Chymistry of Isaac Newton: A Rigorous Analysis of the Language of Alchemy

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).A team at Indiana University is now completing an online, searchable edition of Newton's chemical writings, comprising over one hundred manuscripts, which comes to about a million words of manuscript material. That project has received substantial support from NSF and it will be complemented by the present project. The electronic corpus of Newton's chemical work is filled with obscure and archaic terms such as "foliated earth" and "vegetable Saturn," whose physical referents are not immediately obvious. In addition, Newton left behind substantial manuscript laboratory notebooks filled with chemical experiments, whose aim or purpose he nowhere describes. The present project proposes to analyze such experiments and technical terms by means of well established tools of computational linguistics. In particular, the proposal aims to use machine-collocation of terms and their statistical occurrence to locate meaningful patterns of experimental practice and recurrent terminology. The project will result in a new and deeper understanding of Newton's goals for his chemical theory and practice, which is in itself a very major undertaking. More than this, however, the tools developed and adapted from computational linguistics by the team at Indiana University will be applicable to other corpora of scientific texts once they have been digitized. Historically significant sources in biology, material science, and medicine are filled with archaic and unclear terminology that is often as opaque as the chemical vocabulary of Newton. In short, the tools developed by the Chymistry of Isaac Newton team will be applicable to digitized textual corpora ranging from the works of the second-century physician Galen up to the correspondence of the famous founder of modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin. The history of science is intrinsically a difficult area of research, in part because of the technical language that scientific writers have used from antiquity up to the present day. The approach being implemented in the current project will greatly facilitate and possibly transform history of science research.