“Although Newton’s fame comes from physics, Levenson points out that much of his life was in fact dedicated to studying alchemy, or figuring out how to transmute dross into gold. That fascination, so often regarded as oddly inconvenient by Newton scholars, becomes the hinge of Levenson’s tale — for by 1695, King William III’s royal Mint was in such a dire state that it could have used a little alchemy itself. Because the silver in British coins was now worth more in continental Europe than the coins’ face value, speculators were melting them down, shipping the metal abroad, and then using the proceeds to procure … more coins. “It was the nearest thing imaginable,” Levenson writes, “to a financial perpetual motion machine.”

Paul Collins reviews Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson

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