in 1936 a huge collection of scientific documents and personal papers was put up for auction at Sotheby's in London our greatest scientists Isaac Newton a veritable treasure trove of knowledge to assay starting what these papers have never been seen by the public and a large number of them were bought by the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes many were written in secret code and for six years keynes struggled to decipher them he hoped they would reveal the private thoughts of the man who invented a new branch of math called calculus figured out the composition of light and gave us the laws of gravity and motion which governed the universe the man who is considered the founder of modern science Sir Isaac Newton Newton assured in an age the Newtonian age and it was promised on the concept that everything virtually in the universe was amenable to scientific understanding Newton's work has a beauty and simplicity and an elegance that makes it the greatest work of science ever done but what Keynes found shattered his image of Isaac Newton for in these manuscripts Keynes discovered an Isaac Newton unknown to the rest of the world and Isaac Newton who seemed obsessed with religion and devoted to the occult he is known today as a sort of a high priest of the age of reason but this is a misconstruction of meeting the modern interpretation of Newton is about as far as could possibly be from what Newton himself thought on the one hand we can recognize him as a scientist but on the other hand he's pursuing an activity which we now label as a pseudoscience now scientists and historians are trying to reconcile the Isaac Newton they thought they knew with the Isaac Newton they're discovering in his private papers our project now must be to see Newton the way that Newton was rather than trying to see Newton the way we want him to be what are these mysterious documents revealing about one of the greatest scientists ever Newton's dark secrets right now on Nova corporate funding for Nova is provided by Google and by VP major funding for Nova is provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute serving society through biomedical research and science education HHMI major funding for newton's dark secrets is provided by the National Science Foundation America's investment in the future additional funding is provided by American Playhouse major funding for Nova is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you thank you in a library in Jerusalem lies an intensely curious document it was written about 300 years ago and only a handful of scholars have ever examined it the author was arguably the most important scientist of all time a genius who uncovered the laws of physics that govern the entire cosmos Sir Isaac Newton the subject Newton's calculation of the date the Bible said the world as we know it would end in the Battle of Armageddon the Year 2060 if this calculation were correct then we are close to the time of the end that's exactly what this sort of calculation would point to when this document came to public attention recently it was headline news but why was Isaac Newton making this dire prediction we find it surprising that Newton sounds like a televangelist talking about the end of time we only find it shocking because we've made Newton something that he's not we've made Newton in a rationalist enlightened image that's just not Newton what these manuscripts reveal is a very different Newton than most people conceive of this is a Newton who is not a cold calculating scientist this is revealing that Newton in all his glory warts and all if you will so who was the real Isaac Newton on a small farm in rural England called Woolsthorpe the conflicted life of Isaac Newton began in 1642 that same year the astronomer Galileo had died and his work was still sending shockwaves through Europe Galileo had risked his freedom by challenging the ancient belief held by the Catholic Church that the Sun moved around the earth based not on faith but observation he confirmed the earth was just one of several planets orbiting the Sun it was the dawn of the Scientific Revolution an age when science and reason would redefine the world there was a sense of a whole new era the very idea of having the empirical world answer our questions that idea was taking hold in a way that had almost never done so before and from a young age Newton was gripped by this new outlook as a boy he pored over a book called the mysteries of nature and art a manual for building mechanical contraptions and investigating the natural world he was preoccupied by the things that preoccupy physicists by time and motion so he made windmills he made little boats he flew kites that supposedly affrighted the locals he tied candles to them and they were put up and they thought that they were comets but from the start there was another side of Isaac Newton his father died before he was born and when he was just three years old his mother remarried and moved away leaving young Isaac behind with his grandparents Newton later confessed to such rage but he wanted to burn his mother and stepfather in their house and by the time he left home for Cambridge University Newton had lived through two decades of violent political and social turmoil a bloody civil war the beheading of the king and the restoration of the monarchy under charles ii in 1660 at Cambridge Newton buried himself in his studies truth is he offspring of silent unbroken meditation he didn't go anywhere I mean he rarely traveled he never went to the continent he was that insular I mean he stayed in his rooms he worked seven days a week 18 hours a day and he pushed himself drove himself he had a library of his own that had about 1600 or 1800 volumes but it was very much a world that came to him through printed matter or through manuscripts from others the decadent atmosphere of Cambridge was something the reclusive young Newton wanted no part of it was a time particularly after the restoration of charles ii it was a time of great fun and frolicking and I think Newton would have been dismayed by many of the antics of his fellow students drinking going after bad young women in local villages to resist temptation Newton drew up a plan that he'd stick to for the rest of his life the way the chastity is not to struggle directly with incontinent thoughts but but to avert she thought by some employment though by reading or meditating on other things or by convos for he that's always thinking of chastity will be always thinking of women he's a very silent thoughtful young man who I suppose looks as though he's utterly tedious from the outside there's no evidence I think that anyone liked him at all apart from his friend John Wiccans John Wiccans was another Cambridge student he and Newton became roommates after both grew unhappy living with students who put pleasure before work they have a very peculiar relationship because Wiccans is somebody who is of a higher status than Newton at Trinity and seems to have become Newton's amanuensis I his secretary over the following 20 years but they must have been very close they lived in the same rooms for 20 years as a student Newton devoured the latest scientific ideas it was widely accepted by this time that the planets orbit the Sun but now the question was how did the planets move what held them in their orbits the most popular theory came from the French philosopher Rene Descartes who thought of the universe as a giant machine like a clock Descartes said everything even the orbits of planets could be explained simply as the physical interactions of parts of this machine but Newton had trouble accepting this view of nature Newton is a very smart guy and he became convinced that the only types of statements that are acceptable are ones which you could to put it bluntly tests in the laboratory but just as Newton was probing the limits of Descartes the plague struck England thousands died every week the university closed a Newton returned home to avoid infection and it was here in the apple orchard just outside the family home that the legend of Isaac Newton was born the story of course is that he's lying in the garden there and instead of thinking about girls he's thinking about moon and how it goes around the earth and so on and he an Apple falls and the story goes a bang he suddenly has the idea that's the same thing that's making the Apple falls what's holding the moon in its orbit Newton told his tale himself in his old age claiming that with the fall of that Apple he realized that what held the planets in orbit was not a physical mechanism like de cartes clockwork but an invisible force he called gravity and he was convinced that the force pulling apples down to earth and keeping the moon in orbit around the earth were one and the same he stayed up late in the even count Hill fire when the numbers didn't quite work out he put the idea aside or so the fable goes I doubt that an apple was what stimulated him to get the idea it's almost certainly an apocryphal story yeah I don't think it's even known whether it ever happened I'm extremely skeptical about the role of fruit in Newton's life but there is no doubt that the motion of objects like apples and the moon captivated Newton at this time the Italian scientist Galileo had proved in a famous experiment on motion that all objects falling to earth pick up speed or accelerate downwards at the same rate regardless of their masks and finding the average speed of a falling object was a straightforward process for example if you want to find the average speed of an apple falling from the tree all you have to do is divide the distance the Apple travels by the time it takes the Apple to fall but Newton was not satisfied with the average what would be the speed of an Apple which is constantly accelerating at every point along the way what would the apples velocity be halfway to the ground to find out you can measure the apples average speed over smaller and smaller periods of time the shorter the time interval the closer you get to knowing the apples speed at that moment but to find its precise speed at a single instant you have to reduce that time interval as close to zero as you can Newton invented a way to make that time interval infinitesimally small what is infinitesimally small that is smaller than any number that you can think of it's not zero but it is smaller than any number that you can think of for the first time it was possible to calculate quantities that are constantly changing like the speed of a falling Apple at any particular moment or how a planet's position changes over time with this technique Newton invented an entirely new branch of math called calculus and has changed in all science of course the whole way looking at the world changed because of calculus yet calculus was a quantitative understanding of the way things change not just velocity but in physics chemistry even in populations how fast as a population changing over time this mathematical framework becomes the language in which modern science is formulated today calculus shows up everywhere from analyzing the stock market to modeling global climate change by the time he was 22 years of age working on the calculus at wool store he was the greatest mathematician the world had ever seen and yet no one knew only Newton knew and it was his secret this was a guy who adored computation of every kind among the things that you can see if you open his manuscripts for instances there are places where you'll find he's calculated logarithms out to 50 places and things like that not because he needed it but because he liked doing it I mean it was a pleasure to him to do that sort of thing and if that weren't enough Newton overturned accepted wisdom about how colors are produced performing an experiment on himself with a large needle or bodkin I took a blood can and put it between my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could I'm pressing my eye with the end of it so as to make the curvature in my eye there appeared several white dark and colored circles fortunately a Newton found a safer way to investigate light in color using a prism from Aristotle to Descartes scientists thought sunlight or white light was pure colors were produced by physically modifying white light which they believed passing it through a prism did but Newton decided to see for himself sending sunlight through a prism he produced the spectrum of colors and then he went one step further he sent the red ray of light through a second prism instead of making a new color it remained red Newton concluded that white light is not pure but a combination of all the colors of the rainbow he thought of the prism actually as a separator of the objects that are all in the original light this was very hard for almost everybody to swallow because it meant that when you're looking at white light you're looking at something which has all the colors already in it this seemed completely counterintuitive and indeed frankly it's counterintuitive to most people today only 25 years old Newton had made some of the most stunning breakthroughs in the history of science but he kept them almost entirely to himself just as he had done with calculus after the plague subsided he returned to Cambridge where he worked his way up to an appointment as the Lucasian Professor of mathematics the position held by Stephen Hawking today Newton became known for his prematurely white hair and for his long-winded lectures on light that belongs to refractions tacitly founding their demonstration on a certain physical hypothesis not well established my judge it will not be unacceptable if I bring the principles of science to more strict examination the introverted Newton had little time for students and they had little interest in him years later one of Newton's laboratory assistants would recall so few went to him and fewer that understood him that often times he did in a manner for one to hear us read to the walls but Newton's study of light was about to start a revolution fifty years earlier Galileo had built one of the first telescopes it used blast lenses to gather light from distant objects and focus it for the observer but this kind of telescope had a problem its lenses produced fringes of color around the edges of the objects being observed and that meant that the objects that you looked at always had this chromatic aberration this they always look coward even when they the original object wasn't and Newton began on the side to make some things with his own hands and he designed a remarkably and radically different kind of telescope from anything that had been built before Newton realized that the edges of a lens behave like a prism breaking white light into different colors as it passes through so he abandoned lenses and substituted a mirror to gather and focus light from distant objects and because the light never passed through a lens it was free of color Distortion Newton's telescope was only six inches long but Newton bragged that it could magnify a 40 times in diameter which is more than a six foot two can do I've seen with it Jupiter distinctly round and his satellites it was an instrument that has left its impact on astronomy ever since our huge telescopes of today are built on this model they're gigantic versions of this tiny little thing these are the telescopes that sit on the top of the great mountain peaks these are the telescopes that we launched into space to peer into the deepest parts of the visible universe Newton regarded his invention is just a toy but a colleague took it to London where it was shown off to King Charles the second the effect that it had on Newton's contemporaries was immediate and dramatic it brought Newton onto the world stage of science and Newton became an overnight sensation Newton was elected a member of the Royal Society a group of leading scientists in London most of them were awed by the whizz kid from Cambridge and Newton was so delighted that he promised to send the Royal Society a paper he had written on his discovery that white light is made up of different colors but members of the Royal Society had no idea that Newton was studying something far more mysterious than light by this time his private notebooks revealed that the same year he became a professor at Cambridge he bought two furnaces an assortment of chemicals and a strange set of books Isaac Newton had become an alchemist alchemy is an ancient and secret practice with roots in the Middle East by carrying out lengthy and complex chemical procedures alchemists tried to produce a magical substance called the philosopher's stone the Philosopher's Stone was so potent that even a small quantity was said to perform miracles curing ailments conferring immortality and transforming ordinary metals like lead into pure gold in the 16th and 17th centuries there were many many people who came to courts in Europe and claimed that they possessed the Philosopher's Stone and they were employed by nobles and princes throughout Europe to make gold in some instances it was immensely profitable you could milk a Duke or Prince of a substantial amount of money no question but if you got caught it was extremely dangerous we know that one of the customary punishments for defrocked alchemists as it were was to be hanged on a gilded scaffold and sometimes they were forced to wear suits of tencel as they were hanged to make it a public spectacle as Newton immersed himself in alchemy his paper on light was igniting a firestorm in London the job of evaluating Newton's ideas fell to another Royal Society member Robert Hooke who would become Newton's lifelong nemesis the paper got published and Hooke wrote a report on this and it's a peculiar report because effectively speaking what it says is I accept all of Newton's experiments but whatever is new in them I already did and all of my light are wrong for four years Newton and his critics fought it out with blow after blow published in the magazine of the Royal Society the sensitive Newton was mortified Newton was allergic to criticism I'm really allergic he went off the wall and people criticized him the problem for Newton was having anybody question what it was that he had done he didn't want to tell anybody about it in the first place but if he was forced to do it you sure better believe what he said he cannot convince as many people as he wants that what he said is true and that defeat if you like to call it that was very bitter for him then by the mid 16th 70s he's withdrawn completely from the international world of science you can vowed he would never publish a scientific paper again in the isolation of Cambridge Newton threw himself into alchemy alchemy had been outlawed because the British government feared that frauds would debase the currency with fake gold and for years controversy has raged over why Isaac Newton took up alchemy even Newton's lab assistant was baffled what his aim might be I was not able to penetrate into but his pains his diligence as those times made me think he aimed at something far beyond the reach of human art and Industry in the past many scholars dismissed Newton's alchemy is scientifically worthless but now they're taking a second look to find out what Newton was really up to Bill Newman has begun deciphering Newton's coded recipes and recreating our chemical experiments Newton did 300 years ago if we want to figure out what's going on in these laboratory notebooks that's the way to do it actually try the experiments and see what happens Newton believed that in the distant past people knew great truths about nature and the universe this wisdom was lost over time but Newton thought it was hidden in Greek myths which he interpreted as encoded alchemical recipes in some instances he interprets the myths in a very very exact way so that they correspond to actual recipes but getting these recipes right is no easy matter like all alchemists Newton concealed his ingredients in bizarre sounding terminology our body thus compounded is called a hermaphrodite being two sexes and it is both father and mother to the stone used a very colorful language that's typical of the alchemy of the time for example he talks about the green lion the sordid horror and the minstrel blood of the sordid horror these are terms that had very specific reference in 17th century alchemy one of newton's recipes called the net comes from the writings of the Roman poet Ovid in his poem the metamorphosis Ovid tells the story of the guard volcán catching his wife Venus in bed with the god Mars according to the myth Vulcan made a fine metallic net and hung the lovers from the ceiling for all to see in alchemy Venus Mars and Vulcan mean copper iron and fire viewed this way the myth becomes an alchemical recipe and if Bill Newman has interpreted the recipe correctly he should get the same results that Newton got 300 years ago a purple alloy known as the net which was believed to be one step towards the Philosopher's Stone behold the net it works a purple alloy a with a striated net like surface work perfectly by recreating these recipes bill Newman is finding that Newton's alchemy contained key elements of modern science it was a systematic process with results that could be reproduced and verified and historians have also discovered that Newton was not alone in pursuing alchemy other scientists of the day including members of the Royal Society were alchemists too perhaps Newton's alchemy was less an occult practice than another way to investigate the natural world alchemy was really matter theory alchemy was a science which pursued the most basic questions of what is the earth what is all of the universe made up of what are the components of matter it was a profound element to the practice of alchemy which really makes it deserving of being called early modern chemistry he's not a madman playing around with strange spirited substances he's trying to actually figure out how to change material particles around to get one thing out of something else and that's not so weird Newton's alchemy came as a surprise when it was discovered in the papers bought by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1936 but other manuscripts now housed in Jerusalem contained an even greater surprise for most of his life Newton held a dangerous secret as a fellow at Trinity College he was required to become a minister in the Church of England but this was something he violently opposed Newton became convinced that the central doctrine of Christianity the Trinity or the idea that Father Son and Holy Spirit were all equally divine was not true the more ancient Christian texts he read the more he believed Christ was the son of God but not God's equal now because Newton was so convinced that God is extremely powerful and unique Newton as the saying goes reads himself into heresy in other words Newton begins to minimize to play down eventually to deny the divinity of Christ and Newton comes the conclusion very early on that the Trinity is a blasphemy on the first commandment because the first commandment says that thou shalt have no other gods before me and the worship of the Father Son and Holy Ghost from Newton's point of view is a heresy but denying the Trinity was illegal and Newton was risking everything by holding these beliefs if Newton had been exposed while he was at Cambridge as an anti Trinitarian his career would have been over he would have been ostracized it's almost certain that it wouldn't have involved being put to death but definitely prison would have been one possibility Newton was eventually excused from becoming a minister but he wrote more about theology and alchemy than science and math combined only recently made available to the public at the National Library in Jerusalem these documents are now revealing that for Newton religion and science were inseparable two parts of the same lifelong quest to understand the universe Newton himself wanted to design a universe in which God was absolutely present and absolutely powerful there's an enormous irony there in the 18th century and gangs of interpreters most of them French will take the God out of Newton's world it's a very common image of what the Newtonian world was that it was soulless it was mechanical but it really wasn't theologically motivated at all now ironically that's very anti Newtonian because Newton argued that God had to be present you couldn't read him out of the universe the most beautiful system of the Sun planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being mutant owned more than 30 Bibles and he examined them as rigorously as he did the natural world correlating biblical passages with astronomical information Jiri dated ancient history drawing up elaborate charts and chronologies that show civilization starting around 980 BC I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of computations and workings and reworkings where he tries to probe this over a period of close to 30 years time and time again he'll come back to it calculating and recalculating trying to make it work just the way he tried to make his theories of light work with the same fervor that he brought to science and math Newton also combed the Bible for keys to the future what he was trying to do is determine when the end would come when price would return when all the apocalyptic events at the end times would would come to a head and that date is now alarmingly close the Year 2060 Nutan is not a man who keeps his theology in a box that he brings out only on Sundays and then a man who does his science has a working man the rest of the week Newton sees his work as a seamless unity and his project is to understand the truth of God most people today think of religion and science as completely different spheres in Newton's day science the investigation of the natural world was a part of religion it was all questions in some ways ended in divine knowledge alchemy and religion might have continued to dominate Newton's thoughts but in his early 40s he received a surprise visit that would refocus him on physics it was the astronomer Edmund Halley now known for the comet named after him he asked Newton an esoteric sounding question about planetary orbits my question is this what kind of curve would be described by the planets supposing the force of the attraction toward the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of the distance from it and alert an ellipse how do you know I hope that my calculation you have how did you calculate it I'll show you yeah should be there somewhere I don't want our we do the calculations I'll send you a copy Hallie's question would change science forever through years of observation scientists had discovered that the planets move around the Sun not in perfect circles but in slightly elongated elliptical orbits but no one could explain why Hallie and many other scientists had begun to suspect that the planets were attracted to the Sun by some kind of force they guessed that this attraction became weaker with distance in a mathematical relationship called the inverse square law for example the inverse square law says that if a planet is twice as far from the Sun the gravitational attraction it feels is four times weaker but no one had been able to prove this resulted in elliptical orbits several months later Hallie received a paper from Newton it was Newton's mathematical proof that a planet obeying the inverse square law of gravity must travel in an elliptical orbit Newton may have used calculus to arrive at this but he had not published this new form of math and his proof was written in the traditional language of Euclidean geometry but Newton wanted more than a mathematical proof he wanted to know how the planets move through space for the next 18 months Newton worked on this question day and night barely eight he barely slept and he saw one when you look at what he did earn a multiple any human Hey deceptive of almost smackle and mathematic is it rich finally he deprived huh every piece pinky Nautica to the side for pub lit great is beside our leg to work just beside a victim after the publication of the kipi ID Duden Duden is the matter I mean me beauty damned this thing about lot of people see nothing important in you people suppose that Newton was fine on the salmon you verse building and Zack Cooper says it's studying ocean and determine projectile always fall path upper but gallop he'll believe motion of celestial objects like the moon was very different Galileo still believed that there were differences between the terrestrial and celestial he retained the idea that was ancient that motion was different up at the moon and above Newton disagreed he thought the same laws must govern motion on earth and in the heavens to demonstrate this he would have to devise a set of laws so powerful they could explain motion everywhere he began the Principia with a set of ground rules his famous three laws of motion one an object in motion will remain in motion forever unless acted on by an external force an object's rate of acceleration is proportional to the force exerted on it and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction these laws allow scientists to make such accurate predictions about how objects move that they are still used today to send rockets into space and explore other worlds but explaining the orbits of the planets required another ingredient this brought Newton back to the work he had begun 20 years earlier on gravity to show how gravity works on earth and in the skies Newton designed a thought experiment he imagined firing a cannon from the top of an extremely tall mountain from his first law of motion he knew the Cannonball would travel in a straight line at a constant speed forever but gravity pulls the ball downward if it's speed is low the cannonball hits the earth near the mountain the higher the speed the farther away the ball lands if you throw it faster it comes farther away even faster farther away even faster it may go a thousand miles even farther it may actually go almost halfway around the earth and there hit the earth you can imagine that if its speed were high enough the Cannonball would travel all the way around the earth and settle into orbit the orbit that the Cannonball around the earth was a balancing act between the cannonballs tendency to fly off in a straight line and it's being yanked back towards the center of the earth continuously by the force of gravity so in Newton's picture of the world there were two things the natural tendency of an object to travel in a straight line which was true on earth or in space or anywhere and there was the attraction of gravity which was true on the surface of the earth and it was true up in space Newton's breakthrough was to see that the moon's orbit around the earth and a cannonballs motion on earth were governed by the same law of gravity that is a beautiful way of persuading you me and probably his colleagues that cannonballs falling through the earth and the moon falling to the earth is one and the same law of physics gravity the moment that he realized that almost everything else follows from that Newton reasoned that if gravity governed motion on the earth and the moon why not on Jupiter and its moons which he had seen with his reflecting telescope why not the entire solar system in a bold leap Newton proclaimed that this invisible force operates everywhere in the universe it's an incredible leap it's beyond anything anybody had imagined at the time you can called it the universal law of gravitation and he wrote it in one simple mathematical equation it's so important because it really tells us how nature operates in a fundamentally new way Newton is saying the same thing that is going on in the heavens is going out on earth and vice versa it gives us a guidebook to answering the age-old question of what causes the rise and fall of the tides it gives us answers to the orbits of the planets in their positions it's a tremendous act of intellectual triumph one of the great keystone cornerstone pieces of our intellectual heritage it was a total revolution the universal law of gravity was a complete revolution the way that we think about the world the solar system therefore the universe whatever the size of the universe was in those days and therefore the way we think about ourselves the pre Gibeon showed a promise that gravity by itself could account for virtually all the motions we know of in our planetary system and the rest of science to this day has built off of that foundation Newton turned out to be more correct about that than he could possibly have been confident of but Newton was not able to enjoy his success for long as soon as the Principia was published Newton's old rival Robert Hooke claimed he had come up with some of the key ideas first and later others attacked it because Newton did not explain what gravity is just how to calculate its strength the Newton himself didn't understand it how can this object attract his object there's nothing in between them that seemed to them as going back to some sort of an occult philosophy in fact some think Newton's idea of gravity was related to the occult practice of alchemy Newton was fascinated by an alchemical process called the vegetation of metals in which inert metal seemed to come to life and grow like plants today we know this is just the reaction of mercury and silver with a solution of nitric acid but Newton thought these kinds of reactions showed that mysterious invisible forces he called active principles or at work everywhere in nature perhaps he thought of the invisible force of gravity in the same way Newton pursued alchemy because it gave insight into the active principles of nature gravity was an occult force it didn't have an explanation and Newton believed that it was possible that gravity was one of those forces one of those active principles and so in that sense Newton's alchemy could give insight into gravity yet by the early 1690s after more than twenty years of research Newton's alchemical experiments had yielded no scientific breakthroughs like those he'd made in math and physics we're not quite sure exactly what he was trying to do he certainly was looking for something and you know it's obviously something quite big and he obviously did not find it because he opted not to publish anything about it I think there's no question that he was disappointed because he was looking for ultimate answers to questions and he had failed an alchemy as he had not failed in any other pursuit finally Newton had what many think was a nervous breakdown he made wild accusations against his few friends charging one the philosopher john locke with trying to embroil him with women locke is puzzled by the whole thing you know what is what's up with Isaac there he wasn't running a brothel on the side and bringing Sir Isaac to it when Newton explained that he was sick and had gone without sleep for five nights his friends forgave him he was knackered if he had a breakdown I think it was probably because of exhaustion whatever the cause Newton's illness was brief within a few months he seemed to have regained his composure and soon a strikingly different Isaac Newton began to take shape Newton moved to London and was appointed master of the mint a well-paid job that put him in charge of issuing new currency and cracking down on counterfeiters about two dozen counterfeiters were executed well Newton was in charge Newton became a member of parliament president of the Royal Society and was knighted he commissioned at least fourteen portraits of himself it is an extraordinary change he's very much this icon and he settles into that role I think in London and likes the the role of the great man a year after Robert Hooke died Newton published his second great masterpiece optics which expanded on his work with light at the end of this book Newton finally wrote up some of his key ideas about calculus forty years after they were conceived and although he had given up alchemy he continued to devote himself to theology right up to his death he tried to keep his heresy as secret as possible and he thinks there's no point trying to convince these people of what I'm doing because the time is not right these people aren't fit to receive the kind of word that I'm giving out Newton died in 1727 he was 84 years old he was buried among kings and queens in Westminster Abbey beneath a monument to his scientific achievements his alchemy and passionate but heretical religious beliefs virtually unknown now two and a half centuries later a new picture of Sir Isaac Newton is emerging along with a new understanding of the roles that science religion and alchemy played in his life he sees his world has one world he sees his pursuit of truth as one pursuit and whether it takes him two books of theology or two books of nature whether it be books of astronomy or books of alchemy it doesn't matter to him what new does is brilliantly to use the tools appropriate to every field in which he worked he's an ingenious and energetic builder whose astonishingly brilliant at composing gorgeous monuments of the most intensely clever design sometimes these appear as great books like the print appear itself sometimes they appear in experiments but we would be wrong to look for a single key which unlocks the whole mystery of eyes of new men was a complete genius I mean people like Newton if I shoot off the hip maybe once in five hundred years at best you Nova is a production of WGBH Boston corporate funding for Nova is provided by Google and by VP major funding for Nova is provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute serving society through biomedical research and science education HHMI major funding for newton's dark secrets is provided by the National Science Foundation America's investment in the future additional funding is provided by American Playhouse major funding for Nova is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you thank you we are PBS