The Belief in Alchemy

I used to think that the difference between alchemy and chemistry was like the difference between astrology and astronomy: the ignorance–wisdom split. But something always felt jarring with that view: how then did so many of the great scientists like Newton and Robert Boyle (he of the gas laws fame) believe in alchemy? Was it just greed and hope? That felt too simplistic…

 

Philip Ball’s book on water, H2O, explained the reasons. The first one is obvious. Given what was at stake with alchemy (gold, riches), it is not surprising that none of its practitioners shared information or made their techniques public. That in turn meant that independent confirmation, or attempts to redo the process, were out of the question. Further, they encrypted their notes to ensure that even if stolen, they wouldn’t make sense to others. Which in turn ensured there was no way to compare two methods or attempts.

 

But it’s the other reason that goes far deeper, and is built on ancient, often Greek, principles. We like to think of ancient Greece as the fountainhead of everything good about the West, but as Ball says:

“It is not possible to find a single example from classical Greek philosophical thought that was modified as a consequence of experiment. Naturally, one can’t possibly hope to get everything right by thought alone, to find that the Universe falls in line with your ideas of how it ought to be.”

 

Aristotle came up with the famous fourfold categorization of the elements – earth, air, fire, water. To reiterate, the Greeks thought of these as “elements”, a status we attribute today to the likes of carbon, oxygen and iron today. Once you start there, then technological limitations add to the confusion:

“In the elemental philosophies of antiquity, transformations of matter are often discussed in terms of changes of state, not of composition… To the ancient Greeks and their successors, ice is not fundamentally the same stuff as liquid water. It is a substance that has the attributes of earth and metals – hardness, solidity… To Thales, water became a kind of earth when it froze, and a certain kind of air when it evaporated.”

The implication of the above isn’t obvious, so let me make it explicit. To the Greeks and their followers over their ages, it looks like the “elements” (earth, air, water) can be converted from one to the other. Transmutation, in other words!

 

Aha, now it all begins to makes sense:

“It’s only when we recognize this that the old views of matter, including those of alchemical tradition, start to make sense. If we can make earth from water, why not gold from base metals? After all, that’s not even converting one ‘element’ to another (in pre-scientific framework), but just making one metal to another.”

No wonder then, the West believed in the possibility of alchemy for so long.