The following are photos I took of the alchemical notes of
Sir Isaac Newton, which are located in the Dibner Library, in the
Museum of American History in Washington, DC. This library, one of the
Smithsonian Libraries, contains an amazing collection of rare books on
the history of science. These papers of Newton are the ones mentioned
in The Eight. At that time they were located in Cambridge, but
Cambridge found them embarrassing because they wanted to maintain
Newton's reputation as a serious scientist. They didn't realize that
alchemy is the father of modern chemistry. The meeting between Newton
and Voltaire in The Eight is fictitious, of course. I took
these pictures during my tour of the Dibner Library, which Katherine
Neville organized, on June 24, 2019. Later, she invited me to her
apartment, where we had a delightful visit,
which you can read about here.
For more about these papers,
watch
the video that
Katherine Neville filmed during this visit, where she talks about
them.