This Eurocentric view fails to take into account the work of the Chinese alchemists, who also developed methods for manipulating minerals and altering the state of substances. Like western alchemists, the Chinese were obsessed with creating gold but, rather than creating gold for wealth, their obsession was with creating gold of the utmost purity for creating an elixir of life and a way to achi...

A serious scientific journal seems to be the wrong place for a paper on alchemy. However, we believe that the history of science includes knowledge of the complex relations between specific scientific disciplines and what is called the “world-view” (Weltanschauung): the image of the world corresponding to a given stage of cultural development. The world-view, born of the “marriage” of Aristotle...

hree hundred years ago, alchemy became chemistry. Arcane art became science when its practitioners abandoned secrecy to embrace process transparency and peer review. Today, software engineering is undergoing a similar transition, moving from closed to open source development. Only when we complete this transition, adopting open source development as a normal practice, can software development a...

the subject of love has been a source of inspiration for poets and men of letters as well as a basic element for many literary works in the world and especially in the oriental literary works. arabic poets have also placed the subject of love as the progenitor of the seminal and enduring works and have presented different interpretations of it depending on their personality, their life experien...

When we know and recognize one another, our souls join with those of others. This is called ta’aruf in the parlance of the Qur’an. Ta’aruf increases love and unity, as it decreases violence and enmity. Knowing one another occurs in several ways. One way to know others is to love the same thing that they do. This means that several people will love a similar spiritual being. Fr...