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.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Matter and light can transform into each other — and Newton considered this perfectly natural, consistent with how the universe works. In modern terms, it anticipates Einstein's E=mc², the principle that mass and energy are fundamentally equivalent. Newton saw the universe as operating through deep, unified principles, and this interconvertibility of light and physical substance was, to him, simply nature following its own elegant logic.
Relevance to Isaac Newton
Newton devoted years to optics, famously splitting white light into the spectrum with a prism and writing Opticks in 1704 — the book this quote comes from. He also pursued alchemy obsessively and secretly, fixated on transforming matter. This quote bridges both passions: light as a physical phenomenon and the conversion of substances. His belief in nature's deep unity drove both pursuits, making matter-light interchange feel inevitable to him.
The era
Newton lived during the Scientific Revolution, when natural philosophers were dismantling alchemical tradition and building modern chemistry and physics. The nature of light was fiercely debated — Newton championed the corpuscular theory that light consists of particles, making its interchangeability with matter plausible. Alchemy's long fixation on material transformation still pervaded intellectual life. This was an era when the boundary between matter and energy, solid and radiant, was genuinely open and philosophically contested.
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