Alchemy as a lens. Not just lead-to-gold fraud, but a serious attempt to systematize transformation — of matter, of the self, of the world. The alchemists were proto-engineers running experiments without a framework that could contain the results.
What happens when you approach a problem with intense rigor and completely wrong models? You get real discoveries embedded in nonsense. Paracelsus. Jabir ibn Hayyan. Newton's private manuscripts. The line between alchemy and chemistry is methodology, not intention.