Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
At the same time alchemy is not so much complete as it is just discarded as false. It's like aether theory, the idea that light travels through a background medium called the aether and you should be able to measure differences in the speed of light based on your own movement through it. That's a field of study that’s just gone (mostly at least, I'm sure there's some dabbling) because the basic idea turned out to be wrong. The same methods and instruments and physicists were happily applied to other fields of physics, and I'm sure good things for the rest of physics were discovered or developed during the falsification of this idea, but the aether itself is a closed chapter. Does that make it complete?
I haven't studied this, but my gut feeling is that there's a difference in kind between a "field of study" and a "theory". Aether was a theory, which was (AFAIK) discarded when Einstein came up with special relativity as a better alternative. But alchemy was much bigger than just one theory or even one philosophy, and it's not all "discarded as false" by any means.

What we mostly associate with alchemy today is the hilariously elaborate idea of the "great work" that culminates in the creation and use of the philosopher's stone. But that whole theory was a relatively late (Renaissance) invention, born (I'm guessing here) of some alchemists' ambition to be taken more seriously as scholars by making it seem as if they had a grand, unified plan. Long before that, people were doing "alchemy" for smaller, practical problems such as manufacturing and construction, and they did perfectly good work that's still visible in modern practices. For instance, the alchemical terms "sublimation" and "calcination" are still in use today, with their meanings basically intact.