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?
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I define alchemy as pseudoscience, woo, or bullshit.
This is how I define anything that doesn’t have evidence of it’s existence.
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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.
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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.
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…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.
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No thing is becoming any other thing. 2 things, one from the air and one from your body are getting tied together.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Do you know the difference between an atom and a molecule? I can’t tell if you’re just trolling at this point.
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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.
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I answered you multiple times before I suggested you are a flatearther.
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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.
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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! 😃
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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.
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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.
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