Jay Vee #conspiracy

Jay Vee #conspiracy answers.yahoo.com

Alchemy is real, I can asure you that. It's as real as science or chemestry ever were. It should also never be catorigized with wichcraft, as the two have absolutly nothing in common. There are no "magic words" in alchemy, there are no "mystic potions" in alchemy. Alchemy is also not evil, as some might think. Those rumors, I'm sorry to say, were created by the roman cathlic church in the early 16th century.

18 comments

old comment by Brain_In_A_Jar

Alchemy was indeed the beginning of chemistry. The difference is that alchemy was mostly ignorant empiricism, whereas chemistry is based on rationalism. Alchemists typically didn't have a fucking clue how anything they did was working or any means of predicting results, they operated by guesswork - mixing any old shit together and remarking when it did something interesting, like changing colour, and blindly hoping the correct sequence of interesting but incomprehensible reactions, much like a magical incantation or a cargo-cult aeroplane summoning ritual, might actually produce something of value, whereas modern chemists make predictions based on an underlying model and only use empirical tests to validate that model.

In short, alchemy is cargo-cult chemistry. Oh, with a healthy dose of something remarkably similar to numerology, too - attributing various chemicals with relevance to particular supernatural entities, seasons, etc based on vague, superficial similarities, in the hope that one can be used to predict the behaviour of the other. Granted, there's a bit of a grey area as the alchemists gradually learned how to be proper chemists over the centuries, but you get the idea.

Jay Vee #conspiracy answers.yahoo.com

18 comments

Confused?