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When in 1718, Etienne Francois Geoffroy, son of a pharmacist who held the chair of chemistry at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, published the "Table of the different relations observed between different substances", he did so in a context where chemists were already trying to disassociate themselves from alchemical thought.

The coup de grace was given by experimental knowledge but, above all, clear information from these experiments in an open society.

Experimental knowledge

It is usually thought that the disappearance of alchemy from the scientific field was due to experimentation without further ado. But it was not like that. Nor was it the development of cultured networks dedicated to new knowledge.

What condemned alchemy to the attic of pseudosciences was, as explained David Wootton in his book The invention of science:

The insistence that experiments had to be openly reported in publications that presented a clear explanation of what had happened, and that they should then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.

Alchemists had always done just the opposite: they had dedicated themselves to secret learning, convinced that only a few were qualified to have that exclusive knowledge.

In other words: a closed society regarding knowledge became an open, transparent society.

Corollary: We should not really expect to find reliable science before scientific communities began to take shape in the 1640s.

The disappearance of alchemy provides additional evidence, if additional evidence was needed, that what our modern science points to is not the performance of experiments (the alchemists performed a large number of experiments), but the formation of a critical community capable of to evaluate the discoveries and replicate the results.

This idea can perfectly be linked with the four basic tips that we must always remember to identify quite quickly when we are dealing with pseudoscience or established science, as you can see in the following video.

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The news

The death knell of alchemy came for a more important reason than the arrival of the first experiments.

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.

A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport, next to a particularly ugly orchid, top the list of 156 new plants and fungi from Kew Botanical Gardens worldwide in 2020.

In fact, a third of the new species are orchids; and a total of 19 orchids were found on the island of New Guinea. In the following photo you can see an image of what is considered "the ugliest orchid in the world."

Other findings

Six new species of webcap toadstool fungi have been named in the UK this year, including Cortinarius heatherae (pictured at the top of this post), which was discovered along the river on the edge of Heathrow Airport by field mycologist Andy Overall. Other discoveries by scientists at Kew include:

• A Peruvian plant related to the sweet potato that could be a future food source.
• A rare and rare scaly shrub growing in the arid regions of Namibia, which has scaly leaves and grows in hot natural sand trays.
• A plant related to the pineapple, which is pollinated by hummingbirds, lives on a limestone cliff in central Brazil, but is at risk of extinction due to the mining of limestone to make cement.
• A bush related to the blueberry found near the world's largest gold mine in New Guinea, Indonesia.
• An herb with medicinal properties found in a forest on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
• Two new species of Aloe (as in Aloe vera) from Madagascar.

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The news

A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport is one of 156 new plants and fungi on the 2020 list

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

.