The short answer to the question, ‘was Newton the last of the magicians?’ is, yes …. And also … no. Newton and alchemy turn out to be ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ We toss a coin and take a heads-and-tails approach. In this podcast we argue that the alchemical experiments he undertook had nothing to do with magic. Newton’s alchemy now looks to historians like good science (although he would have called himself both a natural philosopher and a chymist). It was well conceived and measured and drew on the work of his contemporaries and of many men before him. And Newton was certainly not the last person in Europe to practise alchemy of this kind. Within fifty years of his death it would simply evolve into modern chemistry.

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