Transmutations continued

Placzek pointed out that uranium and thorium both exhibit a capture resonance for neutrons with medium-range energies of about 25 electron volts. That meant, first of all, that although fission was one behavior uranium could exhibit under neutron bombardment, capture and subsequent transmutation continued to be another. Bohr was not ever to be rid of those inconvenient transuranians. Some of them were real. 

Transmutation continues to be an active area of study for the Pd/D system [3], but because of possible contamination and molecular ion interferences this area is even more controversial than the excess heat found in cold fusion experiments. Among the leading contributors to transmutation results is the team at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, led by Iwamura [45], Transmutation results generally report the detection of new elements such as copper or zinc that were not initially present in the system [3]. Occasionally, these are reported with non-natural isotope distributions, but technical challenges make these results less certain than the heat, helium, and tritium results. 

As the transmutation rush continued across 1913 and 1914, the Alchemical Society continued to engage with scientific research. The engineer Herbert Chatley, in his December 12, 1913, talk to the Society entitled Alchemy in China, discussed Ramsay s transmutations, presumably his radon-induced supposed transmutations from copper to lithium and his observed transmutations of radium to helium. Chatley opined that a more gradual change would produce gold as one of the descending steps (37). And the December... 

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. 

The nuclear reaction involving the bombardment of curium with calcium that directly produced element 116 occurred on December 6, 2000, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in cooperation with personnel of the Lawrence-Livermore Berkeley Group. This nuclear reaction resulted in the production of a few atoms of the isotope ununhexium-292, which has a half-life of 0.6 milliseconds and emits four neutrons. Uuh-292 is also the most stable isotope of element 116 as it continues to decay into elements with Z numbers of 114, 112, 110, 108, and 106, plus emitting four alpha particles for each transmutation. (Z numbers are the number of protons in the nuclei of atoms.)... 

As the Aphorism states "Cyclicity is akin to Rhythm, and arises hy reason of it. All events tend to move in Cyclic Trend—in constant circular movement of continuous recurrence. The only escape from Cyclicity is found in the process of transmutation into Spirality. This is accomplished by advancing Ike Central Feint cf Motion, The ton version of die Circle into the Spiral is one of the highest forms of mental Alchemy."... 

Bernard s relatives in Treves considered him mad and would have nothing to do with him, so he decided to retire to the island of Rhodes and live there in modest circumstances. But then the inevitable happened. Bernard met a monk who was as enthusiastic as he was about learning the secret of transmutation. However, neither of them had the funds to buy the materials needed to carry out alchemical experiments. Bernard mortgaged what remained of his Italian estates, and once again he set to work. He worked with the same obsession as before and lived, slept, and ate in his laboratory. Even when he had exhausted the last of his money, he continued his quest, reading and rereading alchemical works. 

As additionally appears to have been the case of a covert transmutation of Marcel Duchamp into Rrose Selavy, Maier says, that this [mutation of gender] does actually happen in the Philosophical Work need not be a surprise. There are some people, if we may believe the stories, who also change their sex. Thus the Poets tell us about the sex changes of Cenea Iphis and Tiresias [and various others]. In more modern times, continues Maier,... 

Continued failure of the alchemists labors in their efforts to transmute metals into gold may have forced them to expand their aims to provide... 

---