Our medieval ancestors had any number of habits we now find odd - among them their pursuit of a formula to turn base metals into gold. That's one reason why we often equate the word "alchemist" with ...

SCOTT JAGOW: Gold is really expensive right now. This morning, it costs $632 an ounce. If we lived in the 17th century, there might be alchemists all over the world trying to capitalize on this. They ...

Alchemy wasn’t fringe pseudoscience—it was mainstream intellectual pursuit. Medieval scholars believed matter, spirit, and ...

Part of the appeal of the Boyle myth may be that it promised a clean break: a waymark at which alchemy was cast aside and chemistry took over. But such changes rarely if ever happen in science, and ...

Jacques Lagniet, “Recueil des plus illustres proverbes, divises en trois livres…” (1657-1663), engraving, on view in The Art of Alchemy (courtesy the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles) The “Great ...

The Chemical Heritage Foundation wants to set the record straight about alchemy. The medieval practice, often perceived as a dark art or pseudoscience, actually helped form the process of scientific ...

The system which began to be called alchemy in the 6th and 7th centuries of our era had no special name before that time, but was known as the sacred art, the divine science, the occult science, the ...

Alchemy is making a comeback. No, wizards haven't learned how to transmute lead into gold and they haven't found any rejuvenating elixir of life. But the scholars who write the history of science and ...

About 15 years ago, I read a very good book by John Hedley Brooke, published by Cambridge University Press, called Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Ask me what I recall of it, and ...

Work has begun in downtown Lancaster on a restaurant and events venue themed around the ancient and modern history of alchemy. House of Alchemy will take a spot at 51 N. Market St. that has most ...