I want to understand it but everything I read about it oscillates impossibly between vulgar metals -> gold and some kind of spiritual transformation metaphysical stuff
What is it and what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Does it have utility outside of use as a metaphor or allegory or whatever?
Anything of merit in terms of materials that was discovered by alchemy has long since been subsumed by chemistry. Study chemistry, the truth is way more interesting and weird.
There was a Dara O’Brien bit from a while ago where he said about herbal medicine “We tested it, and we called the stuff that worked ‘medicine’. Everything else is a nice herbal tea and some potpourri.” Same basic idea.
What is it
Mostly fairytale magic.
what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Don’t bother.
Alchemy is basically just the alpha version of chemistry. It wasn’t feature complete and still had a lot of bugs, but there was some good mechanical ideas that have persisted throughout development. Such as mixing two or more things together to make something new.
It real just clap your hands together and make sure you have the right ingredients. Don’t try to bring your mother back to life though.
I breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. So no, alchemy is real. Just not with metals, unless you’re talking about eating a bar of gold and having it turn into a substance called shit, though you’ll be in the bathroom for a long, long time.
If it could be done with metals, we would’ve seen a lot more hyperinflation in history, and alchemists were typically people appointed by monarchs who planned to farm that wealth for themselves, which reflects their thirst for pizzazz more than anything actually fascinating.
I’ve heard its chemicaly/“physicsly” possible but involves messy particle smashing and other largely expensive/messy/theoretical processes that aren’t worth the squeeze as of yet
Technologically anyways. Someone wanting to do alchemy can always give birth (though the resulting baby is always more precious than the amount of gold in their body).
We breath in air not oxygen. We do remove the some of the oxygen and exhale what’s leftover. This is biology, not alchemy.
How would you define alchemy?
I define alchemy as pseudoscience, woo, or bullshit.
This is how I define anything that doesn’t have evidence of it’s existence.
How is literally inhaling one element and exhaling another not evidence?
Air is not an element. It is composed of Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2, Argon, and trace gases. https://earthhow.com/earth-atmosphere-composition/
You do know what an element is, right?
Breathing out CO2 is not evidence of alchemy because it’s in the air we breathe in. We aren’t creating CO2.
Learn some grade 3 science.
Dollars to donuts you are a flatearther.
I don’t know about being a flat earther, but I know for a fact they’re a moon landing denier. Very unkeen on evidence, that one.
I knew op was a science denier, just want sure which flavor, thanks.
These are elements.
With some of them playing prominent roles due to something that is well-researched (dollars to donuts you don’t like to question things but instead point and say “flat earther” to get out of things; I’m just running on intellect that ironically the same people who criticize me have given).
If CO2 emissions were seen an issue, and everything the body produces was never actually produced in the first place, you’d think one of the solutions wouldn’t be cutting down on steak and killing whales (and before a certain someone interprets this wrong and says I’m a climate change denier, I’m not), that some organism somewhere could cheat the ecosystem by eating byproducts, that if you eat metal either you or your byproducts would be magnetic, that animal venom or allergic reactions would be a little less of an issue, that killing animals wouldn’t be said to release more carbon than killing plants releases oxygen, or that bananas wouldn’t produce antimatter, you know, something that’s not even supposed to exist on Earth. At this point I might as well feel prepared for this kind of scrutiny at this point.
I answered you multiple times before I suggested you are a flatearther.
CO2 isn’t even an element… It’s not evidence because the premise is incorrect in the first place. O2 from the air you inhale is tied to C in your body and exhaled. Nothing happens to the O2, it doesn’t change. You don’t even tie all the O2 you inhale to C.
It’s still certain amounts of one thing becoming another thing.
No thing is becoming any other thing. 2 things, one from the air and one from your body are getting tied together.
We inhale air, which is composed of nitrogen, oxygen, and small amounts of other gasses such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and neon. Carbon dioxide is not an element, but a compound. Elements are things composed of only one type of atom, wheras compounds, such as carbon dioxide, are composed of more than one type of atom, specifically two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom.
We inhale oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air, it’s just that when we exhale the ratios are different. When we exhale we also breathe out oxygen as well since not all of it gets absorbed. In order to change an element from one to another, you need to do nuclear reactions. Our bodies can change one compound to another but that’s a whole different story (and much less fun than nuclear reactions). I hope this helped! 😃
Kind of. What makes us say it’s any less conversion/alchemy?
The elements aren’t being converted into other elements (for example, converting lead atoms into gold atoms). The only conversions taking place are chemical reactions, where compounds are either forming or being broken down.
