Conversation

@dredmorbius
On alchemy: There is a school of thought that what the alchemists understood ahead of their time was that there's more to properties than composition, processing matters.

They were tinkering with processing-properties links.

An extreme version of this point of view is that alchemy was early systems thinking, and presaged modern materials science more so than the (reductive, non-systems-based) chemstry and physics.

I think that's overstating it, but it's a neat idea.