NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/magick/6957

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-26 | 4.1 KB

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From: [e-mail] (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Alchemy
Date: 26 Jan 1993 05:29:36 GMT
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There's actually a small problem in a remark by Lorenzo Farris --

Quantum mechanics and relativity did not falsify Newtonian physics. A
watermelon thrown from my roof will still hit the ground at the speed
that Newton predicts. ;-)

--

Without really wanting to open the whole can of monkeys of falsifi-
cationism and so on, I would like to point out that not only did
Newton have something to do with Newtoniam physics, but that he
was also a practicing alchemist, and (later) a zealous searcher into
the Real Meaning (tm) of the NT book called "The Apocalypse of St John."

At least as far as Newton was concerned, Newtonian physics falsified
neither of these other enterprises.  As far, however, as (for example)
Mr Farris is concerned, the traditional claims of alchemy are at least
made problematic by a physics which does not make "Newtonian physics"
problematic.

I don't mean to criticize Mr Farris's remarks about alchemy and
contemporary physics.  I just want to point out the old chestnut that
it's often not a theory "in itself" but a theory-in-interpretive-context
that's subject to falsification, and it can be a judgement call whether
it's the theory or the background assumption set that has been falsified.

If we want to say that Newtonian physics hasn't been falsified by later
developments, isn't it possible that we may end up reconstructing an
unfalsified Correct Interpretation of Newtonian Physics out of the
ensemble of ways in which it was understood before those later
developments came along?

And isn't this rather like the project of apologetic theologians who
contrive to show that the initiated interpretation of their doctrines
really never has contradicted what we all now know to be true?

Even something that we all feel at home with, like Newtonian physics,
quickly resolves into a tangle of problems when approached by historians
and philosophers of science (whose careers are of course justified by
the discovery or invention of these tangles).

The same problems that beset history of science also beset "ethnoscience,"
the study of living sciences and technologies embedded in cultural
contexts very unlike our own.  "Chinese medicine" (already a problematic
term!) provides a very good example of these problems.  There is no
easy "translation" of accounts or events or activities in terms of
Chinese medicine into terms of modern cosmopolitan medicine.  It takes
people (or teams) simultaneously adept in both to be able to begin to
see in what ways both do (or do not) engage the same world -- and what
is the same about the worlds both engage.

Alchemy is even less easy to evaluate in modern terms.  But one thing
is clear.  In its own terms, much of alchemy was in fact about doing
things in laboratories, and getting laboratory results.  It is very hard
to assess a technological literature without having at least worked in,
if not mastered, the techniques on which that literature is focused --
and the various modern counterparts of those techniques as well.

Nathan Sivin's _Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies_ is an example
of one kind of valuable work; Hopkins _ALchemy, Child of Greek Philosophy_,
with its conjectural reconstruction of alchemical technique in terms of
the metallurgy of Hopkins' period, is another kind of valuable study.
But very little published work on western alchemy has been both
historically and philosophically scrupulous *and* based in a thorough mastery
of  both modern and alchemical technologies.

In the face of these difficulties, judgements about whether alchemy
"works" can only be premature.

--LeGrand