Can someone explain me the concept of the “alchemy” subject?
In: 8
Right. Here goes.
It’s fucking bullshit.
Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.
If you want slightly more detail. It’s about turning worthless metals, like lead, into valuable ones, like gold. It’s basically a belief in magic.
With modern technology we can turn things into other things (particle accelerators and the like) but generally the cost is way more than what the final product is worth.
The original alchemists were on to something, in a way they were the first chemists, all matter is made of the same stuff, and can be transmuted from one element to another but they did not understand the nature of the atom. With nuclear physics we can now manipulate matter at the atomic level and turn lead to gold and unleash forces they could barely imagine.
“Alchemy” is an old word for “Chemistry”. The name changed around the same time the scientific method was invented, so people think of “alchemy” as being unscientific, based more on religion than on experiment.
The focus was on trying to transform different substances into one another. They were hoping that most substances were just mixtures of a handful of basic elements (e.g. earth, air, water, and fire).
There were some successes, like inventing gunpowder and figuring out how to distill alcohol. But there were also a lot of failures: for example, there was a lot of effort put into trying to transform different metals into one another–e.g. “turning lead into gold”–but it turned out that most metals are basic elements in themselves and not just mixes of other elements. Without the scientific method, there was no good way for the field to reach a consensus on what was possible and what wasn’t, so they mostly kept spinning their wheels chasing the same impossible goals over and over again.
Alchemy was essentially proto-chemistry. It was about changing materials into other materials by doing things to them.
Usually, that meant mixing reactants and reagents and boiling and separating.
As it became more scientific and refined, it became chemistry as we know it.
Before that, it was a very bizarre collection of scientific ideas and *totally non-scientific* speculations.
Riddles are easy when you know the answer. When people were experimenting with alchemy, they did not know any answers that we do. They did know that certain things could be combined in certain ways and have different properties than the original material. For example, copper and tin can be combined to form brass which is substantially different from either copper or tin. The Greeks had developed a form of napalm, steel had been invented several times, people had started discovering chemical properties of things like urea and various acids. The ultimate hope was that you would be able to turn lead, a heavy, soft, gray, relatively worthless metal into gold, a heavy, soft, yellow expensive metal. Intuitively, this seems like a good approach – They seem to be about the same sort of thing and we know metals can be changed from one form to another.
The first problem was as a group – Alchemists were all incredibly suspicious of each other and were convinced that THIS time they would find the magic combination. This meant that they only rarely wrote things down and if they did it was usually encoded. This meant that their knowledge died with them. The second problem is that it means everybody is starting over from scratch every time. You can’t say that so-and-so tried this and it didn’t work so I’ll try something different you’re always trying to figure out every possible combination by yourself.
Second, they are dealing with a backlog of every known religion, every snake-oil salesman, every quack physician and starting to wonder is there truth in this or not? Many of the alchemic formulas involve symbols or prayers to various deities admist the elixirs and various metals – because for all they knew, maybe praying to a certain demon or writing a certain incantation would actually work. Throw in some good neurotoxins like mercury and lead, both alchemic favorites, and you are in for a wild ride of more or less randomly mixing different things together and seeing what happens. (For what it’s worth, we still have the same quackery today, this bottled water costs more because it was exposed to the light of the full Gemini moon while we sang quantum blessings at it and it will align your positive chakras better than regular water and is more energetic).
The greatest underpinnings of the modern age are the scientific method and open dissemination of ideas.
The word “alchemy” means “the process of transmutation of material to join it with the divine”. Before modern science and the notion of atoms there was sort of a branch of philosophy where they would think about the nature of materials — why do some things mix or not mix, why are they the colors they are, why do some things burn but others melt, and so on. Different traditions had come up with all sorts of ideas, but consistent was the notion that things were basically configurations of a handful of basic elements or properties, like air, water, fire, and earth — and these were also connected to more fundamental supernatural properties.
For example, the notion that metals could be “rearranged” to form different metals came from an Arabic guy named Jabir ibn Hayyan. He noted that lead and gold had many properties in common, but gold was more rare, never tarnished, and had the warm and color of the sun — it was the purer and more divine form of lead. If one could learn to remove the properties of lead that would make it gold, then the same could be applied to living things to cure disease, or souls to obtain immortality (Jabir was convinced that man could create life where there was none).
By the 18th century, there was already quite a bit of practical alchemy in that there were knew of a variety of chemical reactions that did useful things and the mysticism of it went out of fashion — it was a practical art, even if it wasn’t fully understood what was going on. from that point, the empirical study of chemistry replaced alchemy. We came to understand what the elements were, how they shared certain properties and could be grouped by the way they interacted with other things. We became more methodical and advanced instruments that helped us learn about atoms, molecules, and how reactions worked.
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