Sir Issac Newton, best known for formulating the laws of motion and gravity, wrote about his revolutionary findings using homemade ink that had beer as a key ingredient, a new study has claimed. A paper in the Royal Society’s journal Notes and Records has revealed two ink recipes in Sir Newton’s various works. While one contained a quart of wine, the other utilised a quart of “strong beer or ale”.
Sir Newton published his laws of motion, theory of calculus and theory of gravity in Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. As per Professor Stephen Snobelen, from Dalhousie University and King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who spent two years analysing Sir Newton’s personal beer flagon, the physicist may have written his most prominent work using the ink containing beer.
“Although chemical analysis of the ink in Newton’s voluminous manuscript corpus has yet to be carried out, many 17th-century authors used beer as a solvent in their home-made writing ink,” Mr Snobelen was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.
“Newton’s two surviving ink recipes confirm that he followed in this craft, at least while he was at Cambridge.”
As per Sir Newton himself, his beer-based ink would “endure many years” and it is perhaps one of the reasons why his work still looks like it was freshly penned.
While Sir Newton used beer to write papers, as per the study, little is known about his drinking habits. However, according to his lab assistant, Humphrey Newton, Sir Newton drank beer and ale with meals and only sparingly.
There are many references to beer, ale, cider and wine in his surviving papers, including household inventories, as well as discussions on the best variety of apples to produce good cider.
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Newton predicts the end of the world
While not writing research papers that laid the foundation of physical science, Sir Newton also predicted when the world would end. In a letter penned in 1704, he predicted that the world would cease to exist in the year 2060. The physicist based his doomsday prophecy on his Protestant interpretation of the Bible and the events that followed biblical history, specifically, the Battle of Armageddon.
Known to have penned enough papers to fill 150 novel-length books, Sir Newton arrived at the year by using the days numbered 1260, 1290 and 2300 in the Book of Daniel and Revelations, which mark the end and beginning of certain important moments in the apocalypse. However, he interpreted these days as years.
