Reevaluating Alchemy

This article talks about a recent reevaluation of alchemy as a precursor to chemistry. 

" 'We've got people who are trying to make medicines, which are pharmaceuticals; we've got people who are trying to understand the material basis of the world - very much like a modern engineer, or someone in technology,' says Lawrence Principe, a professor of chemistry and the history of science at Johns Hopkins University who is a leading thinker in the revival of alchemy studies."

Both those who are reexaming alchemy and those who are emphasizing it as a "crank" field generally seem to hold up science as an objective empirical field whichalchemy either fails to measure up to, or for which certain parts of alchemy can be redeemed as a precursor.

"In many ways the alchemists made it easy for later scientists to dismiss them as tall-hatted cranks. Their notebooks are deliberately cryptic; they wrote under arcane pseudonyms and invented fictional authorities. They assumed vast, secret connections between planets and the spiritual world; they saw metals as an expression of the divine.

Even their most serious research was infused with beliefs and terms that sound more like wizardry than like modern lab science - the Philosopher's Stone, the Chemical Wedding, an invisible "vegetative spirit" that suffuses the earth. It is hard to imagine a modern scientist choosing to express his lab findings, as the distinguished German alchemist Michael Maier once did, in a set of 50 musical fugues for three voices, in which mythological characters represented the interacting elements."

But actually much of what I read in science at the moment seems to be turning back to just that latter kind of merging of Art & Science.   And on the less beneficial side, inventing fictional authorities is certainly not unknown in modern science.

So I liked better the approach cited toward the end of the article--not trying to purify alchemy of it's more base elements in order to achieve empirical objectivity, but going back to see how alchemy could inform our modern view of science--it's supposed separateness from other fields and the "purity" which gives it a privileged access to truth.