Reading time: 18 minutes
The first thing anyone thinks of when they hear the word alchemy is a man in a robe trying to turn lead into gold.
Well. It worked.
In May 2025, CERN reported that lead had turned into gold inside the Large Hadron Collider. Four billion Swiss francs of machine, and colder than outer space when it is running. Lead has 82 protons. Gold has 79. Knock three of them off and it is gold, and that is what happened, about eighty nine thousand times a second.
The total, over four years: twenty nine trillionths of a gram. And it did not survive. The gold came out of the collision moving so hard that it hit the wall of the pipe and came apart, a fraction of a second after it existed.
There is about a billion times more gold in your phone.
And here is the part worth stopping on. Nobody at CERN was trying to make gold. They were smashing lead into lead to see what matter looked like a moment after the universe began. The gold was a side effect. It was litter.
Which is the oldest story in this subject. What the alchemists were chasing turned out to be the least of it. What they built in order to chase it turned out to be everything.
The alchemists had two goals, and gold was only one of them. The other was the thing that lets you live forever. Get rich, never die.
The chase never stopped.
Alchemy is a method. You take a thing apart far enough to find out what it actually is, how it works, and what it can be turned into. That is the whole art.
They did not fail. They ran out of tools. You cannot rearrange the nucleus of an atom with a fire, a flask and a pair of hands, and it took eighteen hundred years and the largest machine ever built to make something that could.
And both goals are still on the table.
Nobody says it out loud any more. They say they are building wealth.
Find a problem enough people have, solve it properly, and sell the solution to all of them. Buy a digital coin nobody can explain, and watch it turn into a technology with a market. The logic underneath every one of those is the same sentence: put in something worth little, apply a process, take out something worth more.
That is transmutation. Not as a metaphor. That is the definition of the word.
And the chase was never about one man getting rich. A country that could make gold on demand would own everything, and everybody else's money would be worth nothing by Friday. Which is why England made the attempt itself a felony. Read that again. There was a law against trying, and it stood for two hundred and eighty five years.
And that is not a medieval worry. In July 2026, Elon Musk predicted in an interview with The Economist that money will not matter by 2036, because AI and robots will make so much of everything that there will be nothing left to buy with it. That is the outcome England wrote a law to prevent. He is selling it as good news.
The second goal never went anywhere either. It just got a bigger budget and a bigger following every decade.
Bryan Johnson spends millions of dollars a year running his own body as an experiment and publishing every measurement he takes, and his slogan is two words: Don't Die. That is the elixir of life with a protocol attached.
And the people building artificial intelligence are selling both promises at once, in the same order the alchemists sold them, to exactly the same instinct.
Ignore the men selling it for a moment, because the work happening underneath them is far more interesting.
We took the body apart, using instruments they never had. We found out that muscle is not just meat that pulls, it is an organ that sends signals to the rest of you. We found out that the bacteria in your gut are not passengers. We found out that light landing in your eye in the morning sets a clock that decides how you sleep fourteen hours later.
And we worked out that there is a molecule sitting under your skin that turns into a hormone the moment sunlight hits it, then learned to make that same hormone in a factory and press it into a tablet. We took the one thing our body needs from the sun and put it in a pill. There is a whole Experiment on that one.
The word itself gives the game away.
Alchemy reached English from the Arabic al-kimiya. In Arabic that word means the chemistry. Not something like chemistry. Chemistry. Ask anyone in Beirut or Casablanca what kimiya is and they will tell you it is the subject their kid is failing at school.
Arabic never split it. English did, around 1720, and within twenty years the old half had been narrowed down to gold making while the new half kept everything that could be proved. Same people. Same benches. Same notebooks. One craft, two names.
And what the old half covered was everything. Chemistry, physics, biology, physiology, medicine, metallurgy, the lot. There is no single word left in the language that covers all of them at once.
The method is not finished. Alexander Fleming found penicillin in 1928, and it took until 1944 to make enough of it to matter. For those sixteen years an infected scratch in the garden could still kill a healthy adult.
Nobody got smarter in between. What changed is what they had to work with. Fleming had a petri dish. By 1944 there were industrial fermentation tanks and a world war paying for them.
A COVID vaccine was designed in a weekend, tested in months, and in arms around the world inside a year.
That is the only thing that ever really changes. Not the ambition. Not the method. The tools, and everything we know by the time we pick them up.
That is what modern means. Same curiosity. Better instruments, and more time.
Two of them you already know.
Isaac Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on alchemy, and he was doing it in the same years he was working out gravity.
Leonardo da Vinci did not believe you could make gold, and said so plainly. Yet Leonardo spent his entire life running the method: dissecting bodies to find out how they worked, taking birds apart to find out how flight worked, drawing every stage of it. He was never against the method. He was against the promise. I own a stack of his books, and the ones full of those drawings are the ones I keep going back to. The Vitruvian Man is why my latest project has the logo it has.
The promise had a name. The Philosopher's Stone was not an object anybody had. It was something they believed could be made, and whoever managed to make it would get both things at once: cheap metal turned into gold, and the elixir that stopped you dying.
And the people closest to it kept saying the object was not the point.
I own an early edition of a book by Manly P. Hall, published in 1928, called The Secret Teachings of All Ages. It is a believer writing for believers. Big, old and beautiful, and the most precious book I own. I love showing it to people and reading them the chapter titles, because it looks like something a magician left behind. And in the middle of his own chapter on alchemy, Hall stops to warn his own readers: "Woe to that seeker who accepts as literal the rambling allegories of the alchemists." He drew it too, and under his own plate of the Philosopher's Stone he calls it a symbol of the perfected and regenerated man. The stone was never a stone.
The Kybalion, published in 1908, is close to a bible for modern Hermetic teaching. It says the same thing in one word: allegory.
Then there is The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, which is also one of my favorites. For years people kept stopping me mid story to tell me that one was my story. They were right. But the alchemy is the smallest part of it. What that book is really about is the hero's journey, which is its own kind of alchemy, and it gets its own piece.
The pursuit of gold was the headline. The method was the inheritance, and we are still living on it.
Bring a medieval alchemist here and hand him a phone. Let him ask it a question out loud and hear it answer.
He would not call it engineering. He would call it magic. And from where he is standing he would be right, because a trick stays magic only until somebody shows you the mechanism. Then it is a technique, and eventually it is boring.
Taking the trick apart is the entire art. Start with what he already had.
Alchemy had three principles: mercury, sulfur and salt. Every one of them ended up in medicine. Mercury will poison you, and in 1714 Fahrenheit sealed it inside a glass tube, and we used it to take our children's temperature for three hundred years. Sulfur went into the first drugs that ever beat a bacterial infection, nine years before penicillin arrived. And salt is the one thing your body cannot run without, which is why there is a bag of salt water hanging beside almost every hospital bed you have ever visited.
Their three were the starting inventory. The list never stopped growing.
Sand. Melt it and you get glass, the first thing you could seal something inside and still watch what it was doing. Every flask and bottle the alchemist ever worked with was sand, and so is the screen you are reading this on. Then coat the back of a sheet of it and you get a mirror, which is the first time a person could see their own face clearly, and whenever they wanted, instead of leaning over still water. And it is not just for vanity: it is in your car so you can see behind you without turning around. And the same glass is inside every telescope and every camera lens ever made.
Then purify that same sand to 99.9999999 percent and you get the wafer that every computer chip in the world is cut out of.
And the machine that does that last step is built by one company on earth. ASML, in the Netherlands. Two hundred million dollars each, a hundred thousand parts, forty shipping containers to move one, and it makes its light by hitting falling droplets of molten tin with a laser, fifty thousand times a second. The chips running the AI boom all come out of these machines.
Sand becomes the bottle, then the mirror, then the machine that answers you when you speak to it.
Which is why this line, from Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto in 2023, is not poetry. It is a description. "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone – we are literally making sand think."
And it keeps coming from where nobody is looking. Two of the quiet winners of the entire AI boom are a Japanese toilet company and the company that invented MSG. Toto spent a century perfecting ceramics for bathrooms, and now makes the ceramic plates that hold silicon wafers steady while chips are built on them. That business is now worth more to them than the toilets. A Japanese chemist named Ikeda pulled umami, the fifth taste, out of a kelp broth in 1908, and a company called Ajinomoto was founded to sell it. There is a whole piece coming on that one. Sixty years later Ajinomoto found that a byproduct of making it worked as insulation film for microprocessors. Today they hold about ninety five percent of that market, which means almost every high performance chip on earth has seasoning chemistry inside it.
And then there is plastic. We pull crude oil out of the ground, break it into its parts, and rebuild it into a material that never existed on this planet until we made it. Gold is worth more per gram. Plastic is worth more per day. Look around the room you are in and count what would still work without it. Take it out of a hospital and the hospital stops.
Once you know where to look, you see it everywhere. The gas sealed inside a bulb so the filament will not burn away. The fluid running through the coils of your fridge, taking the heat out of your food and carrying it away. The wifi crossing the room right now to put these words in front of you, which you cannot see, cannot feel, and have never once thought about.
Every one of them is somebody taking a thing apart far enough to find out what it is, and then making it do something else.
Manly P. Hall had a phrase for the half of alchemy that became chemistry. He called it the earthly body, and he meant it as a demotion. To him it was the lesser half, the part left behind when the real work went somewhere we cannot measure.
He drew the line in exactly the right place. He just thought the half we can measure was the shallow one. It is the other way round.
The earthly body is simply the part we have instruments for. That is the whole difference, and things cross that line as the instruments arrive.
Humming does not feel like it is doing anything. It turns out humming raises the nitric oxide in your nose about fifteenfold, and nitric oxide is a signal your blood vessels run on. So the chanting in temples and churches all over the world was doing something measurable to the people doing it, thousands of years before anybody had a way to measure it. Music does the same and it goes further than your heart rate: tempo pulls your breathing along with it, and then your attention, which is why you already know which album gets you working. And the bacteria we spent a century treating as dirt turn out to be involved in most of what happens inside you.
We will go deeper into all of those in future Experiments.
None of it was ever magic. It was mechanism nobody could measure yet.
People chewed willow bark for pain for thousands of years without being able to say why it worked. It just did, so it got passed down. Then chemists went into the bark, pulled out the compound doing the work, rebuilt it into something you could dose and swallow, and that is the Aspirin sitting in your cupboard right now.
They knew it worked. They just could not explain it, and being unable to explain a thing is not the same as being wrong about it.
And that gap is wider than people think, because of how the system is built. Your doctor can only prescribe what has been proven, published and approved. He may privately think something else and still cannot say it, because the guideline is what protects him when a case goes wrong. Then there is the money already sitting on the old answer. A pharmaceutical company that spent a decade and a fortune developing a drug is not going to fund the study that ends it before it has paid for itself. And the correction takes years to reach your doctor's office.
I have been running experiments on myself for years with no research behind them, because they made sense to me and because they worked. Every year a few more of them get proven right. Many of those get their own Experiment.
Every craft is defined by its tools.
Freemasonry makes this literal. Its ritual is built around working tools, and every one of them had a real job on a building site before it was given a meaning. There is a piece coming on that.
The alchemists built their own, and theirs are still here. The furnace. Distillation, which separates a mixture by boiling one part off and catching it as it cools, and is the reason there is anything in your liquor cabinet. And fermentation, which sits on the same list of operations as distillation. Bread, wine, cheese, yogurt, vinegar, soy sauce, every pickle: all of it is a controlled rot somebody learned to steer, and there is an Experiment coming on what it does to your gut. And the bain marie, which is nothing more than a bowl sitting in a pot of hot water, so the heat arrives gently and nothing scorches, and it is still how you melt chocolate without burning it. It is named after Mary, an alchemist in Alexandria who is credited with inventing it about eighteen hundred years ago.
They never got their gold. The equipment outlived them anyway, because a goal dies with the person chasing it. The tools do not, and neither does anything they wrote down.
And the newest one is sitting on your desk. I know enough code to read it and fix a line, but not enough to build anything with it. This year I have been building software anyway, by describing what I want out loud to a machine that writes it. They call it vibe coding. It is a tool doing what tools have always done, which is put a craft in the hands of somebody who never trained for it. That one gets its own Experiment.
The first laboratory I had was a cupboard.
As a kid in Lebanon I had a children's closet in our bedroom, with a folding door that opened out into a desk. I wired it so a light came on by itself when the door opened, put plugs in it, and hung every tool I owned on the wall behind it. I was about eight. There were batteries, wires and motors everywhere, and I spent my time taking electronic toys apart and rebuilding them into something else. My first hammer and the multimeter I still use today both lived in that cupboard. Nobody told me there was a word for what I was doing.
The first real one I ever saw was in our family house in the village.
My grandfather had built a garage at the edge of the garden when he bought one of the first cars in the village, a Chrysler from the nineteen thirties. He was gone before I was born, and so was the car.
My grandmother let a man from the village use it. His name was Joseph. He was the only Armenian there and there were several Josephs, so everybody called him Joseph the Armenian. A modest man, and what he did was fix things. Everybody's things. And in exchange for the room he kept our house and our garden running.
What he built in there was a workshop. Soldering irons, tools, flasks, and the stool he sat on, which he had made himself. This was the seventies, so the equipment in that room would be half a century old now. It looked exactly like the thing you are picturing when I say the word alchemist.
He owned a large format view camera, the kind you stand behind with a cloth over your head, and he developed the pictures himself. He became the village photographer.
He passed away when I was very young, so I barely remember him. I remember his lab perfectly. It stayed shut and stayed exactly as he left it, and we would sneak in and play with his tools with no idea what most of them were for. When we moved to Canada a couple of them came with me. Two old metal files with wooden handles, and I still have them and I still use them.
The garage got its second life a long time later. My cousin had gone to New York to study photography, and he came home with an old camera like Joseph's that he found in Brooklyn. He turned the room into a studio and darkroom, and mounted a full exhibition shot on that camera.
My loft in Montreal is the same idea with better light. There is nothing in sight, and you would never guess what is in it, because every tool is put away in a cabinet until the day it is needed: electronics, carpentry, plumbing, scales, training gear, and every tool a proper kitchen needs. Whatever I need, I have it and I know exactly where it is. One of the most precious objects in the place is my professional gas stove, and it is the first thing I show off when I am walking someone through my kitchen setup.
I cook every day and I do not use recipes.
About fifty spice jars sit in the rack above the stove, and there are more everywhere else. Every oil, every salt, every pepper. It looks more like an alchemist's lab than a pantry.
I know what the ingredients do to each other, and that is the entire job. This one needs fat to open up. That one dies if it meets heat too early. Acid at the end lifts the whole plate and acid at the start kills it. I build from there, and I build fast, because I am not deliberating, I am running a reaction I already know the end of. Most of the time I do not even taste the food until it is served, because usually I am still fasting while I cook.
That is alchemy in the kitchen.
Baking is the other half of the same craft, and it is pure chemistry: measurement, time and heat, with no room to improvise, because the reaction is the recipe. I do not bake a lot, because I do not like following recipes and instructions. Baking does not give you that choice.
I know that firsthand. When I was opening the burger restaurants I wanted our own pure butter brioche buns, baked fresh every day, so I put my chef's hat on and worked them out with the bakers. Then we opened in another country and the same recipe came out wrong. Different flour, different water, different yeast, different humidity, a different oven. We spent weeks rebuilding it in every country we opened in, to arrive back at the same bun. There is a reason that when Italian pizza chefs travel to competitions, some of them bring their own water.
I also wanted a charcoal grill sitting directly on top of the condiment fridge, so the cook could turn the burger and dress it without moving his feet.
Impossible, they all said. The grill will destroy the fridge.
Heat goes up, I said.
I had about twenty of them custom built across three continents, and every one of them worked perfectly.
I do not take no for an answer, and it is not stubbornness. It is that something has to make sense to me before I will accept it, and if it does not, I am going to go and find out why. Most of the time the answer turns out to be that nobody ever actually checked.
My father is an agricultural engineer, which is not one of the most known branches. As a kid, my friends used to tease me about it. Does that mean he is a farmer?
Here is one of the hacks he would do. He would cut a T into the bark of a branch, lift the two flaps, slip in a bud taken from a different tree, and bind it with cloth. Grafting. The branch then grows whatever the bud came from, so one tree ends up carrying two different fruits. To us it was just a thing Dad did in the garden. Of course I had to try it myself.
I still joke that the one useful skill he taught me was how to pick a good watermelon by knocking on it and listening to what comes back. Which is acoustic testing, done with a hand and an ear, on a thing you otherwise cannot judge without cracking it open. That skill is less useful nowadays, because we have reverse engineered watermelons and nearly all of them now come out sweet.
The watermelon trick is the joke. What I actually took from him was the way an engineer looks at a thing before deciding anything about it: break it down first, then judge it. That is reverse engineering, and I have been doing it to everything since.
And when we got to university, many of my friends studied engineering. Civil, mechanical, electrical, industrial. Almost none of them ended up working in the field they studied. They run companies, they build things, they solve problems that have nothing to do with what was on the syllabus. Because what they really learned was not bridges or circuits. They learned a way of looking at a thing: take it apart, find out what it actually is, and then build something better out of it.
That is the whole thing.
A fire, a flask, and no idea that atoms existed. Newton at a furnace at two in the morning. Leonardo with the birds. A toilet company holding a silicon wafer steady. A grill on top of a fridge. Software described out loud by a man who cannot write it.
Same move, every time.
Alchemy needs a laboratory. Mine is a loft full of instruments, a brain that will not leave a thing alone, and an AI that never forgets. The most expensive laboratory ever built runs under a mountain on the Swiss border, and the one that taught me what a lab actually is was a garage in a village, run by a man who fixed his neighbors' things in exchange for the room.
And there is one you never get to leave. Your body and your brain. That is the lab I keep running experiments in, and most of what comes next is about what happens in there.
If you take one thing out of this
Pick one thing you have always been told is true, and were never really convinced about.
Then go and find out who said it first, and why, and whether it is still true now.
That is all alchemy ever was. Somebody refusing to accept the answer they were handed, and going to look.
Experiment 003 is complete. You just read it.
Georges
The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.
Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.