Send us Fan Mail Most people know Isaac Newton as the father of modern science. Fewer know that two thirds of his written output was on alchemy and theology — and that he kept it secret because it would have gotten him hanged. This week I read my essay Newton Contra Athanasius, tracing the strange inner life of the man behind the mechanical universe: the abandoned child who reimagined God as a distant sovereign, the secret Arian who spent decades building a forensic case against one of the gr...