[JakkTrent]

I love that you just dismissed Isaac Newton's greatest curiosity as "an addictive hobby" - that may in fact be the best understatement of the quest for the "philosopher's stone" that I have yet encountered.

Perhaps there is a reason some of the smartest of us, for millenia, have fallen into this particular rabbit hole.

I also want to establish that Isaac Newton's quest was not inherently a religous one - the was very opposed to alchemists.

Do you really believe it was spirituality that motivated Isaac Newton? He already believed in God - the subject of his final research was something more tangible, which makes sense considering he was a scientist ;)