>alchemy was just proto-chemistry
>Alchemy was proto spirituality
>>1125567
>alchemy
>just more limpid, shallow spirituality
>not a genuine initiatic art
I SHIGGY
I DIGGY
I SHIGGY DIGGY DOOOOOO
>Trust me, God and universal law are deeply intertwined! Watch this lead turn to gold through His will!
>alchemy
>not hermeticism
>>1125562
But.. it was?
The supernatural stuff helped the advancement of the quasi-scientific art and its maturity into a proper rigorous science simply because it gave people a great motive to experiment and learn: the stone and the elixir.
>alchemy was just the western counterpart of tantric esotericism
>>1129478
>alchemy was just one of the three great truths, dealing with the microcosmos, together with astrology dealing with the macrocosmos and magic dealing with how it all functions
>>1129512
Are you trying to greentext?
>scientific progress was a good thing
>>1129574
>Ancient supernatural hoodoo was better than something that produces actual results
>>1130581
They'll be saying the same thing about your beliefs soon enough. Read a history book faggot. There is no progress.
>>1130689
>i dont see progress so it doesnt exist
What a coincidence, i dont see the moon outside where i am. That must mean it doesnt fucking exist! That's how stupid you sound.
>>1127306
Alchemy didn't advance anything. There was no rigor, there was no real experimentation.
It's like saying astrology is the precursor of astronomy, or numerology is the precursor of math.
In the very limited sense of "people were looking at stars, or people were looking at chemicals" sure, but what would be the point?
Before rigor, you had garbage. After rigor, you had something of value.
>>1129574
>studying the underlying structure of the universe
>bringing us closer to answering the question of what we are and how we came to be
>not
and if you want more than that technological improvements have been shown to GDP
>>1130689
Science is aware that current scientific knowledge will likely be replaced at some point. That's the point, our understanding of the world is improved every time we discover something new
>>1131291
grad student of astrophysics here
i see a lot of hate for alchemy/astrology on the internet, and i don't really understand it. they had the same passion and motivation for the study that we do today. in the future, will people look down on my research and call what i do non-scientific just because i didn't know some mathematical or computational tool? the whole point of science is to study the natural world and push the forefront of knowledge, not claim that what i'm saying is right.
These alchemists/astrologists etc. made theories and then collected data or did experiments in order to corroborate them. this is pretty close to the scientific method of today (except they were less likely to reject their theories since they have less data and less of an understanding of testing statistics).
take astrology for example, they studied the rotations of planets quite rigorously in order to test their theories about how the planets alignments affects humanity. a lot of time and effort was wasted in the pursuit of this field, but it lay the groundwork for astronomical data collection and it serves as a lesson that science MUST be scrutinized, retested and if the results cannot be reproduced, the theory rejected.
astrology was a valiant effort at answering some of the hardest questions in the universe: who are we? why are we here? what is our roll in the universe? Yes, their theories suffered heavily from confirmation bias and were near-impossible to test, but these are still problems in science today and this shouldn't discredit them entirely.
>>1131291
>a system designed for self-mastery didn't advance society so it was bunk
nigga science and alchemy have completely different goals what the fuck are you talking about? why do fedorafags think every thing in history is supposed to responsible for a technological revolution or it's bust? fucking christ
>>1129478
gold = shivic principle
mercury = shakti
salt = maya
>>1131291
>>1125562
>>1125584
>>1125567
>>1129478
Sorry cucks, but it created a lot of methods, concepts and instruments that were (and are) up to use on real chemistry in the XX century like the beaker, distillation, the rule of 3, mass conservation concepts, substance classification and identification, basic metallurgy, basic pharmacology, medicine extraction, basic estechiometrics and more.
I indeed believe sir that you are all behaving like scientificaly illiterate negros and therefore i will heartedly recommend you the following classic book on the subject, on its first 3 chapters; there you will get a much better notion of alchemy and its influence on chemistry
>History of chemistry
>William H Brock (1936-still alive)
>http://www.scs.illinois.edu/~mainzv/HIST/awards/Dexter%20Papers/BrockDexterBioJJB.pdf
>http://www.amazon.com/Norton-History-Chemistry-Science/dp/0393035360/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=
t. Biochemist PhD and /his/ lurker
