Can someone explain me the concept of the “alchemy” subject?
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“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.
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