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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

Well Newton was seriously into alchemy so you never can tell.

From a scientific standpoint, nuclear fission is pretty much alchemy, right? I feel like we use the term to dismiss quacks, but changing one element into another is literally something we now know how to do.

Lead (atomic number 82) isn’t even that far from gold (atomic number 79).

Alchemy, by virtue of association with hermeticism, gets an unnecessarily bad reputation. We know it to be mostly false today, but it really did help develop chemistry.

We live in an age of technical marvel but the goalposts have constantly shifted so nothing feels amazing anymore.

Except the alchemists weren't practicing nuclear physicists, nor did they actually ever turn lead into gold through nuclear fission, nor would anything in their philosophy have led to doing so, either in theory or practice.

Just because it happens to be physically possible to turn lead into gold using a model that alchemists would never have even comprehended (as their principles were based on hermeticism and religion, not experimental science) doesn't mean they weren't quacks, or that they were half right. They were quacks, and it's OK to see them as such.

Alchemy was always quackery. It might have been proto-chemistry, but the minute it adopted scientific method it stopped being alchemy.

The problem with alchemy is that there was no rhyme or reason to its method, other than mysticisim; it wasn't scientific in nature.

If it sparked chemistry, that's a good thing; but it doesn't stop it from being quakery.

chemistry is harder than physics

Chemistry is physics.

Partly yes. But in reality it is much try and error. It hasn’t mostly the hard math that physics has. It’s more “what happens most times has to be true because it is replicable” Physics would be more “because this happens regularly it fits nearly this formula” and more science based on mathematics then try and error like chemistry.

Electrical engineering is more physics than chemistry for example

chemistry follows the rules of physics

that's relative

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