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In what sense is alchemy (in the way Newton understood it) not science? It was a reasonable hypothesis at the time that you can make gold from other material.
by YorkshireSeason 8y ago
In what sense is alchemy (in the way Newton understood it) not science?
It was a reasonable hypothesis at the time that you can make gold from other material. Indeed with particle accelerators you can do this [1, 2, 3]. Newton's methods were not powerful enough to achieve this, but this research hypothesis got refined, leading to chemistry as we know it today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
[3] https://glintpay.com/gold/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-atoms-cern/ https://glintpay.com/gold/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-ato...
- hodgesrm 8y agoThat's a fair question which is why I also included Newton's work on religion, which was apparently something of an obsession. My answer is that humans--even really extraordinary ones like Isaac Newton--don't divide knowledge into scientific and non-scientific spheres. Moreover, commonly used analytic tools like inductive reasoning that are helpful in science don't answer questions like what happens when we die in a very satisfactory way. Even in much more mundane questions humans tend to see patterns where they don't exist. [0] It's still an open question which types of problems are properly the domain of science. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion