I want to understand it but everything I read about it oscillates impossibly between vulgar metals -> gold and some kind of spiritual transformation metaphysical stuff
What is it and what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Does it have utility outside of use as a metaphor or allegory or whatever?
I define alchemy as pseudoscience, woo, or bullshit.
This is how I define anything that doesn’t have evidence of it’s existence.
How is literally inhaling one element and exhaling another not evidence?
CO2 isn’t even an element… It’s not evidence because the premise is incorrect in the first place. O2 from the air you inhale is tied to C in your body and exhaled. Nothing happens to the O2, it doesn’t change. You don’t even tie all the O2 you inhale to C.
It’s still certain amounts of one thing becoming another thing.
A man enters a room and leaves with a box. In the process of picking up the box, he became a man carrying a box. This is not transmutation.
I put some beans on my toast. In the process, it becomes beans on toast. This is not transmutation.
Two things became one combination of two things. Neither thing has fundamentally changed.
A man is asked to deliver supplies to an office. He walks through the whole building, entering through the front door, through the office, and out the backdoor. What was the point?
If there is absolutely no changing going on, this would be an analogy for what oxygen does in the blood, no?
…You just answered your own question. He was delivering supplies. That’s the point.
Although, in the case of oxygen, he was picking up trash (carbon) to take out with him. And he went through the whole place to make sure he got it all.
You say I answered my own question as if the question didn’t remain.
No thing is becoming any other thing. 2 things, one from the air and one from your body are getting tied together.
Something still happens to some of it, the reason we often speak of doing it in excess. Heck, when a baby is conceived, the atoms in the embryo (and by extension the maturing human once born) don’t arise out of nowhere, their atoms have to be converted from something, as matter cannot be created or destroyed, only modified. Or if I understand what you’re saying another way, it’s like saying everything is just protons, neutrons, and electrons/positrons.
They ‘arise’ from the food the mother eats, inhales, etc… Her body processes and converts molecules, not atoms. She doesn’t create iron and calcium from other elements.
We don’t often speak of anything that matches your misunderstanding of how physics and chemistry work.
Everyone is taking “it’s not how it works” to mean “it never happens”, and that is where it stops adding up.
To use another example, the whole climate crisis (and I’m not a denier) is based on the idea something is being produced that wasn’t there before. Without going into semantic nooks and crannies, that’s the gist of it. Heck, they say if you kill a plant, it doesn’t release oxygen, but if you kill an animal, it does release carbon (which is like oxygen and then some). But then how are things explained with “something is there that wasn’t there before” squared with “the only things that are there are things that were always there”? Surely, if everyone here is correct, humans thinking the climate crisis is caused even in part by biological life is the equivalent of humans thinking that everyone going to one side of the world to jump in place will push the Earth away from the sun and cool us down.
This is gonna be my last reply in this. You just don’t understand how matter conversion, mass conservation, combustion, energy conservation, animal and plant reproduction, and many other things work. I can’t teach you middle and high school science in comments on the internet, there are better resources out there. Best of luck and holy shit please do look into it and don’t make any assumptions or judgment calls because they are all wrong.
We don’t inhale a single element and exhale another. We inhale air, a mixture of gas compounds and exhale another mixture after our bodies use and rearrange some of it. By mole fraction (i.e., by quantity of molecules), dry air contains 78.08% nitrogen (N2), 20.95% oxygen (O2), 0.93% argon (Ar), 0.03% carbon dioxide (CO2), and small amounts of other trace gases.
We do not inhale pure oxygen atoms, O, and turn them into carbon dioxide molecules, CO2.
The base element, O, is highly reactive and isn’t even in the mix we breathe. The air we breathe contains O2, two oxygen atoms bonded together. O2 is used by our bodies to break down ATP for energy, recombining and resulting in CO2 and other byproducts. Those O atoms that made up O2 are still there, now just bonded into CO2 molecules.
Biology and chemistry, not alchemy. Compounds changing, not elements.
Unless you want to define alchemy erroneously and way more broadly. In which case every time I take a shit, I’m an alchemist because I’m taking food molecules, pulling some things out of them, and discarding the changed output.
It’s still certain amounts of one thing becoming another thing.
That’s not alchemy. Alchemy was changing elements, specifically not-gold metals into gold, not just molecules.
You can turn copper + zinc into brass, but the atoms of copper and zinc still exist within brass. You can’t turn a copper atom into a zinc atom.
You can mix gold atoms with something else to make a gold alloy, you can’t change gold atoms into something else or vice versa.
If you were to eat one though, and then you pooped it out, is it still the metal it started out as, complete with its original magnetism?
Do you know the difference between an atom and a molecule? I can’t tell if you’re just trolling at this point.
It’s elements (atoms) that have inherent properties such as magnetism. Is this not true?
If I have a rock that has metal inside of it, is it not the metal itself, inherently in its chemical (atomic) status that causes it to not be magnetic?
And would this in turn mean the only way for it to not be magnetic be that it changes into another element?
Now suppose a small child eats this small pebble with metal in it. They have a very bad time in the bathroom as a result, but eventually it comes out. As poop of course. And you put a magnet up to the poop or the child, and nothing happens. No magnetism. Where did it go?
I am not trolling, I am a questioner and might be questioning myself right now had it not been for the same attitude of people who like to point and say “flat earther” to get out of there being disagreement.
Nooooo, that’s not what an atom is. Compounds (substances made of atoms from more than one element), can be magnetic. Like rare-earth magnets are made of rare-earth elements.
Neodymium magnets are made of an alloy of the following elements: neodymium, iron, and boron.
Samarium-cobalt magnets are made from, you guessed it, the elements samarium, cobalt.
I think you should revisit some chemistry resources. You’re missing some fundamental concepts.
Magnetism is a force which is generated by the motion of electrons within atoms. Electrons orbit the nucelus of atoms and some metals, such as iron are ferromagnetic. Magnetic fields are generated due to their magnetic moment, and these fields interact with other things that also have magnetic moment.
Electrons have a property known as quantum mechanical spin. This creates what is known as a magnetic dipole moment. In non magnetic materials, the moments in the material are in a random arrangement, often pointing in opposite directions and cancelling out the magnetic fields they generate. With magnetic materials, particles have spin in a particular direction, resulting in magnetism, and the magnetic fields are cumulative.
With metals, such as iron, there are unpaired electrons and they spin in the same direction, and the field they generate is cumulative, so you get a metal that is attracted to or repelled by magnets.
Elements can be changed into other elements through nuclear reactions, but this wouldn’t be possible through more simple means. If you ate a chunk of iron for instance, it would remain as iron. Rather than being a solid piece of iron it’d be fragmented and dispersed throughout the body so it depends on how sensitive your tools are for detecting magnetism.
We inhale air, which is composed of nitrogen, oxygen, and small amounts of other gasses such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and neon. Carbon dioxide is not an element, but a compound. Elements are things composed of only one type of atom, wheras compounds, such as carbon dioxide, are composed of more than one type of atom, specifically two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom.
We inhale oxygen and carbon dioxide from the air, it’s just that when we exhale the ratios are different. When we exhale we also breathe out oxygen as well since not all of it gets absorbed. In order to change an element from one to another, you need to do nuclear reactions. Our bodies can change one compound to another but that’s a whole different story (and much less fun than nuclear reactions). I hope this helped! 😃
Kind of. What makes us say it’s any less conversion/alchemy?
The elements aren’t being converted into other elements (for example, converting lead atoms into gold atoms). The only conversions taking place are chemical reactions, where compounds are either forming or being broken down.
How would half of the other processes work then, especially the fact you can find antimatter in some forms of life?
Bananas emit positrons because they contain potassium-40, which releases positrons as it undergoes radioactive decay. These positrons are quickly annihilated as they hit electrons, their normal matter counterpart. Potassium-40 is a naturally occurring isotope present in the Earth but it has a very long half life of around a billion years. Around 0.01% of all potassum is potassium-40 and technically, any food which contains potassium will also contain a little bit of potassium-40, it’s just that banana trees are known at being efficient at absorbing and storing potassium.
But to emit positrons, there must be at least one atom to bear it so it has a host to orbit, no?
Yup, there has to be a potassium atom for the positron to be emitted by.
Air is not an element. It is composed of Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2, Argon, and trace gases. https://earthhow.com/earth-atmosphere-composition/
You do know what an element is, right?
Breathing out CO2 is not evidence of alchemy because it’s in the air we breathe in. We aren’t creating CO2.
Learn some grade 3 science.
Dollars to donuts you are a flatearther.
I don’t know about being a flat earther, but I know for a fact they’re a moon landing denier. Very unkeen on evidence, that one.
I knew op was a science denier, just want sure which flavor, thanks.
These are elements.
With some of them playing prominent roles due to something that is well-researched (dollars to donuts you don’t like to question things but instead point and say “flat earther” to get out of things; I’m just running on intellect that ironically the same people who criticize me have given).
If CO2 emissions were seen an issue, and everything the body produces was never actually produced in the first place, you’d think one of the solutions wouldn’t be cutting down on steak and killing whales (and before a certain someone interprets this wrong and says I’m a climate change denier, I’m not), that some organism somewhere could cheat the ecosystem by eating byproducts, that if you eat metal either you or your byproducts would be magnetic, that animal venom or allergic reactions would be a little less of an issue, that killing animals wouldn’t be said to release more carbon than killing plants releases oxygen, or that bananas wouldn’t produce antimatter, you know, something that’s not even supposed to exist on Earth. At this point I might as well feel prepared for this kind of scrutiny at this point.
I answered you multiple times before I suggested you are a flatearther.
You say that like that makes it good form or critical form in conversation or that you are going at me on an individual point basis. I even have sources (for example, doesn’t that undermine HeLa cells). Do you expect people in every disagreeable encounter to see someone objecting to their claim and be like “yeah, uhm, I’ll just phrase everything as a question towards myself/others now and go into disciple mode”. I’ve been forced to do a suspicious amount of that here.
If I was taking your approach, I’d point at you and say “lizard people believer”. In all of my time watching politics, I can’t remember a single time it escalated so much that someone on TV said “that Republican probably believes the Earth is flat”, as they for one don’t go that far. Must I clarify all my beliefs in existence before questioning someone or something so that people don’t point at me during a debate about, say, which way the toilet paper goes, and say “she probably believes chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows”?
Sorry, I don’t have time to read anymore of your comments. Many here have tried to teach you basic science and you refuse to learn. It’s been entertaining.
…as opposed to what, considering “many here” and “it’s been entertaining” ignores a certain person who pointed and used a flat earth strawman?