Transmutation modern

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. 

Ramsay and the other modern alchemists/chemists following his lead believed that they had found the proper energy sources for such syntheses of heavier elements in radium emanation—and eventually other sources of energy, including cathode rays and X-rays—to try to cause transmutations.20... 

The preceding chapters have portrayed the consequences for science and for occult alchemy of their mutual interest in material transmutation. This chapter explores different cultural consequences of modem alchemy in relationship to monetary anxieties during the Depression Era. In particular, it narrates how the idea of modern alchemy intensified questioning of the gold standard and of the moral foundation of scientific aspiration. By the late 1920s and... 

Modern alchemy s claims that atoms were not indivisible and immutable and that humans could effect elemental transmutation entailed a rethinking of the nature of money during a moment of economic and monetary crisis. 

The modern alchemy stories published during the Hoover years demonstrated a real anxiety about the economy s destruction via transmutational attacks on the Federal Reserve and on banks gold reserves. The Federal Reserve had, of course, been created to avoid monetary crises like those in the bank panics of 1893 and 1907. But in the early 1930s, as the gold standard... 

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. 

Lancet. 1907. Modern Alchemy Transmutation Realised. (July 27, 1907) 244. 

Modern science is very different from the descriptions of early systems of thought. Early philosophers and theorists lacked the objective methodologies and rational investigative processes required for the controlled experiments that led to modern science. They were more concerned with seeking universal cures for sickness, transmutation of base metals into gold, and mysticism in general. Most, but not all, ancient philosophers depended more on the written words of experts than on their own observations and insights. 

Ambivalence, as we use this term in everyday speech, has no place in modern science. Even premodern science seems troubled by ambivalence. For if gold can be transmuted from base metals, this must mean that it can be transmuted back into base metals. The Renaissance philosopher-critic Benedetto Varchi cites Aristotle on the generation of species as an argument against the truth of alchemy " ... 

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