Why Are Their Hands Pointed In Different Directions?

The main figures, Plato to the left and his student, Aristotle, to the right, represent two different schools of philosophy. Plato is pointing his finger to the sky to show that to him the real world is spiritual and consists of concepts and ideas. Aristotle, by contrast, is reaching forward. He believes that knowledge is not “up there” but “out there,” grounded in the physical world.

Alchemists followed the philosophy of Aristotle. They believed that through experimentation, they could gather empirical evidence to learn about the nature of that world. And so, Miriam as an alchemist trusted the evidence from her experiments.

Miriam would have explained more in The Deadliest Lie, but Phoebe wasn’t so interested:

I could see that Phoebe had no interest in the alchemists that Judah had introduced me to and how they sought to apply Aristotle’s theory that everything in nature advances toward perfection deep in the ground over long periods of time. That's why Judah and Saul were developing a recipe to accelerate the natural process for perfecting copper into gold.

And so, alchemists including Isaac Newton used experimentation, data collection, and analysis to give us our foundational knowledge of chemistry.

In fact, it was Miriam’s fundamental knowledge of bubbles that enabled her to solve the mystery in The Deadliest Hate. So, sit down with a bubbly drink and click here.