I also wonder what benefit the study of alchemy, the Bible etc may have had on his other discoveries? Sometimes ‘flashes of insight’ come from patterns developed in other fields.

Gutenberg, for example, made a breakthrough with the printing press because his earlier career as a goldsmith taught him enough metallurgy to develop movable type; Charles Babbage credited his work on silk weaving machines with helping him visualise his adding machine (with Ida Lovelace, creating the first ‘computer’).