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