Forbidden Knowledge

Fraser, Kyle A. Zosimos of Panopolis and the Book of Enoch Alchemy as Forbidden Knowledge. Aries 4, no. 2 (2004) 125-147. 

Schultz, John Howard. Milton and forbidden knowledge. New York Modern Language Association of America, 1955. vii, 309p. 

William Eamon has articulated the multiple valences of secrecy in the sixteenth century as "esoteric wisdom, the domain of occult or forbidden knowledge, the artisan s cunning, the moral injunctions to protect secrets from the vulgus, and the political power that attended knowledge of secrets." Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 5. 

Shattuck, R. (1996), Forbidden Knowledge, New York St. Martin s Press. 

There is no doubt that the datura are powerful plants. Just growing one is a bewitching experience a palpable aura of temptation and forbidden knowledge seems to emanate from her. 

Rescher, N. (1987). Forbidden knowledge Moral limits of scientific research, as quoted in Oger, E. Hoeveel waardevriiheid In P. Reynaert (Ed.). Wetenschap en Waardevrijheid (p. 35). Leuven Garant, 1993. 

Examples of this type of reaction, where A, B, and C are atoms, are hard to find. Clear, well understood examples are particularly rare, and one must look instead in the uncertain field of elementary steps postulated as parts of complex mechanisms. A necessary condition for the reaction to occur is for the AB bond to be much stronger than the BC bond. The chances for success are presumably increased if AB has a low lying electronically excited state. They are further increased if formation of AB in the electronic ground state is forbidden by spin conservation. Since there is little detailed knowledge of even the few processes of the above type which have been proposed, we can give only a cursory discussion. 

To the writer s knowledge, it has not been pointed out that moderate deviations from the highest symmetry available to the chromophore, producing comparatively high intensities of Laporte-forbidden transitions and a variety of observable effects, are characteristic for soft central atoms. At an instantaneous picture, Cu(H20) 2 and other instances of Cu(II)06 are not cubic, i.e. having three equivalent Cartesian axes. 

Especially interesting is the case of forbidden disrotatory cyclisation, for which the special form of the dissection allows classification of the mechanism even without knowledge of the reaction path. As can be seen from the Fig. (4), no reaction path connecting the reactant and the product can avoid the region of the intermediate so that the reaction has to be classified as nonconcerted. Such cases are not, however, very frequent and in the majority of cases the topology of the dissection is such that without knowledge of the actual reaction path the classification of the reaction mechanism is impossible (Fig. 5). 

Optical properties are usually related to the interaction of a material with electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range from IR to UV. As far as the linear optical response is concerned, the electronic and vibrational structure is included in the real and imaginary parts of the dielectric function i(uj) or refractive index n(oj). However, these only provide information about states that can be reached from the ground state via one-photon transitions. Two-photon states, dark and spin forbidden states (e.g., triplet) do not contribute to n(u>). In addition little knowledge is obtained about relaxation processes in the material. A full characterization requires us to go beyond the linear approximation, considering higher terms in the expansion of h us) as a function of the electric field, since these terms contain the excited state contribution. 

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