Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

In the late Middle Ages, science took a wrong turn and came to the wrongheaded conclusion that alchemy didn’t work. People had struggled for years to turn base metals into gold; when they found they couldn’t do this in the way they expected, they gave up. Later on, Newton really didn’t help the cause by filling our heads with thermodynamics and the conservation of energy – where science hopelessly misled us was that it imbued in all of us the idea that you can’t create something out of nothing. It taught us that you can’t create a valuable metal out of a cheap one, or that you can’t create energy in one place or form without destroying it somewhere else. While all this is perfectly true in the narrow sphere of physics, it is hopelessly wrong when it comes to the very different business of psychology. In psychology these laws do not apply: one plus one can equal three.