By translating the ancient measurement, Newton hoped to validate his own theory of gravity. He thought that the ancient Greeks had successfully measured Earth’s circumference using a unit called the stade, which he believed was borrowed from the Egyptians. The pioneering scientist also tied his interest in the pyramid to his efforts to understand gravity. In particular, he hoped to learn the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon, which he thought could hold the key to understanding the biblical apocalypse. He believed that it could enable him to figure out the exact dimensions of other ancient structures. Newton was interested in the cubit, a unit of measurement used by the Great Pyramid’s builders. “The searching out of ancient occult secrets was a central trope of alchemy, a subject which Newton studied deeply,” says Sotheby’s in the auction listing. Like some other European scholars of his day, Newton believed that the ancient Egyptians possessed knowledge that had been lost in the intervening centuries. Newton viewed his work in mathematics and physics as secondary to alchemy and theology.
The notes are burned around their edges-damage attributed to Newton’s dog, Diamond, knocking over a table and toppling a candle. At the time, he was in self-imposed exile at his family home, Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, recovering from an attack on his work by Robert Hooke, a scientific rival and fellow member of the early scientific institution the Royal Society. Per the Observer, Newton began studying the pyramids in the 1680s. He formulated the three laws of motion that form the basis of modern physics, discovered that white light is composed out of light from different colors and helped develop calculus, among many other accomplishments. Newton was arguably the most significant figure of the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution. “… His papers were bursting with evidence for just how heretical his views were.” “His descendants made sure very few saw the papers because they were a treasure trove of dirt on the man,” Sarah Dry, author of The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, told Wiredin 2014.
In the British scientist’s own day, church leaders would have viewed many of his ideas on these subjects as heretical. “Today, these seem disparate areas of study–but they didn’t seem that way to Newton in the 17th century.”Īs Peter Dockrill reports for Science Alert, many of Newton’s unpublished notes concerning alchemy, occult matters and the biblical apocalypse only resurfaced after his death in 1727. “He was trying to find proof for his theory of gravitation, but in addition the ancient Egyptians were thought to have held the secrets of alchemy that have since been lost,” Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s manuscript specialist, tells the Observer’s Harriet Sherwood. But for Isaac Newton, they were veritable obsessions detailed in three pages of notes sold by Sotheby’s this morning for £378,000 (around $504,700 USD). Messages about a coming apocalypse that could be decoded through architectural measurements? Keys to secrets of the Bible found in Egypt’s Great Pyramid? These might seem like nonsensical notions far from the world of science.
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