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.
Representation of the four elements of Empedocles in an edition of De rerum natura by Tommaso Ferrando (1472).
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
.