Additional note: Newton started publishing his work on fluxional notation for calculus in 1693, which seems to have been the more relevant point with regards to the controversy; the Principia covered more of the geometrical aspects. Wizard!Newton would have been just as interested in math as Muggle!Newton, and could have started publishing more about it once it started looking certain that the proposed Seclusion would be happening in a few years, and even then didn't get all noisy about things until afterward. Muggle!Newton, on the other hand, could also have been, erm, influenced to get into that squabbled with Leibniz by whichever wizard was responsible for Obliviating him and keeping an eye on him for the next few years to make sure it stuck (selectively Obliviating decades of someone's memory has got to be tricky, so you'd probably want to take some time to make sure you really did get it all). Works either way.
No idea who Muggle!Newton's wizard minder might have been, although there's probably plenty of candidates. Another candidate for a wizard keeping an eye on things, a century later, might be Salieri. He was in a position to hear what various royal courts were up to - "harmless music teacher for royalty and composer, honest" is a good cover for a spy. (They would have known the kind of devastation Muggles could cause, and I'd want to have a warning if any more Thirty Years Wars might bring armies tearing through my half-magical villages, anyway.) Also, possibly one additional reason he got the job as the Princess of Wurttemburg's tutor could be that she had been identified as a Muggleborn witch and, since she couldn't be whisked off to Durmstrang for numerous reasons, a private magical tutor under the cover of a music teacher would work as an alternative (because a princess having uncontrolled magical outbreaks would not be good for keeping magic secret). This of course also means Muggle!Mozart, which is the important point :D While Salieri appears not to have been quite the jealously evil schemer of the play/movie, you just know there's a wizarding version of Amadeus somewhere where he's pissed because it's just so unfair that this Muggle has such talent.
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Re: Newton and Alchemy
Date: 2011-06-04 06:24 pm (UTC)No idea who Muggle!Newton's wizard minder might have been, although there's probably plenty of candidates. Another candidate for a wizard keeping an eye on things, a century later, might be Salieri. He was in a position to hear what various royal courts were up to - "harmless music teacher for royalty and composer, honest" is a good cover for a spy. (They would have known the kind of devastation Muggles could cause, and I'd want to have a warning if any more Thirty Years Wars might bring armies tearing through my half-magical villages, anyway.) Also, possibly one additional reason he got the job as the Princess of Wurttemburg's tutor could be that she had been identified as a Muggleborn witch and, since she couldn't be whisked off to Durmstrang for numerous reasons, a private magical tutor under the cover of a music teacher would work as an alternative (because a princess having uncontrolled magical outbreaks would not be good for keeping magic secret). This of course also means Muggle!Mozart, which is the important point :D While Salieri appears not to have been quite the jealously evil schemer of the play/movie, you just know there's a wizarding version of Amadeus somewhere where he's pissed because it's just so unfair that this Muggle has such talent.