Atomic science

G.V.Akulov, V.I.Bogdashkin, V.A.Moskalev, V.L.Nikolaev, A.V.Tzimbalist, V.V.Shashov, V.G.Shestakov - Mobile betatron installation on energy of 25 MeV for radiative visualization of dynamic processes and flaw detection in field conditions. Atomic science and technique problems. Electrophysical equipment. -1987,v.23,p. 19-21. 

N.P. Dikiy, A.N. Dovbnya, N.A. Skakun, V.L. Uvarov, M.A. Khazhmuradov, B.I. Shramenko, Use of accelerators in geology, medicine, isotopes production and atomic power energetic. Problems of Atomic Science and Technology (PAST), Nuclear Physics Investigation Series, 2001, No. 1, pp. 26-35. 

C. A., Van Dorn, L.O. and Wilkinson, C.C. (2002) Most easily-ionized, closed-shell molecules known easier than the cesium atom. Science, 298, 1971-1974 ... 

Yet the resurrection of alchemical tropes at the birth of modern atomic science demands a third version of the story. Weart notes that the word transmutation offered a clue that could help explain almost every strange image that would later appear in nuclear energy tales (6). In order to understand fully the relationships between alchemical transmutation and the science of radioactivity, I take a path that branches off from both the traditional history of scientific discovery and the image history that Weart provides. In Modem Alchemy, I reconstruct the history of how scientific knowledge was produced and how it was elaborated in a broader cultural and spiritual context. That is, I look at science, its public elaboration, and its spiritual4 dimensions as mutually interacting realms, and tell a story of how science and occultism were entwined. 

But no account of occultism s engagement with modem atomic science could be even adequate without addressing the occult chemistry of one of the most successful occult institutions of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Theosophical Society. It is to Annie Besant and C. W. Lead-beater s efforts to ground Theosophical knowledge in a scientific research program that we must now turn. 

As the new atomic science, through ever more sophisticated detectors, opened a realm that could not be directly perceived by the physical senses, occult chemistry offered an alternative, a mode of scientific experimentation that could attempt to claim legitimacy through its scientific writing, charts, and visual illustrations of data while it also connected the human psyche to the subatomic world through a direct form of perception—that is, clairvoyance. (Theosophists argued that clairvoyance was indeed a sense faculty.) The conception of alchemy that supported such a vision was the spiritual alchemy we... 

Whether Wells s novel affected Soddy as much as Soddy s Interpretation of Radium influenced Wells is impossible to determine, but Soddy s move into monetary theory in the postwar period was, in some ways, already implicit in his alchemical vision of the new science.8 Modem alchemy—the atomic science of transmutation, with all its alchemical connections to spiritual systems, gold, and even greed—that Soddy had been exploring in his pre-War writings may have helped turn this Nobel Prize-winning chemist into what was commonly called a money crank. ... 

More recently, Robert A. Nelson s collection, Adept Alchemy (1998), continues to assert alchemy s scientific validity and its relationship to modem atomic science. Nelson s anthology intends to help alchemists working in the so-called dry path to transmutation. It includes extracts and summaries of work from the Middle Ages through the late twentieth century by Hermetic alchemists, chemists, and physicists, including the 1980 transmutation of bismuth into gold by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley lab. (Nelson also includes the more controversial methods of Joe Champion in the 1990s. Champion was convicted of fraud in Arizona because he had not produced the results he claimed for investors.) Across the century, then, followers of occult alchemy have clearly continued to make connections to modern atomic science. 

While arguing what is essentially the understanding of Heisenberg or virtually any other contemporary atomic physicist or chemist, the narrator rhetorically dresses up atomic science in occult guises for occult ends Electrons are quite as elusive as ghosts we are only aware of them as the conclusion to a colossal sorites. The evidence for ghosts is as strong as that for any other phenomenon in nature (217). 

See Weart on the figure of the dangerous scientist, who is capable of literally destroying the world with atomic science, though Weart does not focus on the dangers such a scientist poses to the economy (1988, 21-24). 

For an exploration of Sitwell s efforts to use alchemical tropes to reinvest atomic science with an ethical sensibility after Hiroshima, see Morrisson 2002. 

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