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Isaac Newton wrote more words about alchemy than he ever wrote about physics. Roughly a million of them — recipes, transmutation notes, hunts for the philosopher’s stone. When the economist John Maynard Keynes bought a trunk of Newton’s private papers at auction in 1936 and actually read them, he came back shaken and told an audience that Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians. ...