Question

I'm writing a paper on alchemy. Is it really possible that someone could turn base metals into gold or make immortality elixirs? It's kinda hard to believe I know but many believed in alchemy in the middle ages. How did "alchemists" get away with that?

Answer 1

in order to turn lead into gold, you would literally have to reach into the lead nucleus and rip out 2 protons from each gold nucleus (with some neutrons and electrons for charge balance). so far, no one has ever been able to do this. people who claimed to turn lead into gold usually played tricks like coating the lead with a thin layer of gold, then running out of town with their money before the local king figured out they'd been conned.

Answer 2

Certainly you can change lead into gold, but, as JFraser points out, it involves nuclear reactions, not just chemical reactions. And the problem with that is that the energies involved in nuclear reactions are enormous -- they are the same reactions that power the Sun or an H-bomb. So you certainly can't get them going by merely heating something in a flame, and they were, therefore, completely beyond the capability of medieval chemists.

There's nothing a priori wrong with thinking you can change lead into gold with chemistry. We observe that most substances can be turned into other substances chemically. Air and water turn into wood in a plant, wood can turn into ashes and smoke, iron turns into rust, iron ore can be turned into iron, and so on. But we also learn by observation that certain conditions must be met in order for the transformation to occur: you have to heat the substance, or combine it with something else, and perhaps in a certain order, or for a certain length of time. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that under the right conditions you could chemically change lead into gold.

However, it just turns out that in this particular case, the transformation is impossible, because gold and lead are both elements. Chemical elements are substances that, by definition, cannot be transformed into each other by chemical reactions. (Once we have the atomic theory of matter, we can say why: because each chemical element is made up of a unique type of atom, and atoms can't be created or destroyed, at least with only chemical reactions.)

There's nothing a priori wrong with an elixir of...well, perhaps not immortality per se, but at least a life that is cut short only by accident, and never by natural decay. Certainly we observe that some foods and medicine can cut life short, or cure disease, or seem to make one live longer and healthier. There's nothing wrong with the hypothesis that some foods or chemicals, or combination thereof, could entirely prevent normal aging, so that one would die only be accident. However, as it turns out, we have not yet been able to find anything that even approaches this function.

Both hypotheses could be regarded as somewhat unlikely, perhaps. Both gold and lead are very stable substances, and as a rule two very stable substances tend not to be connected by any easy chemical pathway. If they WERE, then you'd observe them transforming naturally regularly. That is, if it were possible to transmute lead into gold through a chemical process, then (1) you wouldn't find a lot of lead in the world, because it would have naturally transmuted into gold a long time ago, and (2) you'd occasionally see some lead turn into gold naturally. The fact that neither fact is observed casts doubt on the hypothesis.

Same with immortality elixir. If it were possible to easily adjust lifespan, with a simple combination of chemicals, you'd expect it to happen naturally from time to time. But in all of human history, we have never ever observed even one person living substantially longer than average -- to 200 or 500 years, say. That casts doubt on the hypothesis of a straightforward elixir.

In general, there was nothing "unscientific" about alchemical hypotheses and goals. What distinguished alchemists from chemists is something entirely different: alchemists believed that their own thoughts, feelings, and intentions could alter the outcome of their experiments. That is, like Harry Potter casting a spell, they believed that if you wished for an outcome harder, it would be more likely to happen. Or that certain outcomes wouldn't happen if your thoughts weren't pure enough, et cetera.

Chemists, on the other hand, believed no such thing. They felt that their own internal thoughts, feelings, virtue, hopes, fears and intentions had NOTHING to do with the results of experiments. That these things happened, or did not happen, for strictly objective reasons that had zero to do with the mental state of the experimener. In short, while an alchemist might believe only a good man could turn lead into gold, a chemist would believe that a very evil man could do it just as easily, with the right technique.

It is this that distinguishes magic from science, generally. In science what happens is determined just by the laws of the universe. In magic the emotional and intellectual and moral state of the practitioner matter.