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DISCOVER / MAY 198234

Alchemy began long ago as an expres-sion of the deepest and oldest of hu-manwishes: todiscoverthat theworld

makes sense. The working assumption—thateverything must be made up from a single,primal sort ofmatter—ledto centuriesofhardwork aimed at isolatingthe original stuff andrearrangingit to the alchemists' liking. If itcould be

found,

nothing would lie beyond hu-mangrasp. The transmutationofbase metalsinto goldwas onlya modest partof thepros-pect. Ifyou knew about thefundamentalsub-stance, you could do much more than simplymake money; you could boil up acure-all foreverydisease affectingmankind, you could ridthe world of evil, and, while doing this, youcould makea universal solvent capableof dis-solving anythingyou might want to dissolve.Thesewereheady ideas, andgenerationsofal-chemists worked all their lives trying to re-duce matter to itsultimate origin.

.<Sh&

LEWIS THOMAS: To be an alchemistwas to bea seriouspro-

fessional,

and it required long periods of ap-prenticeship and a great deal of late-nightstudy. From the earliest years of the profes-sion, there was a lot to read. The documentscan betracedback to Arabic,Latin, and Greekscholars of the ancient world, and beyondthem to Indian Vedic texts as far back as thetenth centuryB.C. All theold papers contain aformidable array of information, mostly ex-pressed in incantations, which were manda-tory learningfor every young alchemist and,by design, incomprehensibleto everyoneelse.The word"gibberish" is thought by some toreferback to Jabir ibnHayyan, laterknown asGeber, an eighth-centuryalchemistwho livedinfear of beingexecuted for black magic andwordedhis doctrines so obscurely thatno oneknew whathewas talkingabout.

On Alchemy

Indeed, black magicwaswhat mostpeoplethought the alchemists were up to, in labora-tories filled with thefumes of arsenic, mercu-ry, and sulphur, and thebubbling infusions ofall kinds of obscure plants. We tend to lookback at themfrom today'spinnacleofscienceas figuresof fun, eccentricmenincomical con-ical hats, engaged in meaningless explora-tions down one blind alley after another. Itwas notnecessarilyso; theworktheyweredo-ing was hard and frustrating, but it was thestart-upof experimentalchemistry andphys-ics. The central ideatheywereobsessedwith—that thereis afundamental, elementaryparti-cle outof which everything in theuniverse ismade—continuesto obsess physicists.

The alchemists neversucceededin makinggoldfrom base metals, nor did theyfind auni-versal elixir in theirplant extracts; theycer-tainlydid not rid theworldof evil. What theydid accomplish, however,was nosmall thing:the}- got thework going.Theyfiddled aroundin their laboratories, talkedat each other in-cessantly, set up one crazy experimentafteranother, and wrote endless reams of notes,which were then translated from Arabic to

Greek to Latin and back again. More workers entitle maturity, medicine is on its way tobecame interested,and onething led to anoth- growingup, and it is hard to find traces any-er. As time went on and the work progressed where of the early fumblines toward a genu-with error after error, new and accurate me scientific method. Alclwnv «ri_t«nt.lv

_,_ a

me scientific method. Alchemy existsonly as amuseum piece, an intellectual fossil, so an-tique that we no longerneedbe embarrassedby the memory—but thememoryis there. Sci-ence began by fumbling, by running up anddownblind alleys and gardenpaths. It worksbecause the people involved in it work, andworktogether. They becomeexcited and exas-perated, theyexchange their bits of informa-tion at a full shout, and, the most wonderfulthing of all,theykeep atone another.

Something rather like this may be goingon now, without our realizing it, in the latestand grandestofall fields of science. Peopleinmyfield, medicine, and some inthe "hard"sci-ences, likephysicsandchemistry, tend totakelightly and often disparagingly the efforts ofworkers in the so-called social sciences. Welike to refer to their data as soft, subjective,based on their own preconceived notions ofhuman behavior, and wefail to acknowledgethe differences between the various disci-plines within behavioral research. We speakofanalyticalpsychiatry, sociology,linguistics,economics, and computer intelligence asthough theywereall ofapiece, with allpartieswearing thesame oldcomical conical hats.

It is of course not so. The principalfeaturethat the social sciences have in common thesedays is the attraction they hold for consider-able numbersofbright young people, whoseetheprospect of exploring human behavior asirresistiblyexciting and who hope that asuffi-ciently powerful scientific method for doingthe exploring can be worked out. All of thematters on the social science agenda seemmore urgent than at any other time in humanmemory.It mayturn out, years hence, thatasolid discipline of human science will havecomeintoexistence,hard as quantum physics,filled with deep insights, plagued as physicsstill is by ambiguities but with new rules andnewways of gettingthings done—such as, forinstance, gettingrid of thermonuclear weap-ons, patrioticrhetoric, and nationalism all atonce.If anything like thisdoesturnup, wewillbe looking back at today's social scientists,and their close colleagues the humanists, ashaving launched thenewscience ina way notall thatdifferent from the accomplishmentofthe old alchemists, by simply working on theproblem—this time, the fundamental, primaluniversality of the human mind.

Keep them at it, I say, keep them working,bring in moreofthem, crowd themtogetherinthe deepest water, way beyond their depth.Goad them into swimming into each other,sputtering new bits of information each timethey touch, losing themselvesin a high surfofmetaphor but each time regaining their feetfor a new try. Sooner or later something willcome of it, something like knowledge, new tothem,newand surprisingtoalltherest ofus. ®

things began to turn up. Hard facts werelearnedabout thebehaviorof metals and theiralloys;thepropertiesof acids, bases, and saltswere recognized; the mathematics of thermo-dynamicswasworked out;and, withjustafewjumpsthrough thecenturies, the helical mole-cule of DNA wasrevealed in all its mystery.

The current anxieties over what sciencemaybe doingto human society, including theworries about technology, are no new thing.The third-century Roman emperorDiocletiandecreed that all manuscripts dealing with al-chemy wereto be destroyed, on the groundsthat such enterprises were against nature.The work went on in secrecy, and, althoughsome of the materialwas lost, much of it wastranslated into other languages, passedaround, andpreserved.

The association of alchemy with blackmagic has persisted, partlybecausethe objec-tive—the transmutationofone substance intoanother—seemed magical by definition, andpartlybecauseof thehybrid term.Al was sim-ply the Arabic definite article, but chemy ap-parentlycamefrom khemia, the ancient wordfor Egypt, "black land." A similar-soundingword, khumeia, meant an infusion or elixir,and this was incorporated as partof the mean-ing. The Egyptian origin is, very old, extend-ingback to Thoth,the godofmagic (wholaterreappeared as Hermes Trismegistus, masterof thehermetic seal requiredbyalchemists forthe airtightvesselstheybelieved wereneededin theirwork).The notion of alchemy may beas old as language,and the idea that languageand magic are somehowrelated is also old.Grammar, after all, was a word used in theMiddle Ages to denote high learning, but italso implied a practicing familiaritywith al-chemy. Gramarye, an older term for gram-mar, signified occult learning and necroman-cy. Glamour, of all words, was Scotch forgrammar, and it meant, precisely, a spell,casting enchantment.

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Medicine, from its darkorigins in shaman-ism millennia ago, became closely linked inthe Middle Ages with alchemy. The preoccu-pation of alchemists with metals and theirproperties led to experiments—mostly feck-less ones—involving the therapeuticuse of allsorts of metals. Paracelsus, a prominent phy-sician of the 16thcentury, achievedfamefromhis enthusiastic use of mercury and arsenic,based on what seems a wholly mystical com-mitment to alchemical philosophy as the keyto understanding the universe and the humanbody simultaneously. Under his influence,threecenturiesofpatients with all varieties ofillness were treated with strong potions ofmelals, chiefly mercury, and vigorouspurga-tionbecamestandard medical practice.

Physics and chemistry have grown to sci-

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DISCOVER / MAY 198235