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Robert Fludd was a great defender of Rosicrucianism, a successful London physician, the punching bag of Kepler, Mersenne and Gassendi, and was friends of William Harvey and William Gilbert. He ran in high circles. He also attacked Aristotle and Galen. In 16...

Relatively unknown person, published a short leaflet with a long title: A Caveat for Alchymists, or, a Warning to all ingenious Gentlemen, whether Laicks or Clericks, that study for the finding out of the Philosophers Stone; shewing how that they need not to b...

With the advent of printing, 1440, and etching to make sturdy images, came the emblem books. Printers needed a market, and the unread populace weren't buying books. So they came up with the obvious solution: picture books, called emblem books. These involved s...

We have reached the point in the history of science that events considered fundamental to the development of early science overlap in time with those at the close of alchemy. In this Alchemy series I will concentrate on the alchemy alone, but will mention in I...

We recently read some blogs here "translated by J.F.M.D." This is John French, M.D., Paracelcian physician and huge fan of alchemy. He translated a number of important alchemical works from Latin into English which drove British alchemy to great heights. Frenc...

George Starkey was an American, Harvard-educated, who moved to England in 1650 to be closer to the Alchemy hot-spot. Starkey is the guy who got Robert Boyle interested in alchemy. After his arrival to England he began to promote the works of one Eirenaeus Phi...

Elias Ashmole, like his contemporary Robert Boyle, bridges alchemy and chemistry. He loved old things and collected them, giving them all to Oxford University as the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum. His manuscript collection went to the Bodleian Library. Hi...

If we didn't have a Robert Boyle, we'd have needed to invent one. Boyle was the son of the wealthiest man in Great Britain, the Earl of Cork. Irish, he liked pubs, and chose his drinking buddies well: they called themselves the "Invisible College" and went on ...

Isaac Newton was an alchemist. In terms of years of work, he was far more an alchemist than a physicist or mathematician. While at Cambridge University there was an outbreak of the plague. Newton went home for a year, his Annus Mirabilus (Year of Wonders, 166...

There is no date for the death of alchemy. What we see is a long series of changes to the four elements until the early chemists arrive at a new way of looking at nature. After the mercury/sulfur/salt theory of Paracelsus, (still alchemy), the first major cha...

This is a huge question for me. Why did alchemy persist, as an idea, from 300 B.C. to about 1750 A.D.? Over 2000 years. And it never worked. Why did it last? Support for Alchemy There were a few things that could be observed by practicing alchemists to suppo...

Another important question. Why study it, if it didn't give us chemists anything important?  I think it did provide something important, something that changes the way chemists do science. Last November Lawrence Principe, historian and chemist at John Hopkin...

Is alchemy gone? To answer that, say exactly what alchemy was. Alchemy was a complete reliance on the philosophy of the past, specifically Aristotle's philosophy, with no regard to evidence to the contrary or areas where the philosophy fails. This is difficul...

In a free market the producers try to maximize profits, and the consumers try to minimize costs. Most of us are the consumers, and one effort to minimize costs is to influence politicians so they will set price controls. It works because we consumers have more...

We live in a judgmental culture. Very judgmental. Every social media post is held as a document of condemnation, of a potential failing of the moral character. That scrutiny for iniquity is destroying any hope we have of being friends. Isaiah 29:20-21 (KJV)...

I have a keen ear for science in the news. I also have a keen ear for propaganda, earned by listening for hours, in my younger days, to Radio Pyongyang and Radio Moscow. Those stations never managed to say anything which was true. Trouble is, the news in the ...

There is a fine old tradition of predicting the end of the world. It's been happening for millennia, and I can't see it stopping for anything. The term is from the Greek, is means "from cover," things exposed to view. The Bible translates that to "Revelation....

I was just watching a NOVA episode about black holes. Every scientist they had told a story of black hole formation, accretion, combination, action on nearby masses. Then I realized, we've never seen any of this. Even one scientist admitted we only see snapsho...

Public relations are ubiquitous. Here is an announcement form UVU this morning: On Wednesday December 1, 2021, UVU donors, supporters, and friends celebrated the opening of the Brandon D. Fugal Gateway Building. The completion of the Brandon D. Fugal Gatewa...

Out-of-context news reporting is now the standard. It got that way because of clickbait headlines, and that because of online news funded by advertising. I have two proposals: 1: Reporters must have Asperger's, or be on one end of the autism spectrum. Folk...