Risk of Discovery (2017)

And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn’t a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don’t seem risky either. Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. No one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been working on it.

Source: www.paulgraham.com