When this famous person died a sealed trunk was found containing some 100,000 pages he had written on alchemy, astology and the occult. Who was it? Isaac Newton, Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, or C.V. Raman?

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Newton left a mass of manuscripts on the subjects of alchemy and chemistry, then closely related topics. Most of these were extracts from books, bibliographies, dictionaries, and so on, but a few are original. He began intensive experimentation in 1669, continuing till he left Cambridge, seeking to unravel the meaning that he hoped was hidden in alchemical obscurity and mysticism. He sought understanding of the nature and structure of all matter, formed from the 'solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles' that he believed God had created. Most importantly in the 'Queries' appended to 'Opticks' and in the essay 'On the Nature of Acids' (1710), Newton published an incomplete theory of chemical force, concealing his exploration of the alchemists, which became known a century after his death. http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/newtlife.html Astronomer Carl Sagan's book, 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark', argues for science over superstition, so no doubt he also had quite a collection of papers about the pseudosciences. Mar 25 01, 11:47 PM