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by YorkshireSeason 2770 days 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

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

[3] https://glintpay.com/gold/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-ato...

1 comments

That'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