While continuing to clean out our library — to be sure we don’t have any “banned” books, I ran across an interesting little book about Alchemy.
For thousands of years, maybe more, alchemists have had two goals — transmuting base metals into gold, and discovering the Elixir of Life, which would grant immortality to those who drank it. So far, not one alchemist has changed lead ( or any other metal) into gold. And everyone who drank various elixirs has since died — quite a few of them from the elixirs they drank. All in all a pretty spectacular history of failures.
But these guys weren’t all quacks. A guy that today is revered as the father of modern physics and the inventor of calculus, Sir Issac Newton, dabbled in alchemy. In fact, one of his papers describes a recipe for the Philosophers’ Stone, a legendary substance that reputedly could turn base metals like iron and lead into gold. And — the recipe he described had come from his older contemporary, the famed British chemist Robert Boyle.
(Alchemists believed the philosophers’ stone could transform common metals like lead into silver or gold and could be used as an elixir of life for health and longevity. It was considered the most pure and perfect of all substances. Alchemical images often include pairs of animals or people uniting to become one. These represent the combining and refining of different ingredients into a new form — the philosophers’ stone.)
So — how could so many have failed so often for so long….. there are a lot of reasons, but the underlying reason is that alchemists — all of them — didn’t have a clue as to how the universe really functions. A lot of them were diligent experimenters and did their research, but they invariably started from bad premises. Bad premises get you bad results in science — and — alchemy.
I’m pretty sure you can make gold from other elements — maybe not easy, but start with a huge cloud of hydrogen floating around the universe, then collapse it into a supergiant star. Let that star run through its natural life, fusing hydrogen into helium, and helium into carbon, then oxygen, silicon, and iron, and on and on through the process of thermonuclear fusion in its core. Eventually, the star will completely collapse and explode in a supernova and shoot out millions of tons of gold and other heavy elements. So theoretically, the process is pretty simple.
But all the alchemists were woefully ignorant of atomic theory, or even the periodic table. But they did have some practical knowledge of metals and ores, learned from the experience of metallurgists and other metal workers. And they believed that everything in the universe was comprised of varying amounts of four elements — earth, fire, air and water. So if you presume everything is made from those four things, the changing one metal to another is just a matter of rearranging the proportions — typically through the use of acidic solvents and alloys. That makes perfect sense, if all matter is actually comprised of the four elements — but — it’s not.
Alchemy was known to ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Indians as “the Art.” That’s probably because they thought that the seven known metals (gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron and mercury) were in some way aligned with the seven major planets in the sky (the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Mercury.) So astrology and alchemy came together making it a mystical art as well as a practical endeavor. If these were the guiding principles of alchemy, it’s no wonder alchemists didn’t make much progress in terms of making gold.
Of course, some alchemists put on a good show and claimed to make gold. In the 3rd century B.C., Bolos of Mende, writing under the name of Democritus, claimed in his treatise, Physica et Mystica, to have made gold. But for anyone wanting to do the same, his written directions for changing other metals into gold were extremely vague, and there was a lot astrological mumb-jumbo thrown in that further muddied the waters.
Alchemists certainly had a good idea, but their search for gold has produced massive, never-ending, total and complete failure.
I once heard that to obtain something, something of equal value must be lost.
But maybe William Shakespeare said it best — “You are an alchemist; make gold of that.”
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