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This week, explore the secret alchemical lab of a Renaissance astronomer, meet blushing hens, discover “dark” oxygen on the ocean floor, and more. Glass shards reveal what was inside a ...
Alchemy, the precursor to chemistry, served two purposes: gold-making and medicine making. Alchemists who focused on the creation of gold attempted through experimentation to make it from less ...
Alchemy is the study of the transmutation of materials through obscure processes. Although it is often viewed as a pseudoscientific endeavor, many of its practitioners utilized widely accepted scientific theories of their times to formulate hypotheses about the constituents of matter and the ways matter could be changed. [ 6 ]
Isabella Cortese (fl. 1561), was an Italian alchemist and writer of the Renaissance. All that is known of her life and work is from her book on alchemy, The Secrets of Lady Isabella Cortese. Cortese was also well-versed in several fields other than alchemy.
In Renaissance alchemy, alkahest was the theorized "universal solvent". [ nb 1 ] It was supposed to be capable of dissolving any composite substance, including gold (then not considered an element), without altering or destroying its fundamental components. [ 1 ]
Alchemy was a series of practices that combined philosophical, magical, and chemical experimentation. One goal of European alchemists was to create what was known as the Philosopher’s Stone , a substance that when heated and combined with a non precious metal like copper or iron (known as the “base”) would turn into gold.
Uraniborg was an astronomical observatory and alchemy laboratory established and operated by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. It was the first custom-built observatory in modern Europe, and the last to be built without a telescope as its primary instrument.
Leonardo was the author of some of the earliest known examples of pictorial anamorphosis identified and studied. [ 25 ] [ 26 ] Anamorphosis is a type of optical artifice in which images are represented with altered proportions, and are recognizable only when the image is observed from a specific vantage point or using distorting instruments.