I don't remember the specific context, but recently somebody wanted to insult somebody else. So, he derisively referred to him as an Alchemist. That is an all too common example of something I have been guilty of. "Boy, back in the old, old days", my thinking used to go, "people were really dumb". And it's not just me, or at least the old me. Scratch the surface, and you'll find that this is a common sentiment.
As the years have passed, I have had occasion to take a deep dive into why several people in the past believed what they believed. This has convinced me to change my thinking to the point where I now hold exactly the opposite sentiment. Some of the smartest people who ever lived, lived more than a thousand years ago. And some of those people were Alchemists.
Sure, they held beliefs that we no longer hold. And without considering context, what information they had access to, that's enough for many people to conclude that they must have been dumb. You see, in light of what we now know, their old ideas seem pretty dumb to us.
But they didn't know what we now know. And given what they did know, they did a far better job of it than many of us modern know-it-alls do. This fact that so many contemporary people get so much wrong has provided fodder for far too many of my posts to this blog.
Returning to the past and the people who populated it, a few years ago I did a double blog post on Newton's Philosophie Naturalis Principia Mathematica (see Sigma 5: Principia - part 1 and Sigma 5: Principia - Part 2). In Part 1 I said "[i]t . . . kicked my butt, completely and utterly". That's right. A book that was published more than three hundred years ago kicked my butt.
Now, most people consider me a geek and a math guy. So, the book should be right up my alley. And besides, I have had a year of college Calculus plus sundry other exposures to the subject. It is a book that spends a lot of time laying out the basics of Calculus (it was the first broad introduction introduction to Calculus to see print). It then uses Calculus to solve various problems we would now consider simple and straightforward.
Sounds pretty much like Calculus 101, right? So, you'd think that with my background I would have been able to buzz through it without breaking a sweat. But that's the opposite of how it went. I was in over my head, usually way over my head, almost all of the time.
Newton was a coinventor of Calculus. He and a guy named Leibnitz came up with the idea independently, and at about the same time. So, the version of Calculus used in Principia should have been pretty basic. And it was. (Leibnitz came up with a more sophisticated version. That's why most people now use the Leibnitz methodology rather than Newton's.) But it turns out that was no help at all.
Between then (the book was first published in 1687, but it was based on work Newton had done many years earlier) and now, people have had a lot of time to figure out how to better organize the ideas Newton developed and then teach them. That's one factor. Another factor is the difference between what people back then had to work with in terms of tools and what people had to work with in terms of information.
The farther back you go, the poorer the tools. And the farther back you go, the poorer the data. And this extends both to quality and quantity. Back then people didn't have much data. And the data they had was often of poor quality. That's the real reason only a certified genius like Newton could invent something like Calculus. He had to find a way around the fact that he had poor tools to apply to poor data.
This becomes immediately apparent when you start diving into Principia. Newton had to be really creative to overcome the many obstacles thrown up by few and poor tools. We have better ways of dealing with those problems. As a result, we can now take a much simpler and more direct approach. It is the convoluted (and very creative) methods Newton was forced to use that make the work so hard to follow.
By now I've been exposed to enough primary material (the original publication documenting the method some ancient or other had to use) to see a pattern. I'm sure Euclid's Elements, the document that all of modern Geometry is built upon, would follow this same pattern. But, since I have not gotten around to checking Elements out, I can't say so from personal knowledge. But I can speak from personal experience about an example that is not as old as Elements, but is much older than Principia.
One of my High School Math teachers handed out Galileo's proof that a free falling projectile, one which is being subjected to the effects of gravity and nothing else, follows a parabolic path. His proof can colloquially be described as "Greek to me". Why? It turns out it is easy to duplicate his result if you have access to Algebra and Analytic Geometry.
Both are now taught in High School (and sometimes earlier). But neither had been invented in time for Galileo to make use of them. Without those two tools Galileo had to be a genius on a level with Newton to pull what he did off. Fortunately, he was. And that's my basic theses when it comes to Alchemy.
It wasn't that those people were dumb. It was that they had poor tools and poor data. As a result, it is no surprise that they went down a lot of rabbit holes. Nevertheless, after herculean effort, and with unimaginable persistence they slowly developed better tools. And after still more effort and with still more persistence they slowly cleaned up the old data and developed the new data that eventually led to Chemistry.
So, let's now take a tour through history and see what these people knew and what they learned. Alchemy as a concept dates back thousands of years, but the word itself is relatively modern. The word only goes back to medieval times. The French word alquemie got latinized to become alchymia. The usual rules were applied to turn the Latin word into it's English equivalent.
The concept turns out to be one that several different civilizations have found their way to. The oldest seems to be the ancient Egyptians. There, it grew out of an interest in metallurgy. If nothing else, there is always a market for a better sword. Wood gets replaced by stone. Stone gets replaced by copper. Copper gets replaced by bronze. Bronze gets replaced by Iron. Iron gets replaced by Steel. Each of these steps took a great deal of technical ingenuity to achieve.
The ancient Egyptians were only able to progress to the bronze stage. But finding better materials and manufacturing techniques to employ in sword making was a priority for the Egyptian governments of the time. The Greeks learned from the Egyptians and improved on what they learned. The Romans learned from the Greeks and improved on what they learned. The Byzantines learned from the Romans and improved on what they learned. Medieval society learned from the Byzantines and improved on what they learned. Along the way sword making progressed to the point where it was using steel.
But sword making was not the only problem confronting ancient Egyptian governments. They needed all kinds of new, better, and cheaper materials. And at bottom Alchemy is the study of materials, how to organize them into useful groups, how to transform one material into another material, and how to create new materials. The ancient Egyptians were not the only people confronting these challenges. As a result, under various names Alchemy arose independently in India, China, and perhaps other places.
This is the knowledge equivalent of parallel evolution. It turns out that if something is useful enough, it often gets developed independently several times. Flight is one example. Certain dinosaurs developed the ability to fly. This got passed down to modern birds. But birds are not mammals. Bats are mammals. Bats developed the ability to fly completely independently of dinosaurs and their various offspring.
A more extreme example is eyesight. Eyesight has been developed independently at least five separate times. As just one example, insect eyes are completely different from mammal eyes. Many evolution deniers are completely unaware of this. And the fact that the intermediate steps between "nothing even vaguely resembling eyes" and "fully developed eyesight" have been documented in eye-glazing detail since the objection was first raised, has also failed to penetrate their awareness.
Scientists love theories. They even like theories that are known to be wrong. Theories give you a way to organize a large mass of data into some vague approximation of order. A reasonable number of groups is far easier to wrap one's head around than a large mass of random facts and observations. There is a popular form of grouping that is commonly associated with Alchemy. It is the Earth, Air, Fire, Water business.
But let's take a look at each of these groups with modern eyes. The first thing we need to do is discard two of them as utterly hopeless. Earth and Fire are far too complicated to get anywhere with. Comparatively speaking, Air and Water seem pretty simple. So, let's take a look at what ancient Alchemists were up against by focusing on just these last two.
Of the two, we now know that Water is the simpler one. But even it is complex. Ancients knew that it existed in three forms. As a solid it is ice or snow. As a liquid it is "just water". But "just water" comes in two general types, fresh and salt. Water vapor is the third form. But what's with it? Is it Air, an entirely different group, or is it still Water? Complexity abounds no matter where we look.
And we now know that Water consists of two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen. All three are tightly bound together by chemical bonds into what we now call a molecule. So, maybe Air is simpler. It's all the same stuff. It's always gaseous. It never changes to a liquid or a solid, at least as far as the ancients knew. But we now know that Air is a mixture.
It is roughly 20% Oxygen and 80% Nitrogen. I use the word "roughly", because about 3% of Air is something else. Most of the "something else" is Argon. But, since the ancients had no way to detect any of the components of that 3%, I'm just going to ignore it.
But that leaves plenty of complexity remaining. Air is a mixture. And the components of that mixture are not simple elements. They are molecules. The "Oxygen" is actually a molecule consisting of two atoms of Oxygen tightly bound together by chemical bonds. It's the same thing with the "Nitrogen" in the Air. It is a molecule consisting of two atoms of Nitrogen tightly bound together by chemical bonds.
The problem this presented to ancient Alchemists is that those chemical bonds are not tight enough. Both Oxygen and Nitrogen are intimately involved in the chemistry of life (and lots of other things). The most obvious example is Oxygen. In most cases things burn by breaking some of the chemical bonds in some of the molecules and then rearranging the things into new molecules. Effectively, old molecules get replaced by new molecules.
But each element that was in one of the old molecules that gets changed ends up in one of the new molecules, just not in the same molecule it started in. And that extends to some of the Oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. Some of them become old molecules that get changed into new molecules. Sometimes, these new molecules are gasses. Sometimes not. Either way, Alchemists found it extremely difficult to figure out what was going on.
To take the commonest example, a major constituent of wood is Carbon. When wood burns the Carbon in the wood is detached (one or more chemical bonds are broken) from whatever molecule it is bound to. The chemical bonds binding the two atoms of Oxygen in an "Oxygen" molecule also get broken. The chemical bonds get reformed into a new molecule called Carbon Dioxide.
Carbon Dioxide consists of one atom of Carbon (from the wood) combined with two atoms of Oxygen (from the air). And to make things even more confusing for Alchemists studying this process, Carbon Dioxide is a gas. Of course, as wood burns, many other chemical reactions are going on in parallel with the one I described. Some of them involve Nitrogen molecules from the atmosphere.
In Nitrogen's case several different new molecules form. The amount of each that gets formed varies substantially depending on conditions. Among simplest new molecules are Nitrogen Oxide (1 Nitrogen, 1 Oxygen), Nitrogen Dioxide (1 Nitrogen, 2 Oxygen), and Cyanide (1 Nitrogen, 1 Carbon). All are gasses. Other, more complicated new molecules are solids. Needless to say, untangling all this took a VERY long time.
Returning to Water for a moment, shallow lakes sometimes evaporate completely and leave behind a lot of salt. This is a phenomenon that the ancients were very familiar with. The obvious conclusion is that The "pure" version of Water is salt free. But there is noting obviously Earthy about salt Water. It seems to just be Watery. But you get a kind of Earth when you precipitate (a modern word that describes what is happening) all of the salt out of salt water.
These are just a few examples of the problems associated with the whole Earth-Air-Fire-Water business. The problem Alchemists had was that no one could come up with an alternative that worked any better. The shortcomings of a bad theory can be used as hints as to where to look for a better theory. But the Earth-Air-Fire-Water theory wasn't even able to do that. The lack of a "new and improved" theory is one reason why progress took so long.
But Alchemists tried. Ancient (and later medieval) Alchemists developed many recipes for turning one material into another. But they had tremendous difficulty coming up with predictive rules. They got some milage out of "if this formula works what other formula should also work?", but not much. They kept getting lost in the detail.
They knew of thousands of different materials. They knew that Earth-Air-Fire-Water was too few groups, and perhaps the wrong list of groups. At the other end of the scale they knew of many groups, each consisting of a small number of materials, where all the members of the group behaved in a similar manner. But unfortunately, a large number of materials didn't seem to fit into any group. What they needed was system that would produce an intermediate number of groups, and that would allow every material to be put into one group.
In short, what they needed was what in modern terms are called elements and molecules. BTW, there is actually a third category. There are compounds. These are materials that consist of a mixture of molecules. There may be bonds keeping the compound together, but these bonds are far weaker than chemical bonds. Compounds introduce a whole additional degree of complexity. But things are already too complex, so for the most part I'm going to ignore them.
But figuring out what is an element and what is a molecule is extremely difficult. Water seems like it should be an element. The Oxygen in Air seems like it should be an element. To Ancient Alchemists, there didn't seem to be anything peculiar about Iron or Sulphur, both of which they were familiar with. And both of which are elements, while water and molecular Oxygen aren't. Nor is ordinary air.
Mercury is an element. And Mercury was also well known to ancient Alchemists. But then and now Mercury feels like it should be in a category by itself. Ancient Alchemists grouped it with other metals. But even they considered metals to be too vague of a category to be of much use. What makes Mercury so unique is that it is the only metal (and element) that is a liquid at room temperature.
The problem Alchemists were wrestling with was similar to the one Geologists wrestled with before the advent of Plate Tectonics. Geologists spend most of their time studying compounds. Over time they have been able to catalog more than a million of them. But the old questions of where to find a particular compound, how compounds get transformed, what new and possibly valuable compounds are out there and where can they be found, also hounded them.
Geologists were familiar with weathering. They knew something about the effects of rivers. They knew a lot about this pocket and that pocket of their particular area of study. But nothing ever coalesced into an overarching theory that put the various processes they already knew about into some kind of larger context. Until, that is, Plate Tectonics was developed in the '50s and '60s.
It was the overarching theory that provided that provided context into which the various pockets of knowledge could be placed. It also introduced additional processes. Plate Tectonics explains, for instance, how many types of rocks get formed. It explains how volcanoes work and why they end up where they do.
In short it brings previous knowledge into a single coherent whole. And it introduces new ideas that shed much needed light on what had previously been mysterious. But the key technology that convinced Geologists that Plate Tectonics was real was one that was only developed in the aftermath of World War II, the ability to map the magnetic fields of rocks on the bottoms of various oceans.
The basic idea of Plate Tectonics had first been introduced several decades earlier. But the evidence in its favor was scant and unconvincing. And what evidence there was, was only possible to collect when twentieth century technology became available. There was literally no evidence to support the existence of Plate Tectonics that was available to anyone living before 1900.
Alchemists had the same problem. Almost all of the tools and techniques necessary to tell the signal from the noise took an extremely long time to develop. Modern chemists can use something called a Mass Spectrometer to probe the constituents of a compound. Often, elemental signals are present. Helium was first identified by examining the spectrum of the Sun.
Alchemists didn't know it, but they had a tool that could not be used in as many situations as a modern Mass Spectrometer can. Still, it can be useful in many situations. And it doesn't require any equipment beyond what a typical Alchemist has on hand. It turns turns out that if you burn things you get a colored flame. And the colors in the flame tell you a lot about what's in what you are burning.
The problem is that this technique works best if you are burning things that are both pure and simple. If you burn complicated things then there are so many processes going on, each of which produces its own distinctive set of colors, that the colors generated by all these processes mask each other. And if the sample is not pure, you automatically get a complex situation.
Take what sounds like it should be a simple situation, Coal. It's just Carbon, right? Wrong! Consider how Coal got created. A long time ago a large quantity of organic material got buried deep underground. How? Plate Tectonics provides the answer. In any case, after enough time had passed, and after the organic matter had been subjected to just the right amount of heat and pressure, it turned into Oil. Slightly different amounts of time, pressure, and heat produced Coal.
Given the vicissitudes inherent in how it got created, it is not surprising that there are lots of different types of Coal. Some types of Coal are almost 100% Carbon. Other types of Coal are only 50% Carbon, or even less. When confronted by this kind of problem Alchemists first have to decide "do I have different grades of the same thing or do I have different things". The process of figuring out which it is was a slow and painful one.
One factor that really slowed things down for Alchemical progress is secrecy. Being an Alchemist is a time consuming job. Not that many people are rich enough to self fund. So, many Alchemists worked for the government. That meant keeping the King, or whatever the local head of government was called, happy.
He expected value for his money. Or at least the promise of value. A new and improved sword or other piece of military technology would fill the bill. So would the ability to turn a cheap "base" metal like Lead into valuable metal like Gold. If the Alchemist was successful, it behooved the King to keep the result secret. If not, then secrecy avoided embarrassment.
So, Alchemy and secrecy became closely associated almost from the start. And secrecy inhibited the free flow of information. That resulted in a lot of duplication of effort and no one Alchemist having a good understanding of the state of the art of the field as a whole. Before continuing, I am going to return to the whole Lead into Gold business for a moment.
To the modern ear the whole business sounds ridiculous. But consider this. We now know how to do it. All you have to do is smash a Hydrogen atom into a Lead atom. If you do it just right, then the Proton in the Hydrogen nucleus gets added into the nucleus of the Lead atom and that turns it into a Gold atom. The process involves using a horribly expensive device called a Particle Accelerator. And the quantity of Gold produced is measured in terms of numbers of atoms. But those are just practical details.
We also know how to turn graphite (a common and cheap form of Carbon) into Diamond (an uncommon and very expensive form of Carbon). Industrial diamonds are made from graphite on a daily basis by using specialized machinery. But so far, producing large, gem-quality diamonds by using industrial processes is not possible to do, at least in a cost effective manner. But again, those are just practical details.
Now let's look at what Alchemists knew and what they did not know. They did not know which materials were elements, which were molecules, and which were compounds. Consider salt. Table salt is Sodium Chloride (1 Sodium, 1 Chloride). But to a modern chemist, "salt" is not one singe thing. It is a whole family of similar things. Potassium Chloride is a "salt". The list of molecules that are salts is far to long to include here.
One thing that is true of all salts is that they are are molecules and not elements. But for the purposes of argument, let's say that the same thing is true of Lead and Gold. We know that they are elements, but Alchemists didn't. So, for the purposes of our argument let's pretend for the moment that they are molecules instead. And let's model those molecules after the two salts I just mentioned.
First, assume that Lead, the cheaper and more common material in our example, is actually some analog of Sodium Chloride. Let's also assume that Gold, the more expensive and less common material in our example, is some analog of Potassium Chloride. If this were true then an Alchemist could turn Lead into Gold by some process analogous to replacing Sodium with Potassium. That might easily be within the capability of our hypothetical Alchemist.
Given what Alchemists knew and didn't know, it was perfectly reasonable for them to assume that there was a practical process for turning Lead into Gold. And that means that they were not stupid to try. And that means that ridiculing them for trying is not justified.
I hope that by now I have convinced you that the task Alchemists set for themselves was an exceedingly difficult one. The invention of the printing press helped a lot. It made it easier for results to escape one location and become widely known. That helped. But another important factor tuned out to be understanding that the main problem was just too big. It had to be broken down into many sub-problems and each one had to be tackled separately.
Many separate methods were developed for purifying many separate materials. Many compounds were identified as compounds and their constituent molecules identified. In some cases the constituent elements that came together to make a specific molecule were identified. More and more materials were determined to be either a molecule or an element.
But this buildup of information was a slow, painful process. A breakthrough here rarely led to a breakthrough somewhere else. It was a slow, painstaking process to develop the procedures, processes, and data necessary for a clear picture to evolve. If you want to get something of an idea just how slow and painful the process was, just Google "Phlogiston".
By the late 1600s a hazy picture started to form. By the early 1700s the picture was starting to come into focus. But that very progress caused another problem to surface. Alchemy had been around for a long time. And for much of that time Alchemy lacked a firm foundation. That left the door open for charlatans of every stripe. They took advantage of this open door in large numbers. And that gave Alchemy a sketchy reputation.
Over the millennia, many luminaries have worked in Alchemy. Newton (yes - that Newton) was just one of many people who to this day we think of as being reputable people, but who were also serious Alchemists. There have always been enough disreputable people mixed in with the reputable ones that many people are convinced that all of Alchemy is disreputable.
If the field was going to move forward, then something needed to be done. The solution was one we are now very familiar with, rebranding. Starting in about 1720 reputable Alchemists started calling themselves Chemists. The work they were doing hadn't changed. From a practical point of view, it was still Alchemy.
But the rebrand allowed them to separate themselves and the work they were doing from the now widely discredited term of Alchemy. The rebranding worked. The field went forward, now at the quicker pace enabled in part by shedding the old Alchemical baggage.
Today, Chemistry is seen as an honorable profession that produces reliable results. Alchemy, on the other hand, has lost whatever connection it had with the good work that was done under its auspices. That left just the bad stuff. But Alchemy hasn't changed. Only our perception of it has changed. And the current perception is inaccurate and unfair. It gets a bad rap.
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