The Philosopher's stone turning copper to gold, thousands of years of endeavour

It’s been said that there are three signs of the coming of age of humanity. 

• transmutation of the elements - a scientific break through were every element can be made to acquire the density, form, and substance of each and every other element
• one universal language and script will be chosen this will be the cause of unity, and the greatest instrument for promoting harmony and civilisation.
• kingship, no one will accept to bear the weight of kingship. Kingship will remain with none willing to bear alone its weight. This will be a sign of wisdom among mankind.

The hunger for gold goes way back.  Tombs have been discovered in 1973 along the lower Danube valley in Bulgaria which turned out to be the largest and most ancient assemblage of gold artefacts in human history.  

Dated from the 5th Millennium (4560-4450 BC) there were 3000 gold pieces among 62 grave sites.  Obviously, mankind has long had a yearning for gold.  There is something about this shiny metal that retains its exciting golden glow despite burial, time or even being submerged at sea.  There are reasons so many cultures around the world used gold as their form of money.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) (who knew a lot!) defined the characteristics of a good form of money:  He reckoned it should have four characteristics. 

1. It must be durable. Money must stand the test of time and the elements. It must not fade, corrode, or change through time.
2. It must be portable. Money hold a high amount of 'worth' relative to its weight and size.
3. It must be divisible. Money should be relatively easy to separate and re-combine without affecting its fundamental characteristics.
4. It must have intrinsic value

Obviously gold satisfies all these important criterion.

Such was the desire for this metal that from the Bronze age there has been the practice of alchemy - a quest to transmute base metal like lead into gold.  Indeed in the third century BC Greek and Jewish scholars were able to study ancient scripts on alchemy in the great library of Alexandria.  Although most of these alchemists were charlatans who claimed falsely the ability to transform base metal in to gold, many were actually also wonderful chemists and scientists including Robert Boyle, Paracelsus and Isaac Newton.  Tradition said that the transformation could be carried out by the use of the Philosopher’s stone, a dense red waxy substance that, it was thought, enabled transmutation of lead to gold.  

In fact so worried did people become about alchemy, laws were routinely passed banning it. 

Pope John XII issued a papal bill against counterfeiting currency by means of alchemy in 1217.  King Henry in 1403 banned alchemy in England.  Warnings about the Philosopher’s stone are found in the Canterbury Tales, published in 1478 (“any man may come upon that stone, I say, as for the best, let it alone”).   

Hunger for gold was pretty universal but can have dire consequences.  In 1532 when the Spanish arrived in Peru, the local Incas thought they were Gods and offered them gold as gifts.  The Incas referred to gold as the “sweat of the sun”. There is an account of the response such gifts had on the Spanish invaders from an Inca account. 

“They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; they seemed to be transported by joy, as if their hearts were illumined and made new.  The truth is that they longed and lusted for gold.  Their bodies swelled with greed and their hunger was ravenous, they hungered like pigs for that gold.”

The Spanish Conquistador Franciso Pizarro captured the Inca leader Atahual and demanded a ransom of a roomful of gold for his release.  Despite gold flowing in huge amounts Pizarro reneged on the deal and put Atahual to death anyway.  The exquisite priceless golden artefacts were melted down into bars to be sent back to Spain. In addition, within  a few decades of the Spanish arrival, thanks in large part to the diseases they brought, the 16 million population of Peru was reduced by 93%.  The Spanish desire and hunger for gold had disastrous consequences for the native population of South America.

Perhaps the Philosopher’s stone was really Cinnabar, mercury II sulphide which was used in gold processing.  It certainly had the right colour.  

Cinnabar, mercury II sulphide

Mercury reacted with the gold in rocks to form a mercury-gold amalgam which was then heated, vaporising the mercury to obtain the gold.  It certainly did not transmute the base element into gold but its ability to extract gold from ore made it very popular and must have been an impressive sight.  Unfortunately, the fumes of the mercury were highly toxic and caused shaking, loss of sense and finally death to those exposed.  Being sent to a gold mine was a dangerous occupation as a slave and their lives were all too short.

The desire for gold has long afflicted governments as well as individuals.  In 1933, the president of the US, Franklin Roosevelt, outlawed the private ownership of gold coins, gold bullion and gold certificates of American citizens forcing them to sell all that they had to the Federal Reserve.  Those who did not sell their gold would receive a penalty of $10,000 and/or 5 to 10 years in prison.  The Federal reserve bought the gold for $20.67 per ounce and their reserves went from $4 billion to $12 billion as a result of the initiative.  The price of the gold also surged to $35 per ounce creating an instant profit for the government.  Fort Knox holds 2.3% of all the gold ever refined throughout human history.  

Fort Knox

Our hunger for gold is perhaps most clearly highlighted by the scale of one of the largest gold mines in the world. 

The Grasberg Gold Mine in Indonesia

Back to the seemingly ridiculous hunt for the philosopher’s stone and achieving the mythical goal of transforming base metals into gold. The problem is that every element has a certain number of protons defining it as Carbon, lead, Mercury etc.  Each element’s atom contains a set number of protons (positively charged) in its nucleus and an equal number of electrons (negatively charged) surround it.  For example, gold has 79 protons, copper has 29 protons, mercury has 80 protons and lead has 82 protons. So normal chemical reactions which involve only the interaction of outer electrons in various bonding arrangements with other elements were never going to be capable of transmuting one element into another.  The nucleus despite the heating, mixing, burning, boiling strategies, reactions with other chemicals was never going to change the number of its protons. That essential essence which defined the element, its very heart and soul, the nucleus would remain unaltered despite centuries of the best minds throwing themselves into the task.  For years we have, in fact, sniggered at these charlatans, the alchemists, and felt a vague embarrassment that such famous names as Isaac Newton or indeed Thomas Aquinas, could have wasted their considerable talents at such a dead end task.

The truth is far more startling.  Modern science has demonstrated the existence of radioactive substances.  These unstable substances are continually irradiating their surroundings with radiation in various forms of alpha particles, B-particles and gamma rays.  Those alpha particles are like charged chunks of the nucleus being thrown out.  The B- particles are fast moving electrons which come from deep inside the nucleus not from the outer shell electrons and the gamma rays are high energy beams of electromagnetic radiation (light, X rays, radio waves are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum but the gamma rays are the most powerful and carry the most energy).  So these elements automatically transmute.  

You find them naturally in the earth’s crust. Long-lived radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium and potassium and any of their decay products, such as radium and radon are examples. If you live in an area of granite you will be exposed to higher levels of radon, a radioactive gaseous element.  Some of these elements transmute slower than others.  In fact some have what we call half-lives (the time it take for half of the initial quantity to transform into a new element) of a tiny fraction of a second to others  like Tellurium-128 (128Te) with a half-life estimated at 7.7 x 10²⁴ years.  This is much more than a billion times longer than the current estimated age of the universe.  So by losing parts of their nucleus these can transform into other elements which are lighter than the original element.  

The one we are most probably aware of is uranium because it is used a fuel in many nuclear fission reactors.  Uranium 235 has a half live of 703.8 million years but by firing neutrons at an atom we can trigger a fission of the atom which divides into two other radioactive particles Krypton and Barium which releases more neutrons which triggers more fission of uranium 235.  This run away process can be controlled by having water or graphite to soak up excess numbers of neutrons and keep things running so that the amounts of energy produced can be used to produce electricity in a sustained controlled chain reaction.  We discovered that a change in the nucleus can be triggered by firing neutrons at elements and blasting apart the original element.  

This transmutation is happening not only in our nuclear reactors.  It has been estimated that 90% of the heat of the Earth’s interior is fuelled by decaying radioactive isotopes like Potassium 40, Uranium 238, Uranium 232 and Thorium 232 within the mantle of the earth. The world is obviously weirder than we can imagine!

But back to the creation of gold from base metals. Yes, It is indeed possible—all you need is a particle accelerator, a vast supply of energy and you can make gold. More than 30 years ago nuclear scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California succeeded in producing very small amounts of gold from bismuth, a metallic element adjacent to lead on the periodic table. After mockery of those alchemists down through our turbulent history we can now announce that base metal can be turned into gold!  

The group used carbon and neon nuclei at incredible speeds and slammed them into foils of bismuth.  When they examined the results they found some atoms of Bi originally with  83 protons had lost four protons and become Gold with 79 protons.  In March of 1981 the Physical Review C journal published their exciting results. However, the amount produced was so small and the expenditure of energy to achieve it excessive.  Lest this seems churlish after achieving the long sought for conversion of base metal into gold, let’s put it in financial terms in the Scientific American journal’s words on January 31, 2014.

“Glenn Seaborg, who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with heavy elements and who died in 1999, was the senior author on the resulting study. “It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment," Seaborg told the Associated Press that year. The going rate for an ounce of gold at the time? About $560.”

Note: one quadrillion dollars = 1,000,000,000,000,000 dollars

So instead of getting closer to philosopher's stone we seem to have taken one big step forward and an even bigger one back.  We can now make gold out of base metal but it will cost much more to make than it is worth.  Disappointing I know, but science is getting closer than we think to an even more exciting goal that could change all that.  

The goal of nuclear fusion reactors is to try and bring together nuclei not blast a nucleus apart.  That releases huge amounts of energy and would create no radioactive waste as a by product unlike nuclear fission.  In fact, a couple of buckets of sea water a day would supply the world’s energy needs if nuclear fusion is achieved.  The interior of our sun regularly achieves fusion of the lighter atoms like hydrogen atoms  into helium.  Heavier metals like gold are only produced when a massive star reaches the end of its life in a supernova - the largest explosion that can take place in space.  In one way that is positive, nature has proven it possible but the conditions under which it happens is pretty extreme.  In order to turn copper into gold fission will simply not do.  Gold has 79 protons but copper has only 29 protons.  For that transmutation to take place nuclear fusion is necessary. So, if we can get fusion reactors to work we would be able to provide fuel for all the world’s needs and make as much gold as we like.  Mind you, if we we crack that fusion target and choose to use the energy to make gold it will probably reduce the value of gold itself.  After all, It is the rareness of an element that creates its value.

 the Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator

We are tip toeing closer to that goal of a working nuclear fusion reactor.  "Scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have successfully conducted a revolutionary nuclear fusion experiment. Using their experimental reactor, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7X) stellarator, they have managed to sustain a hydrogen plasma – a key step on the path to creating workable nuclear fusion. " This was achieved earlier this year and another contender in Southern France (involving 35 nations) using a different approach is the ITER Tokamak which runs at temperatures 10 times that found in the core of the sun. The technology is advancing and it is hoped a fusion reactor will become the next big break through in energy production.  It is strangely comforting that being able to unite elements rather than divide them could bring a healthier and safer world.  It hints that unity among nations could likewise usher in a real transmutation of our global society even more elusive than turning copper into gold.

My Letter of Attack, Dear Des....

A Letter to Des

You live in Northern Ireland and work the land. Generations of mine have worked this land and while shaping their landscape also carved from their time here characters as generous and as unique as the fields they are surrounded by.  

However, you are an interloper.  One of those parasites who move into a community and by terrorising your neighbours seize property and substance.  Owning nothing you hoodwink the widowed or elderly to give over their land management forms claiming you will do all the work for them.  Substituting your own signature you then proceed to claim this money for a full five years.  When owners of the land protest that you are taking their right, intimidation becomes the order of the day.  Forcing yourself into my relative’s home and holding one against the wall by the throat!  When an elderly neighbour is seen peering across the road into your garden you assault him and accuse him of looking at your wife.  Little realizing with his poor eyesight he can barely see his own fence and his habit of staring is born of this defect.  

From owning no land, you merely rented from others, you successfully took their forms and claimed subsidies in their place.  Years later, while no longer on the land and having illegally removed fences and gates from the property, you continue to claim money on this property you do not own.  This abuse of the single farm payment goes unchecked as years later you can still claim this amount despite not owning the land or even renting it anymore. Planning permits are ignored as you construct on property that is not yours, barns and houses.  Complaints by neighbours to authorities fall on deaf ears.  Bullies thrive in today’s world where confusion and legislation fight in incompetent courts.  Time delays in obtaining justice means such characters have their way and painful resignation is the order of the day.  

When the persistent few actually win against you, your approach is always the same. You pay the first instalment of the money owned and then stop all subsequent payments.  Knowing full well for the innocent, court orders, enforcement, unpleasantness is draining and demeaning.  Even appearing in court to explain how they have been abused, is a humiliation of the soul.  “Look how old, confused, helpless I am, such a rogue can seize my land, wrestle control of my property and here I appear month after month pleading for protection” they seem to convey.  And hence the rogue thrives on his tyranny of others.

You and I met many years ago.  I was visiting an aunt whose fields you rented.  You had allowed the cattle in the fields to gain access to her garden and the bullock happily played across the lawn.  I phoned to tell you that your bullock was loose and could easily get on to the main busy road causing serious injury.  Your resentment was obvious but you acquiesced and moved the animal back to your  fields.  Later, after I’d gone you complained to my aunt about my manner.   I know why you didn’t like me.  We looked at each other and I saw a petty tyrant intimidating all around him.  You didn’t know me, didn’t know who I knew, could not work out how I fitted in to the neighbourhood.  As it happens I know no one of importance, have zero knowledge of farming practices or the area.  But, I did sense something as you raised your stick and beat the bullock on its side to chase it out of the garden.    I recognised a bully and applied the same logic I have long used with them.  Never appease a bully, it only empowers them.  Accommodating them in any way will only add to suffering of the next victim of their tyranny.  

Years ago public opinion in a rural setting would bring its own consequences.  If you abused the elderly farmer, a widow etc the community would quickly let the person know their actions were not to be tolerated.  In such tight knit farming communities your actions would have consequences that quickly let you know lines had been crossed.  Now, such is the rural isolation and pressures facing farmers despair, suicide, economic ruin, family divisions, addiction all have broken down the once united communities.  The reason rural communities were so united was out of necessity.  You helped a neighbour build a shed, cut his field, herd a stock etc because you would one day need their help.  Your destiny was linked to theirs.  But more, generations before you had followed the same path.  It felt the right thing to do.  A moral principle was ingrained like table manners and instilled in future generations.  

When staying in my grandfather’s farm for a week, while he was unwell, I was shocked by how many characters came through the door expecting tea and chat.  The door was expected to be open under all conditions and a warm greeting extended whether I knew them or not.  You learned that this was deemed acceptable behaviour and to do any less was bad manners.  My grandfather helped build his neighbour’s houses and was paid in potatoes not cash and sometimes not paid at all.  That too, was okay because most people survived on the generousity of others and you knew that it would be repaid in friendship and respect if not in money.    We all have memories of those open doors and open hearts.  We were shaped at those hearths and kitchens that smelled of soda bread and roasts in the oven.  When something has been lost we have to look back at an older culture to summon a better way.  Each culture had a bedrock of social interaction that gently corrected and directed behaviour.  Today’s splendid isolation does not serve.  We are essentially communities of people in cities and countries who need each other more than we can possible imagine.  Working together on common goals in service will help remind us of the necessity of community cohesion and what wonders it instills in us and our children and grandchildren.  To proceed in the opposite direction will create unhealthy individuals, divided families, miserable communities and serve selfish materialistic agendas.