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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8154284" data-attributes="member: 6704184">I'm having a hard time moving past these two paragraphs. They seem...ill-considered, and indicative of a low level of research into the subject matter. Newton was, after all, a hermetic alchemist, and a numerologist, in addition to everything else he was. He might say that the giants in question were natural philosophers, or he might say they were alchemists, because the world hadn't abandoned the nomenclature of referring to people like him as alchemists, yet. We hadn't started calling alchemists scientists, but that is what they were. I assure you, when someone who has studied history reads Paracelcus, they aren't scoffing at the "BS" of "bogus explanations" or "mystic discoveries", because they're well aware that Paracelcus invented what we now call toxicology, and that invention wasn't spontaneous, but rather built on the foundations of discovery in a lineage of writings and study tracing throughout the European Middle Ages, the Muslim Golden Age, and beyond into the work of ancient Greek and Hindu alchemists. Work done in laboratories and workshops in the Muslim world underpin things we take for granted ranging from the camera, to several complex surgeries, to anatomical knowledge, to literally the discipline of the study of Chemistry. Alchemists invented the alembic and most other basic tools of chemistry, and the processes of scientific study that Bacon is erroneously given credit for simply because he put into a pithy package. So, it's hard to keep reading your post when you speak with such dismissive authority from a position of such apparent ignorance.</blockquote>

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