Isaac Newton — "The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to…"
The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Matter and light can transform into one another, and nature fundamentally favors such conversions. Newton is asserting that the physical world operates through radical change of form — particles becoming light, light becoming matter — in a cycle nature actively embraces. This strikingly anticipates the modern scientific understanding that mass and energy are interconvertible, a principle Einstein would formalize two centuries later.
Relevance to Isaac Newton
Newton published this in Opticks (1704) under speculative Queries appended to the book. He pioneered the corpuscular theory of light, treating it as particles or bodies, so the body-light boundary was central to his thinking. Newton also secretly devoted decades to alchemy, obsessively pursuing transmutation of metals. This quote bridges his rigorous optics research and his alchemical conviction that nature endlessly transforms substances.
The era
Newton wrote this circa 1704, at the peak of the Scientific Revolution. Alchemy was still practiced seriously — Newton himself spent more time on alchemy than physics, filling thousands of manuscript pages on transmutation. Mechanist philosophers like Descartes had reframed nature as a system of particles in motion. Newton stood at this crossroads: alchemical belief in transformation, corpuscular physics, and experimental optics converging into one remarkably prescient speculation.
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