The End of Alchemy? Principe, Lawrence M.
Osiris (Bruges),
01/2014, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The general abandonment of serious endeavor toward metallic transmutation represents a major development in the history of chemistry, yet its exact causes and timing remain unclear. This essay ...examines the fate of chrysopoeia at the eighteenth-century Académie Royale des Sciences. It reveals a long-standing tension between Académie chemists, who pursued transmutation, and administrators, who tried to suppress it. This tension provides background for Etienne-François Geoffroy’s 1722 paper describing fraudulent practices around transmutation. Although transmutation seems to disappear after Geoffroy’s paper, manuscripts reveal that most of the institution’s chemists continued to pursue it privately until at least the 1760s, long after widely accepted dates for the “demise of alchemy” in learned circles.
Around the globe several observatories are seeking the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs). These waves are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity and are generated, for ...example, by black-hole binary systems. Present GW detectors are Michelson-type kilometre-scale laser interferometers measuring the distance changes between mirrors suspended in vacuum. The sensitivity of these detectors at frequencies above several hundred hertz is limited by the vacuum (zero-point) fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. A quantum technology--the injection of squeezed light--offers a solution to this problem. Here we demonstrate the squeezed-light enhancement of GEO 600, which will be the GW observatory operated by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in its search for GWs for the next 3-4 years. GEO 600 now operates with its best ever sensitivity, which proves the usefulness of quantum entanglement and the qualification of squeezed light as a key technology for future GW astronomy.
A significant cache of hitherto unidentified manuscripts of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) has been discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg. These manuscripts comprise ...over 5000 pages of material. The documents relate almost entirely to metallic transmutation. About half of the material consists of alchemical treatises (most of them unpublished) by earlier authors - many relate to the transmuter Noël Picard, known as Dubois, executed in 1637 - and show Digby's careful comparison of variant readings in order to obtain the best text. The other half contains transcripts from the otherwise lost notebooks of Joseph Du Chesne, Samuel Cottereau Duclos (including several letters from Johann Rudolf Glauber), and others, as well as reports of experiments and processes carried out by a range of informants and by Digby himself. Significantly, these manuscripts bear witness to an important alchemical circle - of which Digby was a part - active in Paris during the 1650s and 1660s. The members of this circle traded manuscripts and information, and collaborated on a variety of alchemical projects; several members were also involved in other, better-known, scientific groupings of mid-century Paris.
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