Basic Ideas and Themes

If the alchemist is genuine, he may inadvertently make a discovery that proves useful, but not in the way the alchemist or his backer had hoped. Alcoholic distillation was discovered in the alchemist s laboratory, for instance, and so was phosphorus. If the alchemist is not genuine, he will exhaust his backer s funds, and continue to move from town to town, impressing the rich and gullible with his laboratory demonstrations, and hoping that the authorities don t catch up with him. 

The swindlers are the ones who usually find their way into literature and painting. Ben Jonson s play is perhaps the most famous example, overshadowing Chaucer s earlier Canon sYeoman s Tale. The two works deal with false alchemy, and Jonson and Chaucer seem to have had first hand knowledge of the subject  

Albertus Magnus (1193—1280) listed the qualities that the genuine alchemist must possess  

First He should be discreet and silent, revealing to no one the result of 

Second He should reside in an isolated house in an isolated position. 

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Martin, Sean. Alchemy alchemists. Revised updated edition ed. 2001 reprint, Harpenden Pocket Essentials, 2003. 96p. ISBN 1-603047-52-8 Introduction Basic ideas and themes A brief history of alchemy in the West A brief history of alchemy in the East Moden alchemy The Hermetic Museum (brief biographies of more than 100 alchemists) Suggestions for further reading. 

In The Sciences An Integrated Approach, Trefil and Hazen present great unifying ideas or themes in science and include a web of how the great idea has been applied in different science disciplines. In many cases, the application in the different disciplines requires an understanding of basic chemistry. For example, one of their great ideas across the sciences states Ecosystems, interdependent collections of living... 

More variations on these themes could be discussed, but the basic idea should be clear. Through absorption, stimulated emission, and stimulated scattering, it should become possible to exert considerable influence on coherent molecular motion in ground and excited electronic states. 

One of the specihc types of solutions for ab initio electronic structure was direct methods wherein intermediate quantities (two-electron integrals) normally stored on disk were recomputed when needed [7]. Binkley s report went on to say that the effort to adapt to the special features of vector and parallel architectures led to the production of better scalar algorithms. In other words, the basic ideas behind algorithms were influenced by the technology, in this case, computer architecture, and this is really a very significant and constant theme in the evolution of theoretical and computational chemistry. 

See Americo Castro s seminal essay, Incarnation in Don Quixote with its argument that the basic theme of Don Quixote is life as a process creative of itself, in Stephen Gilman and Edmund King, eds., An Idea of History Selected Essays of Americo Castro (Columbus, Ohio Ohio State University Press, 1977). Castro s work contains invaluable material for the serious comparative study of the two... 

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