Alchemy
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Alchemy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For well over a thousand years, alchemists from Alexandria to the Islamic world to Renaissance Europe tried to turn cheap metals into gold and to brew a cure for death itself. They failed at both, but along the way they built the first laboratories, invented equipment that cooks and chemists went on using, and stumbled on discoveries nobody was looking for. This quiz covers the big ideas and the legendary goals, the planetary metals and the symbols alchemists used to guard their recipes, the vessels and furnaces of the workshop, and the famous names: physicians, friars, emperors and at least one great physicist who kept his experiments quiet. It also follows alchemy into novels, plays, manga and modern physics. The questions suit curious beginners as much as history-of-science fans. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing how a failed search for gold ended up founding chemistry.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alchemist Hennig Brand boiled down buckets of urine hunting for gold and instead found which glowing element?
Phosphorus
Phosphorus glowed pale green in the jar, so Brand named it after the Greek for light-bearer. He needed about 1,500 gallons of urine to make just 120 grams.
Q 02Which piece of kitchen equipment is traditionally credited to a woman alchemist of ancient Alexandria?
Bain-marie
The bain-marie, or Mary's bath, is traditionally credited to Mary the Jewess, whom later writers called the first true alchemist of the Western world.
Q 03Chinese alchemists hunting for a potion of immortality are thought to have stumbled on which explosive mixture?
Gunpowder
Gunpowder probably began as a lab accident: old Chinese texts warn of mixtures of sulfur, saltpeter and honey that burned experimenters' hands and faces and even their houses.
Q 04Johann Böttger, an alchemist jailed by Augustus the Strong to make gold, instead gave Europe which luxury material?
Porcelain
Porcelain was the next best thing to gold for a monarch always short of money: Böttger's hard-paste recipe of 1708 led to the Meissen factory two years later.
Q 05Which English scientist wrote far more about alchemy than about optics or physics, the fields that made him famous?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton's alchemy papers were judged unfit to publish and resurfaced at a 1936 auction, where economist John Maynard Keynes bought many and called him the last of the magicians.
Q 06Which legendary prize did alchemists chase in the belief it could turn base metals such as lead into gold?
Philosopher's stone
The philosopher's stone was also said to heal every illness and add years to anyone who drank a tiny piece of it dissolved in wine.
Q 07Which Paris scribe, a character in the first Harry Potter novel, won a posthumous reputation as an immortal alchemist?
Nicolas Flamel
Nicolas Flamel was a real man who drafted contracts and letters for a living and died in 1418; the legend that he made gold and cheated death grew up about two centuries later.
Q 08Which Brazilian author wrote The Alchemist, a novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy seeking treasure at the pyramids?
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho wrote the book in Portuguese, and it became an international bestseller that has been translated into more than 65 languages.
Q 09Which symbol, found in Tutankhamun's tomb and later adopted by alchemists, shows a snake eating its own tail?
Ouroboros
The ouroboros takes its name from the Greek for tail-eating, and one early alchemical drawing of it encloses Greek words meaning the all is one.
Q 10Which Swiss alchemist, born Theophrastus von Hohenheim, taught that only the dose makes a substance poisonous?
Paracelsus
Paracelsus was probably also the first to give zinc its modern name, and he treated syphilis with carefully measured doses of mercury.
Q 11Which mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids did alchemists prize because it could dissolve gold?
Aqua regia
Aqua regia means royal water, and during the Second World War chemist George de Hevesy used it to dissolve two gold Nobel medals so the Nazis could not seize them.
Q 12What name did alchemists give the miniature artificial human supposedly grown in a sealed flask kept warm in horse dung?
Homunculus
Homunculus is Latin for little person, and the sixteenth-century recipe called for forty days of steady warmth before the creature was said to stir.
Q 13Which legendary potion, sought by alchemists from China to Europe, was said to grant eternal youth to whoever drank it?
Elixir of life
Q 21Emperor Rudolf II, intrigued by astrology and alchemy, moved the Habsburg court from Vienna to which city?
Prague
Prague became the Habsburg capital in 1583 under an emperor whose other hobbies included horses, clocks and collecting rarities.
Q 22Which Swiss psychiatrist argued in Psychology and Alchemy that alchemical symbols surface in modern patients' dreams?
Carl Jung
Carl Jung built the book around the dreams of one patient, who turned out to be the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
Q 23Which English poet exposed a swindling alchemist in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, one of his stories told by pilgrims?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer has the Canon and his Yeoman ride up late to join the Canterbury pilgrims, and the servant promptly exposes his master's shady business.
The elixir of life often did the opposite: Chinese recipes were laced with mercury and lead, and are thought to have shortened the life of the Ming dynasty's Jiajing Emperor.
Q 14Alchemists paired each of the seven known metals with a heavenly body; which metal belonged to Mars?
Iron
Iron shared the war god's planet and its symbol, and chemists kept calling compounds of the metal martial into the seventeenth century.
Q 15In the alchemists' scheme linking seven metals to seven heavenly bodies, which planet was matched with tin?
Jupiter
Jupiter lent tin its symbol, and compounds of the metal went on being called jovial into the seventeenth century.
Q 16A sixteenth-century Swiss physician's theory of three primes added which everyday substance to sulfur and mercury?
Salt
Salt stood for the body, the solid and permanent part of any material, while sulfur was the soul that burned and mercury the fluid, changeable spirit.
Q 17The legendary alchemical sage Hermes Trismegistus merges the Greek god Hermes with which ibis-headed Egyptian god?
Thoth
Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and magic, and Greeks in Egypt worshipped the two as one in his old temple city, which they renamed Hermopolis.
Q 18Which short, cryptic text credited to Hermes Trismegistus gave occultists the maxim 'as above, so below'?
Emerald Tablet
The Emerald Tablet came with a tale of its discovery in the tomb of Hermes, and medieval alchemists read it as coded instructions for making gold.
Q 19Which Anglo-Irish author of The Sceptical Chymist attacked the four-element theory yet practised alchemy himself?
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle is widely regarded as the first modern chemist, and the popularity of his book helped push the old doctrine of four elements into disuse.
Q 20Brussels physician Jan Baptist van Helmont coined which everyday science word, taking it from the Greek for chaos?
Gas
Gas was his word for the wild vapour given off by burning charcoal, which he recognised as the same stuff released by fermenting grape juice.
Q 24Which playwright wrote The Alchemist, a 1610 comedy first performed by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men?
Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson's play is generally considered his best comedy, and the poet Coleridge ranked its plot among the three most perfect in literature.
Q 25Glenn Seaborg's team used a particle accelerator to turn a few thousand atoms of which metal into gold?
Bismuth
Bismuth became gold at a Berkeley laboratory in 1980, but making it this way is estimated to cost a trillion times the market price of the metal.
Q 26Which ruler, buried with the Terracotta Army, sent ships full of young men and women to seek immortality?
Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huang took to calling himself The Immortal, and one hypothesis holds that a mercury potion from his court alchemists is what killed him.
Q 27Which author from Panopolis in Roman Egypt wrote the oldest known books on alchemy around 300 AD?
Zosimos
Zosimos called his writings Cheirokmeta, Greek for things made by hand, and he is the main source for what is known about Mary the Jewess.
Q 28Which name did Renaissance alchemists give their theorized universal solvent, a liquid able to dissolve any substance?
Alkahest
Alkahest has no agreed origin as a word, because the physician who first wrote about it left no trace of where the name came from.
Q 29Which court astronomer and adviser to Elizabeth I spent much of his time on alchemy and conversations with angels?
John Dee
John Dee owned one of the largest libraries in England at his home in Mortlake, and came back from his travels on the Continent to find it vandalised.
Q 30Alchemists drew each of the four classical elements as a triangle; which element was a plain triangle pointing upward?
Fire
Fire was tied to sulfur in alchemy, and tradition held that metals were slowly incubated by it in the womb of the Earth while alchemists merely sped things up.