Alchemists operated predominantly in the middle ages. Even though the church still retained its control over learning, these people experimented with ways to separate and recombine Aristotle’s 4 elements. Some performed experiments by consulting astrological charts. They mainly worked with the idea that they could rearrange Aristotle’s 4 elements to create whatever they want. Using this idea, they tried to change many different forms of matter into gold.
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Gold...?The Alchemists hoped that they would be able to make gold out of anything. (If there are only four elements in everything, why not rearrange them so they are gold...)
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The Church...During this time the church maintained control over what was taught and how it was taught. This made it extremely difficult for chemists and philosophers during this time to establish a bases of ideas that the church wouldn't disagree with.
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