• Question: Is alchemy real? And if so is equivalent exchange real?

    Asked by Crowe to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 9 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by Stormy, PartyPoison123.
    • Photo: Mark Collins

      Mark Collins answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Alchemy existed many years ago and it was real at the time but what they succeeded in was not what they intended to do. They wanted to turn lead into gold but they only created alloys! They were successful in creating something new but they did not know at the time it was not gold. In some ways Nuclear Fission is the creation of a new elements from a larger element but this is removed from the original purpose of alchemy.

    • Photo: Sinead Balgobin

      Sinead Balgobin answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Hmm, do I spy a Fullmetal Alchemist fan? As Mark says, alchemy is very old, and sort of predates science as we know it. A lot of what alchemists wanted to do was to make gold from other things (like cheap lead) but it’s not really possible. They discovered other things, but kind of got lost in their own sort of religion. In popular culture, the legend of alchemy is used to reflect how the rules of the story work, and in fact there is a hint of science to it!

      Equivalent exchange means that if you create something, something else must be lost, and it’s bit like the laws of conservation: energy cannot be made or destroyed, it can only be changed into a different type of energy. For example, (to draw from wikipedia, I apologise) chemical energy can be transformed into kinetic energy when the chemicals in a stick of dynamite explode. The explosion (kinetic energy) is created, but the chemical energy is gone- overall, all the energy is the same (it is conserved), it has just changed.

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