Isaac Newton

Wrote the Principia — and a million words of alchemical notes Keynes called the work of "the last of the magicians."

In one decade Newton produced the laws of motion, universal gravitation, calculus, and the first correct theory of color. In the same decade and the next, he wrote roughly a million words of alchemical manuscripts — recipes, decoded Philalethes treatises, lab notebooks of mercury distillations he ran himself at Trinity College. He believed he was decoding a unified prisca sapientia hidden in scripture, mythology, and metals. Keynes, who bought the manuscripts at auction in 1936, wrote: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." The physics rewrote the world. The alchemy rewrote nothing — but it was not a hobby; it was the same mind, applying the same intensity, to a problem that had no answer.