Alchemist

Newton's other side - tiny magic - we are the river

Photo by Jordyn St. John on Unsplash

Newton’s other side

Today, we know Isaac Newton for his three laws of motion¹, which became the foundation of classical mechanics, and for his law of universal gravitation, which helped clarify how objects (including planets) attract one another. He ‘invented’ calculus² and built the first reflecting telescope.

And yet, a sizeable proportion of his writing (roughly 10%) was about alchemy, the occult art that sought to transform ‘base’ metals (lead) into ‘noble’ ones (gold), find an elixir of immortality, or concoct a panacea for all disease. Newton’s heirs hid his alchemical papers out of fear of tainting the eminent scientist’s reputation.

Slowly, the hidden Newton papers were sold at auctions and the famous economist John Maynard Keynes spent a decade collecting the Newtonian alchemy papers before donating them to Cambridge University. Today, you can check many of these papers online thanks to a project by Indiana University.

With the advent of modern science, alchemy was relegated to the obscure corners of knowledge acquisition. Most generously, it became known as a protoscience. Less generously, it was labeled pseudoscience — fun ideas, but at best a mediocre execution based on ‘mere’ intuition and self-proclaimed esoteric knowledge. Not, in other words, the rigorous application of the (often idealized³) scientific method.

Still, the most common goals of alchemy - the transmutation of elements, the defeat of age and death - are creeping into the purview of science.

Earlier this year, physicists (very, very briefly) fulfilled the dream of alchemists by turning lead into gold. Turns out that if you slam lead ions together at ridiculous speeds, funky stuff happens, such as creating 29 trillionths of a gram of gold for 1 microsecond.

But we don’t need giant, expensive particle accelerators to do a little alchemy.

We just need some biology.

Tiny magic

I could make the case that without microbial alchemy, there would be no complex life. Between 2 and 2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis and they turned carbon dioxide into oxygen and water. The result was havoc, because other forms of life couldn’t cope with the oxygen. But in the aftermath of that microbial carnage, complex life came (slowly) marching.

Likewise, I could make the case that human culture would have been very different without the alchemy of yeasts that turn lactic acid into sugars. Hello, bread, beer, cheese, and chocolate. More broadly, nitrogen-fixing bacteria pull nitrogen (N₂) from the atmosphere and transform it into a form (NH₃) that plants can use. Without the help of these soil bacteria, many crops would struggle and agriculture would look very different.

But let’s make it more ‘alchemy-ish’.

Some bacteria live on gold. In nature, however, gold often exists in a toxic, soluble form, like gold chloride, which is lethal for most bacteria. Delftia acidovorans, though, produces a special peptide called delftibactin A that detects dissolved gold ions, binds to them, and turns them into harmless gold nanoparticles. From lethal poison to treasure. For another type of elemental trickery, consider Geobacter sulfurreducens, a bacterium that munches one (highly soluble) form of uranium and turns it into another (much less soluble) form, which makes environmental uranium cleanup a lot easier.

With a little nudge, microbes can do even better. How about an engineered bacterium that can remove not one, not two, but five organic pollutants from the environment? Let’s make it more impressive. A mere month ago, scientists introduced bespoke chemical reactions into the common bacterium E. coli. As a result, the bacterium could eat plastic and burp out (the precursor of) paracetamol. Tell me that isn’t alchemy.

Biology is alchemy.

And alchemy is… psychology?

We are the river

In 1944, Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed a dream sequence from an anonymous male patient. This man, everyone’s favorite shadow worker wrote, had no prior knowledge of alchemy, and yet his dreams were brimming with alchemical symbolism — all kinds of vessels, heat and fire, water, androgynous figures, the union of opposites…⁴

Throughout the sequence of dreams, the main colors changed too, following the sequence of the magnum opus that, in alchemy, is the process of building the philosopher’s stone. From black (nigredo), over white (albedo) and yellow (citrinitas), to red (rubedo).

Jung interpreted this dream sequence as illustrative of his greater idea (*cough* confirmation bias *cough*) that, beneath the surface of everyday life, the human mind is working through profound, symbolic material. Dreams, myths, and even ancient alchemical texts are part of a shared symbolism rooted in what Jung called the collective unconscious — a deep layer of the psyche common to all people.

With this in mind, Jung did not consider alchemy a pseudo- or proto-science. Instead, he saw the alchemical symbols as metaphors for deep psychological change. In the same way alchemists tried to transform base metals into gold, Jung believed the human psyche is always trying to transform itself. Alchemy, in the Jungian view, provides an ancient psychological map to becoming one’s whole self.

To me, that sounds like an overwrought metaphor. But I wring metaphors until they squeal sometimes too, so I won’t cast too many philosopher’s stones.

In many ways, life is transformation, whether it’s bacteria juggling chemical elements, gym bros turning protein into muscle, or therapy helping someone reframe a traumatic event. You are always changing. Most of the cells in your body are constantly undergoing a process of renewal, some fast, some slow. You are not the same person you were yesterday. Every person you meet, every experience you have, leaves its trace. The body, as another scientifically questionable⁵ book tells us, keeps the score.

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus famously said that you can’t step into the same river twice, not only because the river changes, but because you change too. The not-so-ancient philosopher Bruce Lee implored us to be like water.

You are alchemy.

We are the river.

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1. 1) What moves wants to keep moving, 2) force is mass times acceleration, and 3) every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

2. German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz might disagree.

3. Just like the best-laid plans, the scientific method rarely survives contact with the messiness of reality.

4. If you think that it feels like a stretch to make this all about alchemy, welcome to dream interpretation. People will buy it as long as you make it sound cool, which goes for a lot of early 20th-century psychology.

5. I’m on a roll today…