To be fair, the alchemists have accomplished virtually every one of their goals via a mixture of chemistry, particle physics, and electrical engineering invente

To be fair, the alchemists have accomplished virtually every one of their goals via a mixture of chemistry, particle physics, and electrical engineering invented by alchemists, their academic students, their students' students, etc (that is, from the academic tree rooted in the alchemists) -- - Life expectancies are soaring. - Wounds that easily would've been fatal in 1850 are routinely survived by even the poor or middle class. - Diseases of every variety are being tamed or eradicated. - You can transmute elements, if you try hard. - We've weaponized transmuting elements, at least two different ways. - We've invented machines and materials that embody some human faculties, eg the ability to perform logic. - We're making significant progress on artificial souls. - We've created several varieties of artificial life. I think people who regard the alchemists as failures are completely nuts and exactly the sort of people rebranding and marketing work on. Science is nothing but rebranded magic -- to the point if you substitute nouns with unfamiliar words, it sounds like magic out of a book. (Go on -- try explaining how cellphones accessing Wikipedia works at the level of electrons and photons with entirely new nouns in place of the familiar ones.) For fun, we can even argue about if LIGO is actually just a successful version of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the detection of gravitational waves is also a confirmation of the existence of an aether. (It's obvious why M-M was a failure, given that it was trying to detect a much weaker effect with much less sensitive equipment.)