- 1
Alchemy was an old, mostly disproven practice from long ago in which people tried to turn ordinary metal into gold and searched for a way to live forever. It later grew into the modern science of chemistry. Today, people also use the word figuratively for any process that seems to create something valuable, like 'the alchemy of good teamwork'.
煉金術；(比喻)神奇的轉化過程
組成from an Arabic word meaning roughly 'the chemistry' — this old practice is also where the modern word 'chemistry' comes from.
同家族的字
- chemistrygrew out of the same root — alchemy is the old practice, chemistry is the modern science that followed it
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
alchemynoun/ˈælkəmi/
- 1
The premodern and early modern study of physical changes, particularly in Europe, Arabia, and China; and chiefly in pursuit of an elixir of immortality, a universal panacea, and/or a philosopher's stone able to transmute base metals into gold, eventually developing into chemistry.
- And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Æsop makes the fable; that, when he died, told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried underground in his vineyard; and they digged over all the ground, and gold they found none; but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man’s life.
- There were also letters to scientists and other scholars, pages of derivations of mathematics and physics formulae, and copious writings on alchemy and religion. […] The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy.
- 2
The causing of any sort of mysterious sudden transmutation.
- O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts: And that which would appear offence in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
- 1640, George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum; or, Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc., in The Remains of that Sweet Singer of the Temple George Herbert, London: Pickering, 1841, p. 143, No alchymy to saving.
- 3
slangcomputingengineeringmathematicsAny elaborate transformation process or algorithm.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。