March 16, 2009
- Classical Alchemy -
Found this article on Physorg about metal becoming transparent under great stress:
“It is well known that at sufficiently high compression all materials must go metallic,” said Oganov. “This is seen in the metallization of hydrogen at high pressures and temperatures inside planets Jupiter and Saturn.”
It’s a little confusing, because the caption under the accompanying picture (which I’ve swiped and displayed here) says:
“Sodium, a white metal at pressures below 1.5 Mbar (left — picture at 1.1 Mbar, 1 Mbar = 1 million atmospheres), turns black at 1.5 Mbar (center — picture at 1.56 Mbar) and becomes red transparent at 1.9 Mbar (right — picture at 1.99 Mbar). It is predicted to become colorless and transparent like glass at ~3 Mbar.”
So maybe it turns clear, maybe it doesn’t. But either way, it’s pretty cool, and it got me thinking about classical alchemy. I don’t know much about it, but I do know that part (or maybe all) of the “Great Work” of alchemy involves the stages of “Nigredo“, “Albedo“, and “Rubedo“, that is, black, white, and red. Now, sulfur doesn’t go through the colors in this same order, and after doing further research, wikipedia says that there’s actually a fourth color, between Albedo and Rubedo, called “Citrintas“, or yellow.
So although there’s a correlation there, I don’t think there’s much too it:
Alchemy: Black, White, Yellow, Red
Sulphur under pressure: White, Black, Red, Clear
Still, kind of neat, yeah?
Also, while looking up these alchemical terms, I found a pretty direct explanation of these terms that goes a bit deeper than the wikipedia articles. I won’t go over the whole thing, because it’s worth reading through yourself. But there’s a few parts that very clearly say something along the lines of what I was trying to say in that post from late last week:
Well, I am definitely guilty of being distracted by “Makyo”, and for a while I even mistook it as the fruit of my mediation practice. I am not trying to get all high and mighty here. But that last bit, the one I highlighted, really hit home for me as far as the (lack) of usefulness of visions of beings and higher dimensions and stuff like that. I’m not knocking it as being potentially useful for other people, but for me, it’s just another distraction.
The Buddhist’s have said it best though: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha!”
Awesome alchemy link, thanx!
> … visions of lights, of angels, yes even of the great masters, should be neglected …
Verry interesting…
Comment by speedbird — March 18, 2009 @ 11:54 am
Yeah, that kind of hit home for me. Because visions are not really what you’re looking for under the circumstances… Maybe parts of you want those, but the point is not to see visions, the point is spiritual growth. And no one (or thing) can do that for you.
Comment by Ian — March 18, 2009 @ 1:45 pm
But then such things are an entirely natural part of the process, right?
*
Funnily enough, I’m engaged in a bit of modern alchemy at work right now – the hardening and tempering of steels, which has so obviously come out of the same mindset it’s scary.
Comment by speedbird — March 19, 2009 @ 11:25 am
Yeah, definitely a natural process. I kind of think of them as something similar to the light emitted when electrons jump up and down in valance levels (if I’m remembering my high school chemistry vocabulary correctly…)
Sounds cool, a real lead-into-gold kind of operation. Course, I’m not the one doing all the hard work, but still, pretty interesting! Funny, I always thought of that stuff as having been worked out already. As in, we already know how to temper steel; why bother learning it? But someone’s got to know how to do it, and more importantly, perhaps find ways of doing it better.
Comment by Ian — March 19, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
Hmm, I guess it is kind of lead-into-gold…!
> I always thought of that stuff as having been worked out already. As in, we already know how to temper steel; why bother learning it?
This is the thing about learning: every generation has to re-learn everything, or it gets forgotten. And when you get to something like steel that’s been around for a thousand years, you start to realise how weird it all is. I mean, it’s hard to put into words but all the same stuff has been called by a score of different names in that time. Each generation has called it on their own terms, though at root it’s all the same stuff. You can write it down, but then reading it and recreating the original intent actually turns out to be non-trivial. The emphases and meanings and divisions of things change with and reflect the societies who write them down.
- Am I making any sense?
Comment by speedbird — March 19, 2009 @ 3:06 pm
Yeah, that makes sense alright. That’s a problem with history, it piles up behind you and you think things have been accomplished. But they haven’t, not to the extent that people will never need to continue to make those accomplishments.
You see it all there, spread out behind in time and around you in space, and you think, “surely there’s someone taking care of this..”
But sometimes, there’s not. An important thing to remember, that there are still accomplishments that need to be made.
Comment by Ian — March 20, 2009 @ 10:51 am
> “surely there’s someone taking care of this..”
This is something I’m beginning to think is really important. I have met a couple of people on my travels possessed of the idea that answers are always to be found if you just work out the right people to ask, that it’s just a matter of finding the right teacher. And I’ve begun to realise that this just ain’t necessarily so. Sometimes you know as much as anyone else on a subject, and sometimes that’s really scary – both because of the sudden realisation of the limits of knowledge, and the immediate responsibility of action.
Comment by speedbird — March 24, 2009 @ 7:47 am
Yeah, it’s the old Robert Anton Wilson (I think) conspiracy theory thing, that there’s not really anybody controlling it all, no big evil cabal behind the scenes, no overarching body of authority.
But at the same time, “the sudden realisation of the limits of knowledge, and the immediate responsibility of action” is a powerful thing. I think the answers are always to be found if you work out the right questions to ask.
But maybe that’s just all the Feynman lectures I’ve been listening to. :)
Comment by Ian — March 24, 2009 @ 8:59 am
Or maybe Douglas Adams… :-D
Comment by speedbird — March 24, 2009 @ 9:06 am
I did absorb the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide series all at once, in one leather bound gilded volume with a fancy satin ribbon (which I got for like 5 bucks at a used book store). That stuff will echo in the cosmic background radiation of my brain for quite some time…
Comment by Ian — March 24, 2009 @ 9:13 am