Program 23 - "Alchemy: Aristotle and Alchemists"

Music"Fillet of a fenny snake, in the caldron boil and bake;Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog,Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,Lizard's leg and howlet's wing (heh, heh, ha, ha, ho,)For a charm full of pow'rful trouble,Like a hell-broth boil and bubble,Double, double, toil and trouble;Fires burn and caldrons bubble. "(Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. . . . )Zip. Music. Silico: "We are back with Science 122, the Nature of Physical Science. The only telecourse that dares to try to change everything into gold. This is Program 23, Al ka me. "Before we're done with this program we will have learnedabout the chemical skills of ancient people, the elementsthat were known to them, and the magic of turning rock into metal. We will learn about the ancient Greeks' speculations on atomsand re-examine Aristotle's definition and theory of the elements. After a look at the mysticism of the number seven,we'll consider alchemy, its goals and its accomplishments,and its elements before comparing and contrasting alchemy and chemistry.

Here are the objectives for today's lesson. These objectives are also in the Study Guide at the beginning of the lesson. Before you begin to study the lesson take a few minutesto read the objectives and the study questions for this lesson. Look for key words and ideas as you read. Use the Study Guide and follow it as you watch the program. Be sure to read these objectivesin the Study Guide and refer to them as you study the lesson. Focussing on the learning objectives will help youto study and to understand the important concepts. Compare the objectives with the study questions for the lessonto be sure you have the concepts under control. (Swoosh. )Boy that was fun. What?Hey, everybody needs a hobby. Well, anyway, today's program's about alchemy. And, you know, it's often thought that alchemy provided the rootsfor chemistry or that chemistry grew out of some understandingof alchemy as a natural evolution of understanding. This is not entirely true, although there is a connectionbetween the two, and we don't want to leave you with thiswrong impression that alchemy sort of was the predecessor of chemistry. But it is helpful to consider alchemy here in ouradventure for at least four reasons.

First of all, alchemy was based upon Aristotle's cosmology,at least in Europe and theMideast. Secondly, the concept of an element as a fundamentalconstituent of matter took a radical turn in Newton's time. And we need to compare and contrast this change alongwith the gradual shift of the concept away from Aristotle's four elements. Third, although crude, the labors of alchemy sorted out processesand the properties of substances, of apparatusesand the manipulative techniques which provided usefuland chemical studies once the concept of weightwas introduced late in the 18th century. Fourth, was the idea or the development of a formalsymbolic language for practitioners of the art,which acted as recipes as well as an understanding, a model for understanding. So, what exactly is alchemy?Well, somebody once said that it's, you could characterizeit with the statement, "The properties without, reflect the spirits within. "People thought that matter had spirits. It's actually as much of a anthropological science as it is a physical science. And people have looked at alchemy over the yearsin modern terms and tried to characterize it. There are basically three kinds of ways that people look at alchemy. One of these is a Jungean approach.

Jung was a psychologist who dealt in symbolism and speciesconsciousness and that sort of thing. Jung did lots of studies where he looked at the symbolism of dreams. And he noted that there's a large correspondencebetween the symbolism that people have in dreams,sort of archetypal symbols and the alchemical symbolism. So that there's something very deep in the consciousness likecave paintings that comes out in the idea of alchemy. The other one was a physical scientist namedArthur Hopkins who was able to reproduce someof these alchemical processesto show that much of it simply involved chemicalreactions that were practical procedureswhich involved dyeing and, not dying in,you in the death sense,but dyeing in the changing color sense. Dyeing of metals and causing color changes in metals,much like we do bluing on gun surfaces today. The third of these was a religious philosopher named Eliad,Mircea Eliad, and he simply looked at this in terms of man'sreligious connections and mythologies and that sortof thing, and to see that we, the same way that people attributedmythological characters to the stars in the constellations,they also did the same thing to the, to chemicals and to the spirits in chemicals. So, let's see if we can, if I can give you a longer definition of alchemy. By definition: Alchemy is a cosmic art by which partsof the cosmos; that is, the mineral and the animalparts, can be liberated from their temporal existenceand attain states of perfection.

In the case of minerals, that state of perfection is gold. In the case of humans, it's longevity and immortality,and finally, redemption in heaven. Such transformations can be brought about on the onehand, by the use of a material substance suchas the philosopher's stoneor an elixir, and can bebrought about, on the other hand,by revelationary knowledge or psychologicalenlightenment of various kinds. So we can see here that alchemy has both material or exotericaspects as well as spiritual or esoteric aspects. It's interesting that the art or science as you want to call itof alchemy arose independently in various places,and it appears to have arisen around the same time, very early in man's history. There were two sort of theories about this whenpeople first started to study alchemy. One was that it arose independently, as I alreadymentioned, and the other was that it had a single originand then spread out as cultures interchanged. There are some similar elements in almost all of the differentcultures' views of this spirit of the substance. One of these has to do with the concept of metallurgy. And you may remember that metallurgy was one of the earliest arts. It's one of the things that transformed man into a modernera from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age.

Almost all early cultures who had metallurgy, who had developeda working metallurgy, made an analogy or a metaphorbetween the embryonic growth of metals inside the womb of mother earth. Much in the same way that children, a child grows in the womb of its mother. Later linkages between the various cultures specificallyin Europe and the mid-East and China, sort of commonizedthe ideas and brought things together. But this exists in all of these things. For example, the elixir of life exists in the Indianand Chinese alchemy, but not in Greek. And it makes its way back into Europe via the Arabicalchemy of the Middle Ages. So, it seems that there are basically two operationalconcepts that we'll try to deal with here in studying alchemy. One is what people have called aurifiction, which is the imitation of gold. This is like making synthetic materials. Now some people have said it was a way to put forth fraudsand try to make artificial gold; the other is simply a relianceupon the things that look like gold, much the waywe use synthetic materials today to mimic wool. We use acrylic to mimic wool in various things.

The other aspect of this is what's called aurification. This is the belief that you can actually turn things into gold,and this was more the realm of the natural philosophers,whereas, the aurifiction, was more the realm of the artisan. And we remember from Greek philosophy or from the Greekculture that these two things didn't overlap very much. And on one hand were the philosophers who were thearistocrats, and on the other hand were the artisanswho were the more common people. And this may be one reason why the science or artof alchemy was never really unified, because we hadthis sort of division of labor in this respect. So now I think we can go ahead and take a little bitmore advanced look at some of these concepts thatwe'll be considering in this program. Let's look at some of the chemical skills acquired by ancient peoples. The first of these was, no doubt, the use of fire.

Now we don't always think of the use of fire as a chemical skill,but certainly, fire is always used in chemical activities of all kinds. So what we see is that people, fairly early on,had developed a fairly sophisticated appliedchemical arts and technologies, of various kinds. What we mean by this, obviously, the first of these was probably metallurgy. Metallurgy, we'll spend a little time on the concept of smeltingmetals from their ores here in a couple of minutes. But, certainly, glass, pottery, fermentation, explosives,cooking, perfumes, dyes, and paint were all things which peoplehad used and had developed a fairly sophisticated levelsby the Middle Ages when we start to see actually the developmentof what we might call chemistry from these earlier techniques. There were many substances known to the ancients. Some of them, they knew as common substances. Others, they knew as less common substances. But the concept of these things as elements really didn't emergeuntil the Middle Ages with the concept of alchemy. In fact, the concept of elemental substances, at all, begins with the Greeks.

The word, element, means basic or first principle,as in "Elementary, my dear Watson. "So, I'm going to run through with you some of these commonsubstances, and you probably seen some of these before, but some of them not. But we want to get a handle on the properties of these thingsso that when we talk about them later on in aspects of chemistryand later on in this program, we'll have some idea of what we're talking about. So the first of these is a substance we know as sulfur. Sulfur has this sort of odd yellow appearance. It's very distinctive odd yellow appearance. And in the next program I'll demonstrate for you howit burns with blue flames and smelly fumes, although youwon't be able to see this, because we don't have "smellavision"yet, but you'll be able to see the fact that it burns with leaving no residue. One of the few things that leaves no ashes when it's burned. It's associated in alchemy with the quality of combustibility. Because it combusts completely and leaves no residue. The fumes are also associated with volcanic activity. And, in fact, the word comes from Sanskrit which basically meanscopper enemy or copper destroyer. It was thought by the alchemists to be anactive agent in mineral formation. It's also called brimstone and it's been associated with the fires of hell.

You've probably heard of this, fires and brimstone. OK. Another substance, then, which also plays a central rolein alchemy is the substance, mercury. Mercury is a rather odd substance as well. It's a liquid metal. In fact, the metal, it's the only metal that occurs as a liquid naturally. It was thought to represent the passive substance in mineral formation. And we'll see later on that mercury and sulfur were thoughtto be the sort of mother and father of minerals in this embryonicgrowth of minerals within the earth. It turns out that mercury is the easiest of all metals to extractfrom ore, and we don't know exactly when it was firstextracted, but, it's a wonderful stuff. You can sort of see; it has a mystical property. Watch when I pour it into the container. It has this, the luster and the shininess of metal, but it has this liquidity.

Liquidity is unusual on a metal, but it has this really neat liquid look to it. And we'll see later on, mercury, in the Middle Ages cameto be thought of as the embodiment of the principleof metalness, because it has the ultimate property of being ableto flow, which is what metals really do better than anything else. Another substance that you're probably all more familiarwith is the substance we know as carbon. Carbon occurs naturally as both charcoal and coal. And it turns out that it's a very common substance. In fact, whenever you burn a fire, whenever you burn anythingorganic, you get carbon leftover as a residue, if it's not completely burned. It also occurs, as I mentioned a minute ago,is coal, naturally as a mineral. It turns out that carbon is the key to releasing metallic elements from the ores. And it's kind of one of those interesting things that carbonjust happens to be one of the byproducts of burning,but it's also one of the elements that's necessaryto smelt metals, to turn ores into metals. Another of the metals, or another substance knownto the ancients, was that of gold.

Gold is, we know is a rare substance, and that's whatgives it its value, among other things. But gold also has other properties that make it valuable. For example, it doesn't react chemically. It's very difficult to get gold to react with anything. In fact, it doesn't tarnish at all, which is why we use itfor jewelry, and it's been considered a noble element. The word, noble, meaning it simply doesn't combine,or it doesn't do things that other elements do. Gold is almost always found uncombined in nature. In other words, you don't find gold as an ore,you simply find it as chunks of gold, either laying loosein stream beds or imbedded in minerals and various things. A related metal is that of silver.

Now silver is a little bit less noble because it does tarnish slightly. If you have silverware at home or silver jewelry, you probablyknow that it develops this black patina that you have to remove with silver polish. It has a beautiful surface luster and a color,and also, like gold, usually found uncombined,although there are silver compounds that occur in nature. The last of these metals is a substance we call copper. I have a piece of copper here someplace. Copper, you've probably seen before. Copper is occasionally found in the native state, but it's oneof the first metals to have been extracted because nextto mercury, it's about the easiest one to extract. It has this distinct reddish color which makes it seemgoldish, because it has a gold tint to it. It was very early in history that copper was first smelted. In fact, there's evidence that it was smelted in Britainand Europe as early as 2200 B. C. in the Mideast, probably even earlier than that.

Copper alloys very easily with metals. In fact, it alloys with both lead and tin to form bronze. I can show you here, you may have done this before, but all youhave to do is copper in the presence of mercury,and the two of them combine and, of course, things never worklike this, but the copper and the mercury combine with eachother and you can see a little, I think, little bit of coatingof mercury developing on the copper there. When we were kids before mercury was poison, we used to dippennies into mercury and turn them into silver penniesand try to pass them off as steel pennies. So copper is a very important element. One that's known as a native state, but also known as an ore and very easy to smelt. One of the most interesting aspects of chemistry has todo with the element carbon,and it's ability to reduce metals from their ores. In fact, you've got to kind of wonder how this might have come about.

Imagine a bunch of people sitting around a camp fire,and they have this particular little piece of metal which maybe hasa bright green color or something like that. A metal ore, I should say, it has a bright green color,and they use it as a stone in their fire ring. And they run this night after night after night and suddenly,one day somebody comes back and they're siftingthrough the ashes and they see this piece of shiny metal in the fire. Now, how long would it take to make the connectionbetween that green rock and this piece of shiny metal?Who knows?It may have taken generations. It may have happened the first time someone saw it,but basically the way it works, is that the carbon replaces theoxygen in the. . . takes the oxygen away or the sulfur awayfrom the ore and leaves behind the metallic element. The process is actually quite simple. But once you make the connection, you still have to work with it alittle bit to figure out how to change it. So, we might say that the discovery of smeltingores was a major technological step. In fact, transformed mankind from the stone age into the bronze age. Bronze being the first metal to be smelted.

Bronze, itself, is an alloy of copper and other metals. So, there were seven metals known in ancient times. These seven metals were: gold, silver, iron, mercury, tin, copper and lead. Gold and silver, we know are valued as wealth. They were then and they still are today. Copper, when alloyed or melted and mixed with tin and lead, forms bronze. And it's possible for metallurgists to go back and look at say oldRoman coins or other bronze that's found from variousperiods of time and to be able to trace whereand when it was made simply from the relativeamounts of copper, tin, lead, and zinc, which you find in it. Although zinc wasn't discovered until later on.

Now iron, itself, was not discovered as a smeltedelement until quite a while later. But iron does occur naturally on earth in the uncombined formonly in meteorites, and people must have known thatmeteorites fell from the sky, and, of course, they were neverassociated with the heavenly realm because people thoughtthey simply came from the earthly realm. That they were pieces of imperfection that were falling to the earth. It's interesting that the same carbon which causes ironand other elements to be reduced from their ores, is the thingthat also makes iron into a strong steel. In fact, ordinary plain, pure iron is very weak and it's the impurityin it, in a controlled sense, that makes iron into steel and gives it its strength. So, the other remaining metal now is mercury, which you'vealready seen an example of, which is liquid at room temperatures.

I mentioned before that it is the easiest of all the metalsto smelt from its ores and it very easily coats and alloys with other metals. In fact, if you have silver fillings in your teeth, those are actuallymixtures of silver and mercury because the two of them forma liquid which solidifies upon waiting. Or mercury is also the only common metallic ore whoseore reduces with fire alone, that doesn't require the carbon. So, certain ores of mercury, you simply heat them in a fireand you get these little droplets of liquid mercury showing up. This must have been quite a thrill for people to stick this dullcolored red rock in a fire and have these little bubblesof liquid mercury, liquid metal, appear at their fingertips.

So now's a good time to review a little bit about Aristotle'selements and also add some new information to this. Aristotle's elements were, as you know, earth, air, fire and water. But, there's more to it than that. In fact, you see, the earth, air, fire and water wererelated to each other in a certain way. And Aristotle believed that all four of them weregenerated from some primary matter. This is sort of like clay unto which various qualities could be impressed. Like making a mold or a model out of clay, and the whole thingformed this quartet of what Aristotle called elementary substances. So, these were earth, air, fire and water. We've seen a graphic of this before in an earlier program,so let's go back to that graphic and look at it and see if we canget a little bit more information out of this. The four elements were earth, air, fire and water. They were joined to each other by a, by these qualities. The qualities were hot, dry, wet and cold. So, these essential qualities established the centralcharacter of a substance, and Aristotle believed that the fourelements were bound together by the quality of moistness,which is not the same as wetness, but moistness. So, you can look at this, and you can see here that pure firein Aristotle's sense was the ideal combination of hot and dry. And that in this sense, one element could be changedinto another in the same way that you can take the same pieceof clay and mold it into something different. So, for example, if you add wetness at the expenseof dryness, then you could gradually transform fire into air. You can think of it as sort of moving along the outside of this triangle.

Combustion, to Aristotle, was considered a type of motion. And you can see how that works in this system very nicely. So what happens, for example, if you take a substance like wood. Well, in Aristotle's scheme a substance like wood is madeout of various amounts of earth, air, fire and water. Now, also in Aristotle's scheme we don't ever see pure versionsof these elements on earth because these things only exist as ideals. So, the fire that we observe is not pure fire because it containsother constituents like hotness or dryness. So, for example, look at the combustion of wood. What happens when wood burns?Well, you start out with a substance of wood, which liessomewhere here in the square, in the diamond, consistingof certain components of earth, air, fire and water. When you burn the wood, what happens?Well, fire is released, obviously as the flame. Air is released.

Smoke, in Aristotle's scheme, was a form of air,and earth, of course, remains after the combustion takes placein the form of ashes, and water, well,you know that water comes out of a flame, don't you?Have you ever held a piece of glass or a piece of porcelain over a candle flame?It not only turns black, but it also gets water on it. This water comes as part of the combustion. So, it's easy to see from Aristotle's scheme how peopleget the idea that substances could be transformed one into the other. Simply because it happens all the time,not only in combustion, but in other types of reactions. OK. So, in Aristotle's scheme, then, each substance or materialscould be analyzed into four components much the waywe would analyze things today into their elemental constituents. In fact, this was such a common thing that Frank and Ernest,well known cartoon--here's Frank in the Hellenic Market in Greece.

You know how everybody reads labels in the supermarket, right?You go in and you look at the ingredients like sugarand starch and tomato paste and all this. Well, here's Frank looking at something which is 29%air, 50% water, 31% earth and 25% fire. So, this is very well, I think, exemplified by the cartoon,and I thank Bob Thaves for giving us permission to show this on the air. Like many things that the Greeks considered both sides of,they considered the possibility of the existence of atoms. They did so in a way which is much more qualitativeand philosophical than actually quantitative and scientific. But the argument, or the discussion went something like this. Suppose that you start subdividing matter. In other words, you take a stick of wood, for example, and you takea certain stick of wood this long and you cut it in half. And then you cut that half in half. And you cut that half in half. And you keep subdividing it half at each time. How long can you do this?Well, of course, one limitation would bethe size of the thing you're cutting it with. Eventually you get down to a toothpick and then you getdown to half a toothpick and eventually the sliverof wood would become so fine that in practicalsense you couldn't really cut it in half any more. But suppose you could?Suppose you had an infinitely small cutting surface. Would you eventually reach some piece which could no longer besubdivided, or could you simply keep on subdividing it infinitely?This was the question that the Greeks considered,and they really sort of broke into two schools here.

One school was that of the atomists. The other school was that of the you might say the "infinitists. "The atomic school was led by Democritus in the 5th century B. C. In Democritus' system, the only things that existedwere atoms and empty space. In fact, one of Democritus' followers, his name wasLucretius, came up with a system for showing howthese atoms stuck together, which, in many ways,is a precursor of our modern sense of chemical bonding. In Lucretius's system the atoms which made up a gas weresimply unconnected and existed as individual entities. The atoms of solid were hooked together. Notice how the atoms here have hooks on them. Exactly how the gas grew the hooks when it changedinto a gas from a liquid to a solid wasn't made clear in Lucretius's scheme. But still, notice that the solid is hooked togetherin sort of an infinite framework. And the liquid is sort of linked together but not linked togetherin as many places--more like a linear sense rather than a network sense. Interestingly enough, although this is a very good system,the atomists lost out to Aristotle's authority. The reason why had to do with the Pythagoreans. You remember the Pythagoreans. These were the guys who looked for the explanationof the mystical aspects of the universe in terms of whole numbers.

Well, I think I mentioned this earlier in an earlier program,but the Pythagoreans didn't like the concept of atoms because, remember why?Because you can't put, you can't make a triangle out of atoms. So, if you have a rectangle of something and you cut it in halfinto a right triangle, most right triangles, if the sides areintegral numbers, the hypothenuse of the right triangle is not an integer. It's some irrational number. This really did trouble the Pythagoreans, and theysuppressed the knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem for this reason. But when Plato brought this back and Aristotle pickedit up, Aristotle adopted this idea. Now, there is something implicit in this explanation which issomething that's worthy of consideration. If you try to draw a right trianglewith a hypothenuse made out of equal sized atoms,you'll find that the atoms generally don't fit along the hypothenuse. But, who said the atoms had to be the same size?Why couldn't they be small atoms and big atoms?Then you could put a whole number of atoms in simplyby sometimes putting little atoms and sometimes putting big atoms. This is one of our modern concepts that atoms are different sizes. But, the problem wasn't just that. The problem also had to do with a different concept of space.

Now, we haven't talked much about Aristotle's concept of space,although I did mention it, I think, in the program on Newton whenwe talked about Newton talking about an absolute space. But in Aristotle's sense, space simply did notexist unless it had something in it. So, if you have a glass that has, that occupies space,and you move the glass to another place, the space goes with the glass. This is unlike Newton's concept of space whichhe said exists independently of anything else,and it's whether you measure it or not, it's still there. So, the other thing is that in Aristotle's sense,the four elements were continuous and fluid-like, which left noroom for empty spaces in between them. Because if you reject the concept of atoms,then there's no room for empty space. There's no necessity for empty space. So, on one hand, you have a concept of space which doesn't existunless there's something in it; on the other hand, you have aconcept of matter occupying infinitely smaller and smallerpieces, so that there's no need for the space. The other important thing here, in this system,was that although the Greek considered the conceptof atoms and the concept of elements, there was never anyconnection between the two things. That is, there is never any thought that fire might representa certain kind of element or atom, I should say, or that airrepresented a certain shape of atom.

The concept of an element was a fundamental substance;the concept of an atom was a fundamental building block,but there was no connection between the two. Again, it makes it difficult for us to understand this. Because in our paradigm we link these things, atomsand elements, as if they are the same thing. And we will come back to this in the next program and,or two programs down the road, and see how the conceptof atom and element becomes linked,once the concept of atom is brought back into this, very early in the 19th century. You may recall in an earlier lesson I read you a quotefrom Francesco Sizi, a Florentine astronomer, who was criticizingGalileo's report of the discovery of the new moons of Jupiter. Señor Sizi had said something about the existence of sevenmetals and seven planets and seven holes in the head and the number seven. Well, this is actually a connection that beganway back in the, before the Greek times actually. And the association with not only the number of metals,but also the days in the week. So, I have a slide here that I think will help explain this. Here we see a slide which shows us the associationsof the metals and the heavens. And some of these are fairly obvious, at least the planet. The sun, the day of the week it corresponds is Sunday. Did you ever think about that connection?I mean it's obvious, but did you ever really meant that?And how about the moon?The moon means, has the day Monday associated with it. It's actually moon day, but it comes down translated as Monday. The metals associated, of course, are god for the sun and silver for the moon. Everybody's heard the song, "Shine on silver moon,"OK?So, that comes from that. The other ones are not quite so obvious. Iron has always been associated with strength,and Mars has been associated with the war god,and in Saxon legend, the god, Mars, is known as Tiw. So, from that we get, Tuesday. Notice the spelling is kind of different. The "T I W" is kind of an odd spelling, but "Tues" comes from the Saxon.

Mercury has always been considered the, well mercurial planet. The one that's hard to pin down, the one that has the sortof unpropitious looks, I guess, is what Sizi said. So, the planet, of course, has the same name as the metal. This is associated with the name Wednesday because the Saxongod corresponding to Mercury was called Woden. So, did you ever wonder where the "N" comes in the word, Wednesday?"Wed-nes-day?"Well, it's really Woden's day. And again, it comes translated from the Saxon downto the English and becomes Wednesday from Woden's day. The metal, tin, was associated with the planet Jupiter. In Saxon legend, Jupiter was known as Thor. Thor's the chief god, the one who causes thunder claps. So, Thursday, which is actually misspelled here,actually becomes "Thor's day. "So we get Thursday from Thor's day. And, the metal, copper, was associated with planet Venus. Copper has always been associated with having feminine qualities. The Saxon god corresponds to Venus was called Friff. So, Friday, actually becomes "Friffday. "And, again, through the translation, it becomes translated into Friday. Now lead was associated with Saturn and the Saxon root hasno comparison, so we use the Roman name of the god, Saturn,which actually should be Saturn's day, but once again,in the translation and the change of the language, gets changedinto Saturday instead of Saturn's day. So now we can finally turn out attention to alchemy.

Now, alchemy, as I mentioned earlier is not necessarily the evolutionary precursor to chemistry. Alchemy is thought of as sort of a mysterious, symbolic, religious,spiritual connection between man and matter. It became a science to a certain extent whenthe technology of dyes and metallurgy combined anamalgamated with the Greek theories of matter and change. Now, alchemy was never a science in the senseof having, you know, an official paradigm,or an official organization, the way chemistry is today. So, even though alchemy may have been practicedin its various forms at various placesin the world, there's very little contactbetween the people, and what information did filter through was very limited. The word itself actually is an Arabic word which comesfrom the word that means "the black soil," specifically the soil of the Nile delta. Now, as we know all substances that we use on earth comefrom the earth, whether or not we know that or not. You've got to try to put this in perspective now,at least in the development of Middle Eastern and European alchemy.

All the knowledge that was available after the Greekempire collapsed was the knowledge of Aristotle. This served as a paradigm for investigations not onlyin the physical world, but also in the chemical world. And like any good ideas, the paradigm becomes corrupted with time. You only have to think back to the tenets of the major religionsto realize how these things have become corrupted. The Hellenistic scientists in Alexandria were interestedin experimentation and they did very good science, but there's adifference because rather than setting up experiments to findthe truth, they were interested more in setting up experimentswhich would support or prove Aristotle's theories to be correct. And this is sort of what the alchemical paradigm came to represent. It was also, of course, very closely associated with mysticism. And in many cases it's difficult to read the alchemists' writingsbecause they were secret and metaphorical. In fact, a whole language arose which was designedto keep, maintain a closed shop, you might say,and to conceal knowledge from the uninitiated. And over time they become more, the language became moreand more picturesque and fanciful. Here's an example of a particular alchemical writing which talksabout a reaction which I'll explain to you in a minute. It says, "The grey wolf devours the King, after which it isburned on a pyre, consuming the wolf and restoring the King to life. "

Now suppose you were trying to make sense out of this. What could this possibly mean?Well, what it really means is that it's referring to the extractionof gold from alloys by a particular method of skimming off thelesser metal sulfides and roasting the gold antimonyalloy until the antimony evaporates. So, basically, you mix the gold alloy with antimonyand antimony soaks up the sulfur. You scraped this off of the molten metal, the antimony remainsbehind, evaporates from the gold. "The grey wolf devours the King, after which it's burnedon a pyre, consuming the wolf and restoring the King to life. "You see it's very metaphorical in the way it's stated, and this isvery common in alchemical language. But, I want to point out that this is really no less mystified thanour modern chemical language of something like,"dehydrohalogenate vicinal dihalides with amide ion to provide alkynes. "So, this technical language is still a very technical language. I want to point out that being secretive is part of mysticism,and we're not necessarily trying to be secretive in our modernchemistry, but they were trying to be secretive in the alchemists' times. In fact, the word, mysticism, comes from a Greek word,"musterion" which means to undergo a secret rite. So, one of the things that characterizes alchemy was theidea of secrecy and sort of keeping things in this mysterious realmand keeping it from the common knowledge so that only certainpeople would hold the keys to these processes. Greek alchemy was, maybe, a misnomer.

The Greeks didn't really have that much in what we might call, real alchemy. But, they did have, for example, the medicine, the Hippocratesand Galen, the two famous physicians, and had a theoryof that went along with Aristotle's idea of the four elements. But, instead of the four elements being connectedwith the qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry, they wereconnected with the four humors, which were, determined illness. And so, when humors were out of balance, a person became ill. The next major philosophical paradigm that came alongafter Aristotle was Stoicism, which carriedover somewhat into the Roman Empire. And they adopted and adapted muchof Aristotle's philosophy which included bothAristotle's physics and the idea of the infinite divisibility of matter. In the Stoic philosophy there were two different kinds of matter. There was inert matter which was passiveand something that was called "pneuma,"P N E U M A. "It's the root word for our word for air, like in pneumonia. Which was sort of a vital spirit which drove changes. So, in the Stoic philosophy, "pneuma" pervaded the cosmosand promoted all kinds of changes as well as generation of newthings as well as decay of old things. And in this scheme, fire and air were thought to be active"pneuma" while earth and water were thought to be passive inert matter. So, the fire and air were then forms of "pneuma" whichbecame the glue that bound the passive earth and water into cohesive substances. You can see how this is a little bit different from Aristotle.

Aristotle had said that the essential qualities were sortof stamped on to the basic matter like clay. So here we're seeing the separation now of fire and airinterpreted as active things which glued together the more passive things. So, in the Greek system, practical alchemy was thechild of four different things really. It was sort of a combination of medicine, pharmacology, as wellas dyeing and paints as well as metallurgy. The most important contribution, I think we can say about theGreek alchemy, was that it transmitted Aristotle's ideasinto the Arabic world which later found its way back into Europe. The ideas of Greek alchemy, along with the other ideasof Aristotle, made their way into the Middle Eastthrough Alexandria and through other means. The Middle East, you can sort of think of in this respectduring this time period, as being a middle man. Because they not only got ideas from the Greeks,but they also had much cultural interchangewith India and even further east into China. So, the middle eastern alchemy was actually integratedwith some of the ideas and practices of the Indian and Chinese and other eastern. These ideas sort of jelled and fermented, you might say,in the Middle East, and finally reached the LatinWest in the 11th century along with other Arabictranslations of the documents. So, it's not sure, we're not sure exactly where the originationof the idea of the philosopher's stone and potable gold,or what's known as the elixir of life, originated,but it was also found in Chinese alchemy. It's not clear whether the Arabs got these ideas from the Chinese or vice versa. But they do appear in both. There were actually two main figures in the Middle Easternalchemical writings who brought some of these ideas aroundwhich we'll see reemerging in the European alchemy later on.

One of these was a man named Jabir ibn Hayyan. He was sort of a shadowy eighth century mysterious figure,and has over 2000 writings attributed to him. These writings were not only in alchemy but also in astrology,numerology, medicine and mysticism, and most peoplethink it was actually the work of a sect called the Brethren of Purity. This is very similar in many ways to the Pythagorean cult, wherePythagoras gets credit for much of the stuff, even if he didn't do it. The work of Jabir as he's commonly known, was compiledfor a European publication from transcripts of his worksand was published as "Summa Perfectionis," the "Summary of Perfection. "One of the things that Jabir did was to introduce what we nowcall today, the sulfur mercury theory. This, again, goes back to the passive active sort of thing. And it makes it in the Chinese alchemy, as we'll see, it relatesto the concept of the "Yin" and the "Yang," also, using sulfur and mercury. So the idea was that metals are generated inside the earthby the mixing of a fiery, smoky principle, that of sulfur,to a watery principle, that of mercury.

Now it's interesting that most of the early known metal ores were sulfides. That means that they were combinationsof the various metals like mercury with sulfur. This goes along with the Stoic idea that metalswere held together by a spirit, and in the Stoicidea, this spirit was mercury and the soul was sulfur. So you have the metals being held together by a spirit and a soul. Today, of course, we look at these as chemical combinations. They never did explain how the different varieties of metalores arose by combining these same two principles of mercury and sulfur. But they did look at the concept of things like density, for example. And Jabir taught that the lighter metals had large particlesseparated by small, by large spaces, whereas, more densematerials like gold, were closely packed. And so in Jabir's scheme of things the alchemists's task wasto reduce the size of the particles and pack them together. This is how you could change a substance into gold. If you could make its particles smaller and squeeze themtogether, then, you would make gold. He also talked about changes which referred to agentsof mercury, such as medicines, elixirs and tinctures. And we still use these words in modern pharmacology today. In the west, the idea of a substance, which was sortof a catch all for changing one thing into another,it was called the philosopher's stone. Jabir's writings also contained a defenseof alchemy and all forms of technology.

Now, I want to point out here, that at this time, much like today,alchemy was considered too practical and too technicalto be included in the curriculum of a medieval university. I don't mean alchemy's too technical to be consideredin a curriculum, but we have things in our own universitysystem today that are too technical. It seemed theologically suspect, that is,from the point of view of religion, because itimplied that it gave sinful humankind the divine power of creation. That is, by creating new chemicals and new substances. So Jabir argued that people had the right to improve upon nature. And also to synthesize substances simply because they could do it. Why?Because we can. It's part of our nature to do so. He cited as examples, in defense of this, the farmers'exploitation of grafting and the alchemists abilityto synthesize certain natural elements. All in the same sort of rubric. The notion that art and science could outdo the productsof nature and that man can change the order of the natural worldby altering these products would have a profound influenceon the direction taken by western culture. OK.

The second person was someone known asAl-Razi, who's also known as Rhazes. He compiled a practical, straightforward manualof chemical practice which was called the "Secret of Secrets. "Here he basically did a classification. He classified substances into metals, vitriols, boraxes,salts, and stones based upon their solubilities and their tastes. He also codified the laboratory procedures into techniquesof purification, separation, mixing, and removal of water. He described and listed chemicals and mineralsand various apparatus and recipes. He described equipment like beakers and flasks and phials,and basins, and candles and naphtha lamps, and braziers,and furnaces, and files and spatulas, and hammersand ladles--whew--and shears and tongs and sand and waterbaths, and funnels and flasks, and mortars and pestles. Basically all of the equipment that's used today in modern chemistry. He also described the basic techniques of distillation,sublimation and calcination, and dissolving substances,which formed the basis for chemical engineeringnot only in medieval times, but even today. So now we're going to take a look at the Chinese alchemy. And the Chinese, we haven't talked much about themand their role in the development of science. Because their physics was a little, little weak, and the astronomydidn't really add much, but chemically and alchemically,the Chinese really did contribute quite a bitwhich found its way back into Europe later on.

The idea of turning things into gold, the aurificational ideasand practices were prevalent in China as early as the 4th century B. C. These were greatly influenced by the Taoist religion and philosophy. This came mainly from a man named Lau Tzu who lived around 600 B. C. He wrote a book called the "Tao Te Ching," whichtranslates "The Way of Life. "Like the later Stoics in Greece, Taoism conceivedthe universe in terms of opposites. The male, positive, hot, light principle "Yang. " and the female,negative, cool and dark principle, "Yin. "The struggle between these two forces generated the five elements. Not four, like in Aristotle's world,but five elements--water, fire, earth, wood and metal. And in the Chinese idea, all things were made from these five elements. Notice the difference here. Water, fire, earth are common, but instead of air, it's wood and metal. Unlike the Greco-Egyptian alchemy later, the Chinese were far lessin preparing gold from inferior metals than they werein preparing "elixirs" that would bring immortality to the humanbody, or maybe, you might even say, to bring human bodyinto a state of perfection and harmonywith the universe so that immortality was achieved. In Taoist theory this required the adjustmentof the proportions of Yin and Yang in the body

Now in the Chinese alchemical sense thiscould be achieved practically by preparing elixirsfrom substances which were rich in Yang such asred-blooded cinnabar which was a formof mercuric sulfide, and gold or jade. This doctrine led to very careful empirical studies of chemicalreactions from which followed such useful discoveries asgunpowder, which was seen as a reactionbetween Yin-rich saltpeter and Yang-rich sulfur. Also fermentation industries and medicines that wereespecially rich in sexual hormones. As in western alchemy Taoist alchemy soonbecame surrounded by ritual and became much moreof an esoteric discipline than really a practical laboratory art. We seem to see this in all of these different alchemes. Belief in the transformation of cinnabar into gold datesfrom 133 B. C. whenLi Shao-Chun appealedto the Emperor Wu Ti to support his investigations. He said this in his writings, "Summon spirits and you willable to change cinnabar powder into yellow gold. With this yellow gold you may make vessels to eat and drink out of. You will increase your span of life, you will be able to seethe home of the immortals that is in the midst of the sea. Then you may perform the sacrifices and escape death. "So, from then on, many of the Chinese texts referredto the consumption of potable gold.

The "wai tan" as it was called form of alchemy which wassystematized by Ko Hung in the 4th century A. D wasnot the only form of Chinese alchemy. The Chinese also developed what we might call a physiologicalalchemy in which longevity and immortality were sought notfrom the drinking of an external elixir, but from inner elixirprovided by the human body itself. In principle, this was attained by a person's own bodyby physiological techniques involving respiratory,gymnastic and sexual exercises. With the ever-increasing evidence of poisoning from some of thesechemicals, another form became popular in the 6th century whichcaused sort of a less of a reliance upon externalelixirs and more of a reliance on internal elixirs. In other words, the external elixirs were poisoningpeople rather giving them immortality. On the other hand, some of these things seemed to haveexperimented with body fluids such as urine whose ritualisticuse may have led to the isolation of certain sex hormones that theChinese found to be useful in a sense of youthfulness. So, medicine and alchemy were always intimately connected in the Chinese. A connection that's also found in Arabic alchemy. So, Greek alchemy laid much more stress on metallurgicalprinciples though the preparationof pharmaceutical remedies was also important. It seems probable that the Arabic and writerswere much more deeply influenced by the Chinese in this ideaof immortality and gold than from the Greek.

Now, there's some evidence that the Chinese actually did havesome fairly sophisticated chemical processes. That they knew, for example, how to prepare nitric acid. Whether this was prepared from saltpeter,or whether the saltpeter was prepared from the acid,we don't have any way of knowing. But we have, different people have speculated that the gunpowderwhich was a mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur. Notice that it's carbon and sulfur, and the saltpeter which wassort of a Yin element was first discovered during attemptsto measure or to prepare an elixir of immortality. The formula for gunpowder had spread to Islamic Asiaby the 13th century and would stun the Europeans in the nextcentury when it was first used against them. So, as in the Latin west, most of the later Chinesealchemy was little more than chicanery. That means. You know what chicanery means?It means, what?It means, fakes, right?So, many of the alchemists' misdeeds are found in westernliterature and have their literary parallels in China.

The Jesuits who invaded China with missionsin 1582, brought with them information on westernastronomy and natural philosophy, but it wasstill not until 1855, that western chemical ideas were published in Chinese. So, what we see happening here is that the Chineseseem to have influenced the Arab culture. The Arabs then went on to influence the European culture,and finally in the 19th century, the European culture goes backnow and begins to influence the Chinese. We see this same sort of cultural interaction taking place not onlyin the sciences, of course, but in all aspects of our cultures. So many of these images that occur in an alchemy have turnedout to be models for our folklore and most of us, at least thoseof us who were raised in a western culture, have heard most of these things. This is the basis for things like witches brews and sorcerer's concoctions. Those of you who have seen the Walt Disney movie, "Fantasia,"remember the sorcerer's apprentice wearing the hatwith the stars and the crescent moons. Things like, you know, the Wizard of Id, the comic strip. Things, concoctions involving frogs' eyesand skin of Newt, and legs of lizards. And Macbeth's witches which my alter ego did earlierin the program was talking about eye of Newt and toe of frogand wool of bat and tongue of dog and adder's forkand blindworm's sting--all of these things have to do with this.

In the Arthurian legends in England,Merlin the Magician was a sorcerer who is out of time. His sense of time had been distorted. In fairy tales we have magic potions, we have Cinderellaand Sleeping Beauty and the magic apple. The magic apple with a spell that a certain kind of poison, right,that it invokes a spell that's going to be broken by the kiss of a handsome prince. And we have, even today, fantasy fiction. Things like "Lord of the Rings" and various, what we call, fantasybooks which invoke the ideas of dragons and magic and all these sorts of things. All of these are basically alchemical ideas or a carry over from those ideas. Another aspect of alchemy which seems to pervade allof the European and middle eastern and Chinese, and even the Greek,was the idea that matter could advance toward a higher state of purity. This sort of comes from Socrates moral principles. Remember that in Socrates system governments couldincrease their ethical purity, and people can becomehealthier and eventually become immortal. And less perfect metals could slowly grow to become more noble. Of course, in nature, this was performed over timein the womb of the metals which was mother earth. This brings us to the significance of time. Because material and spiritual perfection both take time.

Metals grow very slowly, perfection takes time. So, one of the things about the hopes of alchemists were thatthey might be able to discover a method to speed up this temporal process. So that you could simply exist out of time. If you could speed up the idea of perfection, you could attainthe state of perfection much earlier. So, the idea was that metals could grow towards nobility. You could do this by coloring the metals. For example, lead is younger than tin which is closer to silverbecause lead is very grey and silver is very silvery. Now you can do this by alloying or also by chemical coloring. There is a description of one of these aspectsof chemical coloring which goes like this. "A handful of lime and another sulfur in fine powder;place them in a vessel containing vinegar or the urine of a small child. Heat it from below until the supernatant liquid appears like blood. Decant this latter properly in order to separate from the deposit, and use. "What this ancient document is describing is what we wouldnow call the manufacture of calcium polysulfide which isused to change the surface color or a metal. Much like we would choose or we would use gun bluing. So, Aristotle's prime matter was not intended to be tangible stuffthat could be separated from substances in his scheme. But, later alchemists believed that this was true. And remember in Aristotle's idea the ultimate state of matter was quintessence. And so, many of the alchemists sort of started aiming towardbeing able to capture this quintessence here on here,not only change things into gold, but take that one step furtherand change ordinary matter into heavenly matter.

We need to take a brief look now at the alchemical conceptof elements; at least the medieval concept of elements. Now, this differed both from Aristotle's concept and from ourmodern concepts in ways that we'll see moreexplicitly I think in the next program. But, in Aristotle's theme, remember, that theelements were seen as fundamental substances. In the medieval European alchemical sense the substanceswere simply seen as carriers of elemental principles,not necessarily as pure substances. You might think of these as, the substances as carryingembodiments of the principles of purity. Think about this in human terms. We have often heard people referred to as "a modelof virtue," or "model of honesty. "So, here honesty is a quality and we see that a certain personexemplifies the best example of this particular quality. I can give you some examples. Sulfur, for example, was seen to be the principle of combustibility. The ultimate combustibility because it burnswith a clean blue flame; it produces no ashes. And, of course, copper, sulfur also allows the combustion of thingsthat wouldn't combust otherwise, for example, copper. If you put copper and sulfur together, the copper will actually burn in the sulfur. So, sulfur embodies the concept of combustibility.

Mercury embodies the principle of metalness. What does the metal do?Well, in modern terms, we think of metals as conducting electricity. But in ancient times, metals were valued for the factthat they could be worked in the cold state. You can take a piece of bronze and you can pound it into a thin sheet. Or you can take a piece of gold and pound it into gold foil. So the ultimate flowability or the ultimatemalleability is the liquidity of mercury. So mercury was seen then not only as the passive or Yangelement in mineral formation, but also as this principle of metalness. It embodies the perfect concept of metal. The principle of earthiness was embodied in the calxwhich remained after burning a metal. The process. . . The word, calx, "C A L X," is the, today we'll refer to it as the oxide of the metal. It's what remains as the ashes after burning a metal. The process of turning a metal into calx is called calcination. We'll take this up in little bit later on. The ultimate, of course, of all of these principles was the principle of gold. And gold was the substance because it embodied moreprinciples than any other substance. It had the principle of luster.

Gold has this surface appearance that's unlike anything else. It's the principle of color. Nothing else has the color of gold. The principle of heaviness. Gold, in fact, is the most dense substance known,and it also has the principle of nobility. In this sense, the principle of nobility means inertness. Gold simply does not combine chemically with other substances. Much as nobility in the aristocratic sense means thatnobility doesn't mix and mingle with the commoners. So, in the same way, gold does not mix and minglewith the other common elements. We'll see in the next program how the concept of element differsfrom Aristotle through the alchemists through our modern concept. But, this should give us a good enough backgroundnow to proceed into that program later on. In this program we've tried to characterize alchemyas a science of trial and error who's really basedon a misunderstanding of matter. And this misunderstanding pervaded well into the 17th century. In the west it was dominated by Aristotle'scosmology, as was physics, as we've seen earlier. Having been passed down through the Mideast. We also looked at the spiritual side and the practical side of alchemy.

One of the things we didn't touch on is the goalsand the accomplishments of alchemy. The goals of alchemy were to search for the elixir of life,to create immortality, to search for the philosopher's stone,to transform base matter into higher matter or to createan elixir of gold which would help immortality,to search for magic potions, secure diseases. We might think that these were the goals were charlatan or were foolish. These people were not foolish. In fact, the goals are very noble. They were tempted out of a curiosity, a combination of curiosity and ignorance. Much like what we do today when we're lookingfor magic bullets to solve diseases and so forth. Unfortunately, the goals of the alchemists were not attained. There was no underlying chemical theory to guide their experimentation. There was no systematic method for communicating discoveries. They were limited in what they could do by trial and error. In other words, they lacked the real scientific methodand partly they had mostly qualitative studies. It was more a matter of a lump of this yellowpowder combined with this will do something else. It was never a matter of a specific amount of weight. That's largely because there were no good scales to weigh things. These are all things that we'll take up in future programs. So, without consistent guiding theoretical structures, it's verydifficult to come to grips with the real complexity of things. Not only that, but it's also difficult to control thetemperatures and concentrationsof solutions without specific measurements.

So, as a result from a 1000 B. C. to 1700 A. D. , only a few newsubstances were discovered which turned out to be elements. In spite of this, the alchemists did accomplish quite a few things. There was an attempt to systematize information. They developed many of the techniques of modernchemistry and chemical engineering. They supplied us many materials. They revealed much information about the propertiesof substance, and they put many people to work mixingand reacting various substances, which, even today, can help us. Well, you know I think that pretty much wraps it upand that's about it for alchemy. So, remember, when it comes to science, get physical. Music