In an unprecedented move, NASA scientists today announced the ultimate success of their attempts at alchemy and the transmutation of base metals into gold.
“Our profound powers have been distilled through generations into a chemistry of the subtlest kind,” project head Dr. Jim Green announced through a wreath of smoke and potent vapors, enfragranced with the most mysterious and ancient of spices from as far as the kingdom of Prester John. “Behold; I hold within my two hands the Panacea, which is the Goddess of Medicine’s answer to all mortal ills and ailments, a wondrous unguent with marvellous properties, the like of which have never been seen since the Balm of Gilead was lost to the armies of Gog and Magog.”
“Look you here,” cried Dr. Rosa Spencer, drawing the eyes of all in the room to her supple frame, whose hair was fragrant with cedar and cinnamon. “Moses, Isis, Cleopatra, Democritus, and Ostanes, witness me! I have combined my native powers with the choicest sciences, and I have produced the philosopher’s stone, through which all metals, no matter how base, are transmuted to silver and gold! Such riches as not even Solomon knew, and which an independent body of international experts that typically reviews such cases have verified!”
Results from the clinical trials were published Friday in Britain’s New Journal of Chemistry, amid great acclaim and universal rejoicing throughout the lands of all Christian men and free.
Lead scientist Jābir ibn Hayyān, a Saracen from a land of mangos and dragons, announced, “Children of Caduceus, attend me! I have harnessed Azoth! That sweet oil, the universal solvent, the secretion of the gods, that dissolves all materials save that of the container which holds it! Mercury’s animating spirit, that essential agent, without which transmutation is impossible – liquid lightning has been given to me! The universal life force is mine! This marks a turning point in the history of research and development, and my name shall be marked down as a king of science in the annals of learned men. Truly has it been said, Fire and Azoth are sufficient. This day, I have taught Death to forget my name!”
Truly have these doctors purified the soul as well as gold this day, and the government’s continued funding of the occultic sciences has been well-justified in the eyes of all the gods. The Elector of Saxony will be pleased and rise from his sickbed; surely before the year is out we will be communicating with angels and archangels and the flaming cherubim of Ezekiel’s visions. All hail science!
There was briefly a time for questions from the floor, during which reporters asked:
When the Philosophers speak of gold and silver, from which they extract their matter, are we to suppose that they refer to the vulgar gold and silver?
To which the men of science replied By no means; vulgar silver and gold are dead, while those of the Philosophers are full of life.
Science is ended! Go forth to love and serve the science!
Not here too. I come to The Toast to get away from the endless alchemy reposts clogging up my Facebook feed.
Finally.
Pics of the Tree of Life or GTFO.
This is all a lie perpetuated by Big Hermeticism!
Omg it’s you! <3
This is a beautiful reunion. *violins crescendo*
Lol, we knew where each other were, but a happy place to find we have gravitated Toastward!
Are we getting the band back together?
Slowly, it seems possible.
From the far corners of the internet, we shall gather them together, the lost sheep of Livejournal.
Some of us are still on Livejournal, thank you very much.
I’m on LJ, but I never remember to update my journal/read anything but Cleolinda’s posts. I’m a bad LJer.
Good gravy, I remember you as well! What a strange place suddenly to find someone I know, or at least know of 😀
Light and laughter,
SongCoyote
Yeah but everyone knows that alchemy causes autism.
Celestial Fire can’t melt steel beams!
and don’t forget the government also puts alchemical trails in the sky, probably for nefarious reasons
I shrieked with delight through this whole thing. Also forget alchemy, I need Dr. Spencer’s hair potion. 😛
May the science be with you.
“Percy, it’s green.”
Purest green!
“And the fact that this has baffled some of the most intelligent people since time began, this doesn’t bother you?”
“Oh, no, I like a challenge!”
Just going to leave this here… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InetFoC7yG8
Sort of related, “Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England” by Keith Thomas is currently on sale in Amazon’s Kindle store, $1.99. Seems like it might be of interest to Toasties.
It’s easy, you just need very small tweezers and a boy holding a crucible full of protons.
Where’s the pull quote from Dr. John Dee?
True without error, certain and most true.
Alas, I will rue this day forevermore! Of an evening, a man came to my door and said to me: What wouldst thou sayeth, if I I had that knowledge that the medieval alchemists lacked, in their foolhardy pursuits. What wouldst thou sayeth, if I could turn base lead into heavenly gold?
And I scorned his words, and believed him not! Indeed, I believed no Man to be capable of such a glorious Deed, and bade him leave in such a headstrong, obstinate manner, that he was never seen again in those Parts. What a fool was I?
Heed my words, and welcome all such wayward Alchemists to your doors, that ye not be like Me!! I tell you this story true.
[only slightly edited True Story]
Not to bring down the whole room, but I firmly believe that we absolutely would have figured out the secret to alchemy by now, had the library at Alexandria survived.
://///////////////////////////////////
MY HEART.
There is a rather good if trope-y movie about this called “Agora.” Pro: the work on creating a believable fourth century Alexandria, and Rachel Weisz is Hypatia. Cons: there’s only one named woman in the whole shebang. Also they WRECK a LIBRARY.
God, that scene was horrifying.
I know. And it was very far from being the only horrifying scene in that movie.
And oh, G-d, we’re still kind of doing it, but in the name of Mammon instead of the name of G-d: http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-we…
To think of those long-ago Alexandrian librarians (or librarians in Baghdad- (this time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_%2… and others) or librarians in Louvain) who must have tried to salvage what they could and keep it for future generations. Destroying a library is a crime against humanity and a sin against the Holy Ghost.
As an antidote, I recommend the scene from Terry Pratchett’s novel Small Gods, in which The Librarian magically appears in a burning library and starts scooping books (scrolls) into a sack and takes them to the library of Unseen University. It is comforting to imagine that he did that in Baghdad and Alexandria too and that those books still exist somewhere in L-space.
Sadly, it’s still happening for religious and cultural reasons as well.Look at Jaffna and Sarajevo and Cambodia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_l…
Oh, no.
It’s so horrifying.
Evil.
(And I’d forgotten about the Fisheries research. Another reason to hope Harper enjoys Hell.)
On the other hand, Diefenbaker ordered the Arrow blueprints destroyed and yet: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Avro-CF-105-Arrow-MK-1-Avr…
So there is hope yet. Stuff may have gone home in backpacks, briefcases and purses. Also floppy discs and cds.
Yay for Subversive Scholars!
Evil.
(And I'd forgotten about the Fisheries research. Another reason to hope Harper enjoys Hell.)
We actually do have the capability to transmute base metals into gold, and for quite a while now; it was done from bismuth in 1980, according to Scientific American: John Matson – Fact or Fiction?: Lead Can Be Turned into Gold. The yield is very low and the equipment to do it is very expensive, so it’s not currently economically feasible, but it can be done.
More sinisterly, plutonium is transmuted uranium. Actually, you get plutonium synthesis for free with most nuclear reactor designs– but the isotope that’s best for weapons gets turned into an isotope that’s bad for weapons if it stays in the reactor too long, so weapons and dual-use reactors have to be specially designed to make it easy to use them for weapons-grade plutonium production. (Chernobyl’s Reactor #4, the RBMK that blew up in 1986, was such a dual-use reactor.) Three kilos of gold is worth no more than US$113K as I type this, but for three kilos of weapons-grade plutonium– enough to initiate a thermonuclear bomb of arbitrarily high yield, in the right hands– you could pretty much name your own price.
I had a chemistry textbook, in high school (so, early 1990s), which claimed that gold had been made out of mercury in a particle accelerator—twice: once to see if it would work, and again to make sure the first result wasn’t a fluke. It went on, along the lines of that article, to observe that the yield was minuscule and the cost enormously more than the gold was worth.
And then it added this delightfully plausible factoid: instead of making gold this way, scientists regularly do the reverse, and make mercury out of gold, because that produces isotopically pure mercury, which can be used to improve the precision of atomic clocks.
Cool. I went looking for more detail about that, and found that nowadays, at least, the mercury atomic clocks can avoid the isotope problem by using only one atom of mercury: Mercury Atomic Clock Keeps Time with Record Accuracy.
Yay for Subversive Scholars!