Who are we to fight the alchemy?

Summary

Unexplainable – “Who are we to fight the alchemy?”
Release Date: March 16, 2026
Host: Britt (Byrd) Pinkerton | Guest: Lawrence Principe

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the enigmatic world of alchemy, challenging its reputation as pseudo-science and exploring how historians and chemists like Lawrence Principe have reevaluated alchemy as a serious precursor to modern chemistry. Through experimental recreation of ancient recipes, the show investigates what the alchemists were actually doing, why their texts are so cryptic, and how their work influenced the scientific revolution.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rethinking Alchemy: From “Joke” to Serious Science

• Alchemy is commonly misunderstood as either quackery or metaphorical nonsense focused solely on turning lead into gold.
• Lawrence Principe, a professor at Johns Hopkins, is one of the leading figures in “rewriting” the historical narrative of alchemy.

“So before I read about Lawrence’s work, I thought alchemists were nothing more than either medieval quacks... who wrote fanciful books about turning lead into gold and achieving immortality. I thought they were a joke, essentially...”
— Britt Pinkerton [03:13]

2. What Is Alchemy Really?

• Alchemy has a millennia-long history and included the making of medicines, cosmetics, dyes, perfumes, alcohol, metal alloys, and more—not just gold.
• Much of what was once called “alchemy” overlaps with what we now call “chemistry”.

“They were interested as well in making medicines, for example, improved pharmaceuticals, but a whole range of sort of quotidian substances like cosmetics, perfumes, alcoholic drinks, metal alloys, all these sorts of things, dyes and pigments.”
— Lawrence Principe [04:49]

3. Deciphering Alchemical Texts

• Many alchemical texts are intentionally cryptic, full of riddles and metaphorical language (e.g., “fiery dragon,” “Saturn in the mirror of Mars”) to protect secrets and evade legal bans.
• This language has made it difficult for historians to recognize the practical or scientific value in these works.

“If you think you’re close to the way of making gold from cheap substances, you don’t really want everybody else to know about it... Alchemy was actually illegal... mostly because people were afraid... then the value of gold becomes zero.”
— Lawrence Principe [06:22], [06:34]

• The metaphorical style grew over time and became extravagant, making later texts especially hard to interpret as literal science.

4. Experimental Reconstruction: Proving the Recipes

• Principe, curious as both a chemist and a historian, began replicating old alchemical recipes to see if they produced real results.
• His early experiment focused on a 1604 text by “Basil Valentine” regarding the making of glass from antimony.

“I tried for months to make it, and it never worked.”
— Lawrence Principe [11:47]

• Success only came after considering the impurities (e.g., silica in the antimony), revealing the importance of context and materials.

“And you just need about 2% of silica, and wow, it becomes a beautiful transparent glass.”
— Lawrence Principe [13:11]

5. Taking on Alchemical “Miracles”: The Mercury Tree

• The show explores what happens when metaphor meets experiment, particularly with descriptions of making the philosopher’s stone.
• Principe focused on the writings of George Starkey (aka Irenaeus Philalethes) and tried to create “philosophical mercury.”

“He claimed that... when mixed with gold and heated in a flask, [mercury] would... vegetate. So this sounds extraordinarily unlikely.”
— Lawrence Principe [21:12]

• By carefully following (and slightly modernizing) instructions, he produced a dendritic, tree-like formation in a flask—a “mercury tree”—mirroring the surprising language of alchemical texts.

“There was a beautiful, glittering silver tree inside the flask...it filled the entire flask with a trunk and...dendritic growths.”
— Lawrence Principe [23:20]

6. How Metaphor and Experiment Intertwine

• Some metaphorical descriptions in alchemy may be based on real laboratory observations—not just allegory.
• Many alchemical texts begin with real, achievable experiments, then gradually move into more speculative and copied expectations.

“Experience transitions to expectation...I haven’t gotten them to work, but here's the way they should work.”
— Lawrence Principe [25:52]

7. Alchemy and the Scientific Revolution

• Notably, giants of science like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton studied and practiced alchemy. Boyle, closely connected to Starkey, spent decades experimenting with alchemical ideas.
• The boundary between alchemy and chemistry was not as clean as modern perspectives suggest.

“People have...imagined there to be some great discontinuity in the development of chemistry...but that’s a gradual process that happens over time.”
— Lawrence Principe [28:31]

8. A New Era for Alchemy Studies

• Principe and his colleagues sparked a “revolution” in alchemy history, and today experimental reconstructions are more mainstream in historical research.
• Nonetheless, modern experimenters always interpret the past through contemporary lenses.

“When I'm looking at something...I am interpreting it through all sorts of lenses that have been created by the social, political, emotional, religious context of 2026. And my historical actors...have their own mental landscape constructed by 1354 or 1661.”
— Lawrence Principe [30:24]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It was a matter of the impurity that was in the original material.” [13:11] — The turning point for reproducing antimony glass.
• “What would that have done to a 17th-century alchemist who is convinced that a vegetative theory of the growth of metals is the right explanation? He would surely have said, wow, it really works. I’m going to work twice as hard to take this on to the next steps of making the philosopher’s stone...” [24:10]
• “People have...imagined there to be some great discontinuity in the development of chemistry...with what I like to refer to as ‘the arrogance of the present,’ thinking that old people were dumb.” [28:31]
• “Experience transitions to expectation...I haven’t gotten them to work, but here’s the way they should work.” [25:52]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:20–02:30: Lawrence’s early fascination with alchemy and chemistry.
• 04:30–06:15: What counts as alchemy? The wide scope of alchemical pursuits.
• 08:00–09:48: Historians’ struggle and alternate theories for reading alchemy.
• 10:42–13:24: The experimental recreation of antimony glass—a real science in alchemical texts.
• 18:52–19:39: Shifting toward investigating the more “magical” claims.
• 21:12–23:48: The Mercury Tree experiment; metaphor meets laboratory surprise.
• 27:39–28:31: Boyle and Newton’s deep involvement in alchemy and its impact on science.
• 29:18–30:24: Alchemy’s scholarly renaissance and limitations of historical recreation.

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Final Thoughts

This episode illustrates how the quest to understand alchemy sheds light on the fluid boundaries between science, pseudoscience, and metaphor through time. By experimenting with centuries-old recipes and reading texts with fresh eyes, Lawrence Principe reveals that alchemists may not have been charlatans, but curious experimenters exploring the rules of their world. The episode encourages a humbler and more nuanced view of the history of science—one that recognizes the complexity, creativity, and credibility of those who worked in the “alchemy” labs of the past.

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Further Reading:

• Lawrence Principe’s book The Secrets of Alchemy
• Nature article on turning lead into gold via particle accelerator

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For listener engagement and feedback, contact Unexplainable at [e-mail].

Transcript

[Britt Pinkerton]

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. They say that Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow. So for developers that looks like Claude code, it runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you hand holding it. Through every step. Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by an advertiser's agenda. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at Claude. AI unexplainable Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation.

[Lawrence Principe]

Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves, AI levels up, your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those two draft design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn [e-mail] dothatwith acrobat.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Lawrence Principe has been interested in alchemy for a while now.

[Lawrence Principe]

Many years ago, and I won't say how many, when I was in high school, I was rooting about in the public library. Now, the usual reason I did this was because I was very interested in chemistry, often very interested in making fireworks and that sort of thing that teenagers like to do. And in this particular visit, I noticed that there were books before I got to chemistry on the history of chemistry. And there was a book, I remember, called the Arts of the Alchemists. And I took it down off the shelf and I started thumbing through it, and it was filled with beautiful images and, and some facsimile pages of alchemical manuscripts. And at that point I began to think, well, wow, what were they actually doing?

[Britt Pinkerton]

Now, after that discovery, he did go on to make some fireworks.

[Lawrence Principe]

Oh yes, I spent quite a great deal of time doing that when I was a younger person, yes. And I still even have all my fingers and toes.

[Britt Pinkerton]

But ultimately, the question of what the alchemists were actually doing stuck with him. In fact, he has devoted a sizable chunk of his career to answering it. He's now a professor of the history of science and a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins. And over the last few decades, he has helped turn our understanding of alchemy kind of on its head. So before I read about Lawrence's work, I thought alchemists were nothing more than either medieval quacks or single minded Obsessives who wrote folks fanciful books about turning lead into gold and achieving immortality. I thought they were a joke, essentially, and I thought this because that's been the cultural narrative about alchemy for a long time. But now Lawrence is one of several historians of science who've been rewriting that narrative. They have been recreating old alchemist experiments in modern day labs, and by doing this historical recreation, and they have pieced together a new story, a story that is forcing people like me to reevaluate what I thought I knew. Not just about alchemists, but also about the history of chemistry itself. So this is unexplainable. I'm Britt Pinkerton, and today on the show, what were the alchemists actually doing? Researchers like Lawrence don't have all the answers, but what they are learning is kind of transmuting alchemy from a joke into a fascinating chapter in the history of science. Okay, let's start with some basics, like what actually is alchemy?

[Lawrence Principe]

Yeah, that's actually a more difficult question than it sounds.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Turns out alchemy has a long history that stretches back millennia. And for a lot of that history, some of what people refer to as alchemy sounds a lot like what we might call chemistry, because alchemists weren't always solely focused on making gold.

[Lawrence Principe]

It was one of the major goals of the alchemists, but it wasn't all that they did. They were interested as well in making medicines, for example, improved pharmaceuticals, but a whole range of sort of quotidian substances like cosmetics, perfumes, alcoholic drinks, metal alloys, all these sorts of things, dyes and pigments.

[Britt Pinkerton]

When Lawrence was starting out, though, he was reading through the work of European alchemists who were trying to make the philosopher's stone. So the substance that was the thought to transmute metals and also sometimes extend life. Basically the kind of alchemy you read about in literary fiction that seems like a pointless pursuit, Right? Or a whole lot of nonsense. And at least part of the reason that people have spent so much time thinking this kind of alchemy is nonsense is that if you read through alchemical books, a lot of them look like a bunch of nonsense. They are full of riddles and metaphorical language and stuff like, take our fiery

[Lawrence Principe]

dragon that hides the magical steel in its belly with our magnet and mix them with torrid Vulcan. This will be easily done if Saturn beholds himself in the mirror of Mars. Thence is made, our chameleon, our chaos. Well, just try to take that into the lab and do Something with it.

[Britt Pinkerton]

This language is, it turns out, intentionally confusing. Alchemists didn't necessarily want everyone to understand their books.

[Lawrence Principe]

First of all, if you think you're close to the way of making gold from cheap substances, you don't really want everybody else to know about it.

[Britt Pinkerton]

So you might write stuff in weird coded language.

[Lawrence Principe]

Moreover, alchemy was actually illegal in terms of the transmutation of base metals into gold in a number of countries, mostly because people were afraid that, oh, what if this guy in his cellar starts making all this gold? Well, then the value of gold becomes zero, because you can make it and your entire economy and political stability goes out the window.

[Britt Pinkerton]

These various bans didn't stop people from doing alchemy. But again, they meant that alchemical writing was often bizarre and full of metaphors, especially as you got to the late 14th century, 15th century and beyond.

[Lawrence Principe]

And once you have that kind of metaphorical language, people just sort of go crazy with it. So instead of saying this material and that material, they'll say the red king and the white Queen, the wolf, the lion that devours the sun, and so forth. And instead of describing anything that could possibly seem to be like a chemical formula, let's say they become dream sequences or metaphorical stories. You know, I fell asleep one day and I saw a king come to take a bath, and he took off his clothes and he got into the water and he melted away and blah, blah, blah, and all this sort of very rich, extravagant, really bizarre kind of language.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Your fiery dragons and your Saturns beholding themselves in the mirrors of Mars.

[Lawrence Principe]

And so you can see why it is that alchemy, until very recently in terms of historical understanding, has simply not been understood because it just looks so weird.

[Britt Pinkerton]

And listen, if I were a historian, I too would probably not read through something that sounded like the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland and think it looked like solid science. So it's maybe not surprising that there were a lot of interpretations that argued that alchemy was something else. There were 19th century writers who thought that the practice was more about transforming the self than about transforming real things in the laboratory, with one author saying, you know, mercury in an alchemical text could be read as a metaphor for a clear conscience, for example, or in the 20th century, Carl Jung reinterpreted alchemy as a kind of psychological phenomenon.

[Lawrence Principe]

So when I started trying to learn about alchemy in the late 70s and early 80s, I. I did not have a lot of books that helped.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Still, there were people who were curious about whether some alchemists might have been doing something non metaphorical. And young Laurence Principe was one of those people. He enjoyed chemistry. He knew enough to make his own fireworks safely. And in some of these authors, private and even public writings, there were things that looked less like fanciful metaphors and more like a series of instructions. So he figured one way to figure out if any of these texts had real practical advice or if they were all just imagery, was to see if he could follow the instructions and produce results. So when he went off to college, that's what he tried to do.

[Lawrence Principe]

I was extremely fortunate to have chosen the University of Delaware to go to as an undergraduate, and I happened to mention my interest to one of the faculty there, and he said, oh, let me check on something and get back to you. Well, it turned out the university had purchased a huge collection of books in the history of science from an Italian chemical engineer, as I recall, and this faculty member actually got me access to them. Well, I couldn't have been more happy at that point having free run of this amazing collection of alchemical and early chemical books. And to make it even better, the chemistry department itself actually let me use some unused student laboratories to try to replicate these processes.

[Britt Pinkerton]

He selected one specific text written by a pretty famous alchemist, a text by

[Lawrence Principe]

a supposed Benedictine monk who went under the name of Basilius Valentinus, which is a fake name if anyone's ever heard one. A text written in 1604 on the properties and the preparations of the element antimony.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Antimony is a brittle, silverish, toxic metalloid that makes an appearance in a lot of different texts, including this one.

[Lawrence Principe]

I chose that document in particular because it was unusually clear. It did not have the sort of wild metaphors. It seemed, at least to have what were rather straightforward recipes.

[Britt Pinkerton]

And for his recreation, Lawrence picked instructions that the book claimed were simple. This way of making something called the glass of antimony, which was basically taking antimony, manipulating it in specific ways until you got kind of brittle, golden glass. So young undergrad Lawrence got some antimony and got to work.

[Lawrence Principe]

All right, well, I started feeling really bad about this because the author says, well, just because I'm being complete, I'm going to tell you how to make this. But everybody knows how to make it. Yeah, well, I tried for months to make it, and it never worked.

[Britt Pinkerton]

He was following the instructions and getting gunk, not glass. Not the best sign. If you're trying to entertain the idea that these old texts from the 1600s describe legitimate experiments, you don't immediately think,

[Lawrence Principe]

well, there's Something wrong with me? You probably think there's something wrong with the authority.

[Britt Pinkerton]

But Lawrence did not write off Basil Valentine because he figured his experiment was not actually a perfect recreation. He was using Bunsen burners and other modern equipment and antimony that came from a chemical supplier. Not exactly what Basil had access to back in the day. Maybe something about his modern tools was throwing things off. And so he experimented a little bit. He went to a mineral shop, for example, to try and get antimony in a form that was closer to what Basil would have had.

[Lawrence Principe]

I even tried to get it from Hungary, or what was Hungary in Basil Valentine's Day, to see if I could get something that was quite similar.

[Britt Pinkerton]

What he eventually figured out was that Basil was probably working with something that had some impurities in it, like sand, and that probably would have added some silica to the mix. And so he tried things again, but this time with some silica added.

[Lawrence Principe]

And you just need about 2% of silica, and wow, it becomes a beautiful transparent glass. So it was a matter of the impurity that was in the original material.

[Britt Pinkerton]

He'd done it. He had shown that this recipe, at least, was a real set of instructions that he could follow in the present day.

[Lawrence Principe]

I was exhilarated by this. People have criticized alchemical writers for reporting imaginary effects or just making things up or being sloppy workers. But my argument was, maybe we need to just look a little bit closer and give these texts enough free space and enough time to justify themselves by looking more deeply, by being less judgmental, and trying to get into the mindset as much as is possible of the original authors. And that is, after all, what historians are trying to do.

[Britt Pinkerton]

This was a victory, obviously, but it wasn't the biggest victory, because, yes, Lawrence had successfully done an experimental recreation from an alchemist book, but it was for a pretty simple glass experiment. And there's nothing in modern chemistry that suggests you can't make glass. So he started to wonder about the wackier stuff that alchemists were writing about, like the weird metaphor, language and the philosopher's stone.

[Lawrence Principe]

When you've got something like the philosopher's stone, that's supposed to turn one element into another that modern chemistry tells us shouldn't happen, then you're getting a little bit deeper into the thick of things, I think.

[Britt Pinkerton]

I think so, too. So after the break, we will go deeper into the thick of things. Support for the show comes from one password. You should not assume that just because you are a small business, you will fly under the radar. The reality is that Small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors with nefarious intentions, but there are steps that even the smallest teams can take to foil cybercrime. 1Password provides simple security that can help small teams tackle the number one vulnerability. Weak passwords 1Password provides centralized management to secure your company's logins, and they provide turnkey solutions that can be rolled out in hours, whether you have dedicated it staff or not. 1Password is designed to meet small teams where they are, but it's also built to grow with your company. However complex your security needs may get. 1Password will stay with you and every step of the way, you can take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out [e-mail] unexplainable and start securing every login Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you are the kind of person who goes down a rabbit hole and then stays there, or who keeps pulling at a question until it clicks, they say Claude was built for that kind of thinking. For developers that looks like Claude code. It runs in your terminal, reads your code base and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring or debugging without you handholding it through every step. I texted my friend who uses Claude and told him I was making an ad about Claude and asked why I should use Claude and or Claude code. It's just really good at coding lol he said. What does that mean? I said with it I can build things. I wouldn't have time for myself or ability for myself in many cases, he said. Nice, I said. Anthropic says they are committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by someone else's advertisement taking you out of the deep work ready to tackle bigger problems? Try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable and see why some problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Support for Unexplainable comes from Shipstation. Running a fast growing business can mean hours each day spent tracking orders and fielding customer requests, and that can leave you in exhausted and feeling like there's more important work to do. If you don't love that sensation, maybe it's worth taking a look at shipstation. Shipstation says their intelligence driven platform can save businesses up to 15 hours a week by streamlining order fulfillment. Their dashboard brings together order management, rate shopping, inventory and returns, warehouse tools and detailed analytics into one easy to use system. They can also print labels in bulk, send tracking updates directly to customers, and automatically compare rates between major global carriers, including discounted rates. You might already have to find you the best shipping options. You can try shipstation free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Just go to shipstation.com and use code unexplainable for 60 days for free. And Shipstation says that 60 days should give you plenty of time to see exactly how how much time and money you are saving on every shipment that is shipstation.com code unexplainable shipstation.com code unexplainables.

[Lawrence Principe]

And now the last word in modern alchemy.

[Britt Pinkerton]

So, as an undergrad, Lawrence Principe used experimental recreation to show that a recipe for making glass published by an alchemist back in the 1600s was in fact a legitimate recipe. But he still had questions, especially about the parts of alchemical texts that were more fanciful or more weird.

[Lawrence Principe]

What I was trying to do was to figure out, well, why did people believe that they were able to transmute base metals into gold? What made them write these texts with often the wild imagery? What's really going on there?

[Britt Pinkerton]

He started working with the text of a 17th century alchemical author.

[Lawrence Principe]

His real name was George Starkey. He was born in Bermuda. In 1628, he went to England and he started circulating or writing texts under the pseudonym of Irenaeus Philalethes, which is Greek for the peaceful lover of truth.

[Britt Pinkerton]

That's such a difference from George Starkey.

[Lawrence Principe]

Yeah. So, yeah, Irenaeus Philalethes is really George.

[Britt Pinkerton]

George was interesting to Lawrence because in his public work, he was as metaphorical and flowery as the next guy. But in his private letters and his lab notebooks, his instructions were clearer and followable. And he talked a lot about his theories about alchemy.

[Lawrence Principe]

And one of his theoretical ideas is that if you want to make gold, he uses a sort of agricultural metaphor that gold has within itself a seed. And if you can find the right kind of metallic water to cause it to grow, you should be able to make more gold. Just like you take one grain of wheat, you put it in the ground, you get more wheat back. So it's this agricultural metaphor.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Apparently, there was a school of alchemical thought that believed that just like there is a seed of an apple inside an apple, there's also a seed of gold inside of gold, and that you could use the right kind of mercury to free that seed, which would result in a philosopher's stone that could change other Stuff also into gold. So, in this vein, one of George's projects was to make this special philosophical mercury.

[Lawrence Principe]

He claimed that you could make a particular kind of mercury quicksilver, right. Prepared in a special kind of way that when mixed with gold and heated in a flask, would, as he calls it, vegetate. So this sounds extraordinarily unlikely.

[Britt Pinkerton]

As a 21st century chemist, Lawrence was pretty skeptical that mercury was going to do anything that you would describe as vegetating. But he did have these rough instructions from George about how to make this happen. So he took some mercury and tried to do a version of what George

[Lawrence Principe]

did, mixed it up with a bit of gold, put it in a flask, sealed it up, and started heating it again.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Lawrence works in a modern lab, so he was not exactly replicating all the steps, like, because he was using mercury, which is toxic, he was working under a ventilation hood, for example. But he had the substance sealed in

[Lawrence Principe]

a flask, what's called the philosophical egg, a round bottom flask with a very long neck that you put the ingredient in and then you seal. And I had it buried in a sand bath in a thermostatically controlled heating mantle. He doesn't give us a correct degree of heat that has to be added. And so it took several weeks, and it just sat there as sort of a gray, slightly bubbly mass. So what I started doing is I started increasing the heat very slightly every few days before I went home. And one morning I went in, took the flask up out of the sand, and what the night before had been an amorphous mass of sort of gray, slimy stuff. There was a beautiful, glittering silver tree inside the flask. What? Well, that's sort of the result I had. I put it back in the sand bath. I sat down in my desk and sat there for several minutes, quite concerned that I had actually lost my mind.

[Britt Pinkerton]

What do you mean, a tree?

[Lawrence Principe]

Well, what had been just at the very bottom of the flask had grown upwards to fill the entire flask with a trunk and what we would call dendritic growths of a brilliant silver color. What? Yes, I have photos. I've even published photos of that.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Now, this does not mean that modern chemistry is wrong or that either mercury or gold grows like a tree, but the mercury in the flask did take a shape that looks tree like. And so suddenly, George's vegetative language was beginning to make more sense to Lawrence, which is one really clear thing that experimental reconstruction can give a historian like him.

[Lawrence Principe]

So when they talk about this Bizarre metaphorical description. It's not necessarily just their imagination or just a series of literary or metaphorical images. And it actually, in some cases, has this concrete visual experience behind it. Part of the reason I study this is why does alchemy persist so long? Well, I think that they were actually seeing remarkable things, maybe not the actual transmutation of lead into real gold. Nevertheless, imagine just for a second, if I, as a late 20th, early 21st century chemist, was absolutely shocked by this and thought that I had lost my mind, what would that have done to a 17th century alchemist who is convinced that a vegetative theory of the growth of metals is the right explanation? He would surely have said, wow, it really works. I'm going to work twice as hard to take this on to the next steps of making the philosopher's stone, because I've seen this amazing thing.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Based on his work so far, Lawrence has developed a kind of hypothesis that he's exploring. So his idea here is that the early parts of some of these texts, the first few steps, they're more like this tree of Mercury situation. They're doable, practical experiments. But then as the texts move on, he thinks they become more hypothetical.

[Lawrence Principe]

Experience transitions to expectation. I've got a theory of how this is supposed to go. I've seen it work this far. What should happen next, as a kind of extrapolation, are the next few steps. I haven't gotten them to work, but here's the way they should work.

[Britt Pinkerton]

And then a lot of these books end with a description of the philosopher's stone that he thinks is just copied from other older books, so not drawn from personal experience. It's kind of like a description of what they're all working towards or how they will know that they got things right.

[Lawrence Principe]

That's my working hypothesis right now. How many alchemical texts of the thousands that are out there this actually works with? I can't say, but I can cite several where it does seem to work pretty darn well.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Is there any part of you that's like, the first few steps don't seem to be metaphorical? Maybe they were just making philosopher's stones.

[Lawrence Principe]

Oh, I often wish that. I did have the former dean of my university once come by and say, wow, if I can't balance the budget, I'm going to be coming to your lab for some help.

[Britt Pinkerton]

So there's still some imagination at work in alchemical texts. But Lawrence and other historians like him have shown that there's also some real stuff to be found as well, stuff that's grounded in repeatable experimentation. And this new perspective has also changed how Lawrence and others look at some of the early figures of the scientific revolution. Isaac Newton studied alchemy, for example, as did Robert Boyle, a leading light in early modern chemistry.

[Lawrence Principe]

Robert Boyle certainly knew his alchemical literature. He depended upon some alchemical writers. In fact, our friend George Starkey that I mentioned to you was school tutored essentially in the practice of chemistry by George Starkey.

[Britt Pinkerton]

What, they knew each other?

[Lawrence Principe]

Oh, yes.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Robert Boyle, in fact knew about the vegetative theory of mercury.

[Lawrence Principe]

Yes. Starkey entrusted him with the secret of how to do that, and he spent the next 40 years of his life trying to get it to completion.

[Britt Pinkerton]

If you think alchemy is total nonsense, that might seem like a stain on Boyle's reputation. But if you've redone the experiment and seen that this mercury tree stuff was doable chemistry, then maybe it seems less out of character.

[Lawrence Principe]

People have sort of imagined there to be some great discontinuity in the development of chemistry or in the development of the sciences with what I like to refer to as the arrogance of the present, thinking that old people were dumb. And look here, the light dawns suddenly and now we're modern and we just see that this is just not true. And in fact, the truth of the matter is much more interesting to see this gradual accumulation of information, the refining of ideas, sometimes the discarding of theories in favor of a new one. But that's a gradual process that happens over time. And I think certainly in the case of chemistry, this is the case.

[Britt Pinkerton]

Lawrence is not the only person working in this space. And in the time since he and his partner in Reconstruction, Bill Newman, started publishing about alchemy, the field's gone through kind of a revolution.

[Lawrence Principe]

One of the things that I am shocked by is that now alchemy has dozens and dozens of people, some absolutely astonishing younger scholars as well, working on it. So it's become a hot topic in a sense. The other thing that I find equally surprising is that this experimental reproduction of chemical processes or early processes as a tool, as a historical tool in the history of science, has also become now

[Britt Pinkerton]

suddenly mainstream, if not mainstream, then at least more popular. And experimental recreations can't give researchers everything right. Even if Florence recreated every detail of a medieval lab perfectly, which he doesn't try to do, he's always going to be a 21st century chemist operating in a 21st century framework.

[Lawrence Principe]

Clearly, when I'm looking at something, anything, it doesn't matter when I'm looking out the window I am interpreting it through all sorts of lenses that have been created by the social, political, emotional, religious context of 2026. And my historical actors in the same way have their own mental landscape constructed by 1354 or 1661.

[Britt Pinkerton]

So there will always be limits to what anyone can learn about the past by reconstructing it. But still, when I think about the experimental tradition in science, right, the idea that you try things to see what shakes out, I think it's really fitting that the history of science is incorporating that approach too. And maybe it's not surprising that some big field changing ideas have come out of the attempt. If you would like to read more about alchemy, Lawrence Principe's book the Secrets of Alchemy is a great place to start. It has a lot of information about the history of alchemy that we couldn't fit into this episode and a great section about how alchemy got such a terrible reputation. Also, if you want to read more about turning lead into gold and doing the research for this episode, I learned that physicists have actually turned a very small amount of lead into some very short lived gold by using a particle accelerator. So I will link to a Nature article about that in the transcript. This episode was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was transmuted into if not gold, then at least a better version of itself by my editor Joanna Solotaroff. Joe Plord did the mixing and the sound design, Noam Hassenfeld does our music, Melissa Hirsch checks our facts, Jorge Just, Meredith Hodnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm and Amy Padula are the fact that large raindrops are shaped like hamburger buns. And my thanks to Jennifer Rampling, Angela Krieger and Bruce Moran for speaking to me for this episode and helping me better understand both alchemy and the history of science. Thanks also to Matthew Jordan for sending me down this rabbit hole to begin with. If you have thoughts about alchemy or or things about the history of science you think we should explore, please email us. We are@ unexplainableox.com, we are always open to your ideas and we really love hearing about your research as well. If you would like to support this show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do, just go to vox.com members. You get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you also get to know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you have signed up because of Unexplainable. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are as good as gold. No alchemy required. Thank you. We also really appreciate those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform or shared unexplainable episodes with people in your life. You are also golden in my eyes. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.

[Lawrence Principe]

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[Britt Pinkerton]

Wow, you have such strong muscles.

[Lawrence Principe]

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[Britt Pinkerton]

I am breaking up with you to be with Back Market.

[Lawrence Principe]

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