Is alchemy a form of physics or chemistry?

At first I was a bit puzzled by your question, because alchemy was the kind of chemistry that was practiced, let’s say, in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was believed that by mixing different “elements” one could turn base metals into gold. From the perspective of our knowledge of atoms and chemical processes, it is now easy to understand that such a thing would never work. This is because the nature of an element results from the composition of the nucleus of atoms, namely the number of protons present in this atomic nucleus. Chemical processes are brought about by reorganization of the electrons and not by the composition of the atomic nucleus. That belongs more to the domain of physics. So if you’re referring to a process by which taking up a proton converts an element into another element, that’s physics, not chemistry, but not alchemy either. The latter was a kind of chemistry that started from a wrong idea of ​​what elements are and how elements come into being, thus doomed in its aims to failure. On the other hand, it has yielded a lot of chemical knowledge in that time.

Regards,