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Alchemy Tried In The Fire
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Book Synopsis Alchemy Tried in the Fire by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Newman and Lawrence Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory experiments of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy.
Book Synopsis Alchemy Tried in the Fire by : William Royall Newman
Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William Royall Newman and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Alchemy Tried in the Fire by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Alchemy Tried in the Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2005 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. What actually took place in the private laboratory of a mid-seventeenth century alchemist? How did he direct his quest after the secrets of Nature? What instruments and theoretical principles did he employ? Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, Newman and Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the authors show how this American "chymist" translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The intriguing "mystic" Joan Baptista Van Helmont—a favorite of Starkey, Boyle, and even of Lavoisier—emerges from this study as a surprisingly central figure in seventeenth-century "chymistry." A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the authors argue, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution. For anyone who wants to understand how alchemy was actually practiced during the Scientific Revolution and what it contributed to the development of modern chemistry, Alchemy Tried in the Fire will be a veritable philosopher's stone.
Book Synopsis The Secrets of Alchemy by : Lawrence Principe
Download or read book The Secrets of Alchemy written by Lawrence Principe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alchemy, the Noble Art, conjures up scenes of mysterious, dimly lit laboratories populated with bearded old men stirring cauldrons. Though the history of alchemy is intricately linked to the history of chemistry, alchemy has nonetheless often been dismissed as the realm of myth and magic, or fraud and pseudoscience. And while its themes and ideas persist in some expected and unexpected places, from the Philosopher's (or Sorcerer's) Stone of Harry Potter to the self-help mantra of transformation, there has not been a serious, accessible, and up-to-date look at the complete history and influence of alchemy until now.
Book Synopsis Gehennical Fire by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Gehennical Fire written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-02-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both the quest for natural knowledge and the aspiration to alchemical wisdom played crucial roles in the Scientific Revolution, as William R. Newman demonstrates in this fascinating book about George Starkey (1628-1665), America's first famous scientist. Beginning with Starkey's unusual education in colonial New England, Newman traces out his many interconnected careers—natural philosopher, alchemist, chemist, medical practitioner, economic projector, and creator of the fabulous adept, "Eirenaeus Philalethes." Newman reveals the profound impact Starkey had on the work of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and other key thinkers in the realm of early modern science.
Book Synopsis Atoms and Alchemy by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Atoms and Alchemy written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Atoms and Alchemy', William R. Newman provides a spirited defence of alchemy, awarding this ancient and much maligned field of endeavour an important place in the history of the Scientific Revolution.
Book Synopsis Promethean Ambitions by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Promethean Ambitions written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age when the nature of reality is complicated daily by advances in bioengineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence, it is easy to forget that the ever-evolving boundary between nature and technology has long been a source of ethical and scientific concern: modern anxieties about the possibility of artificial life and the dangers of tinkering with nature more generally were shared by opponents of alchemy long before genetic science delivered us a cloned sheep named Dolly. In Promethean Ambitions, William R. Newman ambitiously uses alchemy to investigate the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned—and often negative—responses to their efforts. By the thirteenth century, Newman argues, alchemy had become a benchmark for determining the abilities of both men and demons, representing the epitome of creative power in the natural world. Newman frames the art-nature debate by contrasting the supposed transmutational power of alchemy with the merely representational abilities of the pictorial and plastic arts—a dispute which found artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy attacking alchemy as an irreligious fraud. The later assertion by the Paracelsian school that one could make an artificial human being—the homunculus—led to further disparagement of alchemy, but as Newman shows, the immense power over nature promised by the field contributed directly to the technological apologetics of Francis Bacon and his followers. By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous "father of modern chemistry," Robert Boyle, was employing the arguments of medieval alchemists to support the identity of naturally occurring substances with those manufactured by "chymical" means. In using history to highlight the art-nature debate, Newman here shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles, with vocal supporters and even louder critics, that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that Newman charts between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today, and he ably links contemporary issues to alchemical debates on the natural versus the artificial.
Book Synopsis The Secrets of Alchemy by : Lawrence M. Principe
Download or read book The Secrets of Alchemy written by Lawrence M. Principe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This elegant, readable book…covers the history of alchemy from its shadowy origins in Hellenistic Egypt to its scholarly recovery in the 20th century” (Anthony Grafton, Science). In The Secrets of Alchemy, science historian and practicing chemist Lawrence M. Principe dispels commonly held misconceptions about alchemy and sheds light on what it was, how it began, and how it influenced a range of other ideas and pursuits. Principe demonstrates the importance of alchemy during its heyday in early modern Europe, and explores its enduring place in literature, fine art, theater, and religion as well as its recent acceptance as a serious subject of study for historians of science. Principe also introduces readers to some of the most fascinating alchemists, such as Zosimos and Basil Valentine, whose lives dot alchemy’s long reign from the third century and to the present day. Through his discussion of alchemists and their times, Principe pieces together clues from obscure texts to reveal alchemy’s secrets, and uses them to recreate many of the most famous recipes in his lab, including those for the “glass of antimony” and “philosophers’ tree.”
Book Synopsis The Experimental Fire by : Jennifer M. Rampling
Download or read book The Experimental Fire written by Jennifer M. Rampling and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-08 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 400-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects. Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.
Download or read book Creations of Fire written by Cathy Cobb and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: he history of chemistry is a story of human endeavor-and as er T ratic as human nature itself. Progress has been made in fits and starts, and it has come from all parts of the globe. Because the scope of this history is considerable (some 100,000 years), it is necessary to impose some order, and we have organized the text around three dis cemible-albeit gross--divisions of time: Part 1 (Chaps. 1-7) covers 100,000 BeE (Before Common Era) to the late 1700s and presents the background of the Chemical Revolution; Part 2 (Chaps. 8-14) covers the late 1700s to World War land presents the Chemical Revolution and its consequences; Part 3 (Chaps. 15-20) covers World War I to 1950 and presents the Quantum Revolution and its consequences and hints at revolutions to come. There have always been two tributaries to the chemical stream: experiment and theory. But systematic experimental methods were not routinely employed until the 1600s-and quantitative theories did not evolve until the 1700s-and it can be argued that modem chernistry as a science did not begin until the Chemical Revolution in the 1700s. xi xii PREFACE We argue however that the first experiments were performed by arti sans and the first theories proposed by philosophers-and that a rev olution can be understood only in terms of what is being revolted against.
Book Synopsis The Alchemy of Conquest by : Ralph Bauer
Download or read book The Alchemy of Conquest written by Ralph Bauer and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Book Synopsis The Business of Alchemy by : Pamela H. Smith
Download or read book The Business of Alchemy written by Pamela H. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.
Book Synopsis An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge by : Georgiana D. Hedesan
Download or read book An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge written by Georgiana D. Hedesan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of science credits the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) for his contributions to the development of chemistry and medicine. Yet, as this book makes clear, focussing on Van Helmont's impact on modern science does not do justice to the complexity of his thought or to his influence on successive generations of intellectuals like Robert Boyle or Gottfried Leibniz. Revealing Van Helmont as an original thinker who sought to produce a post-Scholastic synthesis of religion and natural philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan reconstructs his ambitious quest for universal knowledge as it emerges from the text of the Ortus medicinae (1648). Published after Van Helmont's death by his son, the work can best be understood as a compilation of finished and unfinished treatises, the historical product of a life unsettled by religious persecution and personal misfortune. The present book provides a coherent account of Van Helmont's philosophy by analysing its main tenets. Divided into two parts, the study opens with a background to Van Helmont's concept of an alchemical Christian philosophy, demonstrating that his outlook was deeply grounded in the tradition of medical alchemy as reformed by Theophrastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493-1541). It then reconstitutes Van Helmont's biography, while giving a historical dimension to his intellectual output. The second part reconstructs Van Helmont's Christian philosophy, investigating his views on God, nature and man, as well as his applied philosophy. Hedesan also provides an account of the development of Van Helmont's thought throughout his life. The conclusion sums up Van Helmont's intellectual achievement and highlights avenues of future research.
Book Synopsis Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence by : George Starkey
Download or read book Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence written by George Starkey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Starkey—chymistry tutor to Robert Boyle, author of immensely popular alchemical treatises, and probably early America's most important scientist—reveals in these pages the daily laboratory experimentation of a seventeenth-century alchemist. The editors present in this volume transcriptions of Starkey's texts, their translations, and valuable commentary for the modern reader. Dispelling the myth that alchemy was an irrational enterprise, this remarkable collection of laboratory notebooks and correspondence reveals the otherwise hidden methodologies of one of the seventeenth century's most influential alchemists.
Book Synopsis Atoms and Alchemy by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Atoms and Alchemy written by William R. Newman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But in Atoms and Alchemy, William R. Newman—a historian widely credited for reviving recent interest in alchemy—exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle’s famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. Atomsand Alchemy thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed—and deliberated—by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.
Book Synopsis Newton the Alchemist by : William R. Newman
Download or read book Newton the Alchemist written by William R. Newman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book that finally demystifies Newton’s experiments in alchemy When Isaac Newton’s alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, the legendary physicist suddenly became “the last of the magicians.” Newton the Alchemist unlocks the secrets of Newton’s alchemical quest, providing a radically new understanding of the uncommon genius who probed nature at its deepest levels in pursuit of empirical knowledge. In this evocative and superbly written book, William Newman blends in-depth analysis of newly available texts with laboratory replications of Newton’s actual experiments in alchemy. He does not justify Newton’s alchemical research as part of a religious search for God in the physical world, nor does he argue that Newton studied alchemy to learn about gravitational attraction. Newman traces the evolution of Newton’s alchemical ideas and practices over a span of more than three decades, showing how they proved fruitful in diverse scientific fields. A precise experimenter in the realm of “chymistry,” Newton put the riddles of alchemy to the test in his lab. He also used ideas drawn from the alchemical texts to great effect in his optical experimentation. In his hands, alchemy was a tool for attaining the material benefits associated with the philosopher’s stone and an instrument for acquiring scientific knowledge of the most sophisticated kind. Newton the Alchemist provides rare insights into a man who was neither Enlightenment rationalist nor irrational magus, but rather an alchemist who sought through experiment and empiricism to alter nature at its very heart.
Book Synopsis Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy by : Bruce T. Moran
Download or read book Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy written by Bruce T. Moran and published by Science History Publications/USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What lots of people called chymia in the early seventeenth century was a subject that the physician, alchemist, and school teacher Andreas Libavius believed needed sorting out. He called it an art without an art. To establish what sort of thing chymia was would require rebuilding its definitions from the theoretical and practical ground up while cutting back the forest of obscure language and private meaning in which it existed. Libavius took on the job, and in thousands of pages of toughly worded criticism ranging over alchemical, moral, medical, philosophical, and religious topics wielded a polemical blade to huge effect.
