The Genius Of Alchemy: A Greek Philosopher

Alchemy, in modern times, became synonymous with pseudoscience and showmanship. Making gold was proven to be effectively impossible, and alchemists did spend a great deal of time trying to make gold. Sometimes they orchestrated elaborate and large scale frauds to convince people they had succeeded. Making gold, however, was just a small part of what alchemists tried to do. Alchemists were among the foremost scientists of their time and they made huge strides in technologies and massively advanced humanity's understanding of the world. Newton, Boyle, and many of the other “greats” in science were alchemists. Certainly some alchemists tried to create gold, but alchemy was a huge field and categorizing it as a crude metaphysics was a convenient

Alchemy was an extremely old practice originally developed in Europe although it also had deep roots in Egypt, and the Arabian peninsula.The word alchemy comes from Arabic alkemiya which comes from Greek chemeia which originally came from the Coptic word keme which referred to egypt, but can be literally translated to mean “black earth.” The practice grew and eventually became one of the primary sciences throughout Europe. It was based heavily on Greek natural philosophy, and it used those ideas to explain the world. The average person might not understand the complicated philosophy or ideology behind alchemy, but they understood the changes and effects it had on the world. The mere idea of creating gold captured the minds of just about everyone in Europe, but alchemists also made a great amount of practical progress. It was alchemists who brought gunpowder to Europe. It was alchemists who healed the sick, made ceramics, refined metals, and created glass. Roger Bacon, a 13th century alchemist and inventor, promised flying machines, miraculous bridges, and carriages that required no horses to pull them. In the face of these of these successful accomplishments and with the promise of more to come it’s not hard to see how people accepted the philosophy of

For example Robert Boyle, who was generally considered to have created the modern field of chemistry, was really an alchemist. He searched for alkahest, a name for the philosopher's stone, and he spent a great deal of time trying to transmute metals. But although he was an alchemist, he was also a chemist who believed in using careful experimentation to gain knowledge. The very notion of a separate alchemy and chemistry was just beginning to take shape by the time Boyle died. There were even texts in the early 17th century which referred to the art of making gold as chemistry and referred to experiments like distilling a substance as alchemy. The separation of the terms alchemy and chemistry was derived from the belief that chemistry was a science and alchemy was spiritual and dedicated to making gold. The interchangeable nature of these terms, however, demonstrated that there was originally no such split. Alchemy and chemistry were both fundamentally scientific