly, Boyle's interest in and devotion to alchemy actually increased over the course of his career rather than being repudiated as a youthful whim. These findings in the case of Boyle strongly reaffirm the conclusions regarding the importance of alchemy in the early modern period, which were drawn from earlier investigations of Newton.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".