Thanks for posting this, Peter. It goes some way towards answering a question I’ve been thinking about since reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” recently. In the book, Robert Pirsig wonders what the world would be like if we had not accepted Aristotle’s dialectic and wandered into a digital frame of mind where everything is ‘either/or’, instead of thinking more holistically. If scientists hadn’t been looking for rigid laws, such as Fermi’s liquid theory, what might they have actually discovered about what substances really do? Science today might look entirely different.
It makes you wonder if alchemists were doing an entirely different kind of science when they involved their own emotional and spiritual state in their experiments and conclusions. Would it be going too far to wonder if perhaps chemistry is not an advancement from alchemy, but its autistic child?
In high school chemistry classes, my experiments seldom produced the promised results. The instructor never really had an adequate answer for what happened, beyond ‘you must not have followed directions properly’. That became rather suspect when it was given as the reason for the failure of every experiment, no matter how carefully done, and has always made me wonder how immutable the so-called laws really were.