True, but on the flip side imagine how many people tried transmuting lead into gold, thinking the previous attempts simply used the wrong approach.
That definitely needs a citation. The Wikipedia page mentions no such motivation, and describes Alchemy as a proto-scientific endeavor aimed at understanding the natural world.
If you went back in time to an age where people were working hard on changing lead into gold and your mission was to help them succeed as soon as possible, your best bet would probably be something like teaching them the decimal place value system, or how to express algebraic problems as geometric ones. But if you also told people that this knowledge was the key to solving the two problems they were working on, "how to make very pure versions of a substance", and "how to understand what makes specific types of matter different" you would reasonably have been regarded as deluded.
I don’t see how that follows. It’s just a truism that nobody figured out how to do it until someone finally did. The fact that the path wasn’t obvious at various points in the past seems irrelevant.
> But if you also told people that this knowledge was the key to solving the two problems they were working on, "how to make very pure versions of a substance", and "how to understand what makes specific types of matter different" you would reasonably have been regarded as deluded.
If they were listening to you at all, it’s not at all obvious why this part would sound deluded.
How is it any more exotic than any of the failed alchemies?
As far as I can see they were all quite abstract.
This one that happens to be correct, no less so.
The point is that 'just keep trying' would not have been a good strategy.
Yes, it’s possible that there are some concepts we have yet to think of.
See: https://numinous.productions/ttft/
The explanation of how hard it would be to come up with Arabic numerals if you didn’t already have them covers this.
However the point here is that we can learn from this, and we now know a lot more about how to do hard things.
‘It’s too hard and we should give up’ (the countervailing straw man) is even less supported by history than ‘keep trying’.
It just requires a particle accelerator and the amounts are so tiny that it’s ridiculously expensive. But hey, we can still do it!