Physics in Alchemy, Particles and Wave Functions

A phenomenon reserved only for the few who have heard the eighth note (as we will see in Alchemy Resound chapter). Today physicists admit that particles like photons behave in a confusing, probabilistic way rather than following rigid rules. This could be the most fascinating aspect, that is, the entry into an unlimited temporal dimension in which past, present and future come together. But so few were able to witness this supreme event that it is only mentioned for the sake of the record. If it is true that the photon, which moves at the speed of light, has no residual energy to move even in time, this means that it does not experience the passage of time but only an eternal present.

True. It seems that a heated body emits photons… It couldn’t be simpler. Just as it seems that even a glance from our eyes emits photons. Let’s just think about the “gazes” of the Stars and the Sun.

A modern physicist would immediately resort to particles, quasiparticles, wave functions, creation and decay of ionizing particles, electron jumps from one level of the electron cloud to another, dark matter crossings, and even quantum entanglement. Nevertheless, in the not too distant future, even particles and their wave functions could fall into disuse. Scientists have admitted that perhaps particles and their wave functions exist only because they are stimulated in their experiments. The world may not be “particle-like” at all.

Physicists are aware that the experimental scientific method that has given such striking results cannot be applied to the whole of reality. As effective as it is in identifying the mechanisms that regulate measurable and reproducible material processes, it is completely impotent in dealing with phenomena that lack these characteristics. Simply put, modern physicists know that the ultimate part of the Opera Alchemica cannot be replicated with experiments and it is so random as to be less predictable than a dice throw.

In theory, any particle can only decay into lighter particles – and so, in the case of the muon, these are the electron, the photon, and neutrinos. However, although it is not forbidden by the laws of physics, the muon has never historically been observed to decay into an electron and a photon.

In fact, given the muon’s brevity of existence, it is not clear how it can exceed the speed of light to reach us, on the Earth’s crust. Yet we ourselves are passed through by cosmic muons. The only explanation that physicists today can give is even more puzzling: time is not a fixed measure.

It sounds like a cosmic particle from the edge of the cosmos to the depths of the sea. Alchemy tradition has it that Spiritus Mundi falls at night into the crevices of the earth’s crust. We do not claim that the Spiritus Mundi is the neutrino, but that the phenomenon sounds familiar to us.

So alchemists are not poor deluded people. If you remember, Al-Kindi also spoke of stellar rays that penetrate the heart of the earth and return to the surface.

The neutrino is so intriguing to an alchemist because it seems humanly unmanageable. If it can retain its rebellious nature, the neutrino seems perfectly suited to “carrying messages in the private channel”.

Provided we conceive of alchemical light as an aura surrounding the surfaces of bodies, the photon, to us ignoramus, would seem suitable for the task. However, I would like to add that alchemists do not formulate closed fields but only scalars. So, to represent the famous “chains” from sky to earth, the photon, however attractive, is not enough. In Alchemy, a transformation is always needed.

No, because, as already said, the true wonders of alchemical light occur in the dark. On the other hand, modern physicist would find it completely justifiable that “alchemical light” works even in the darkness. In fact, in dark conditions photons will continue to bounce in equilibrium of absorption, emission, absorption, emission in any direction, slowly escaping outward. Furthermore, any object with a temperature above absolute zero will emit photons at any time, mostly turning into infrared.

It seems that, formed by photons produced by metabolic processes within cells, this faint light disappears shortly after death, a confirmation of its actual existence and of its being closely connected to vital processes. The existence of this glow has long been a matter of debate due to the lack of technology sensitive enough to detect it, or to isolate it from other types of light or heat emissions. It is believed that one of the main activators of the metabolism that produces the glow is oxygen in the body. Considering the biological processes underlying this fascinating natural phenomenon of chemiluminescence, it is believed that all other animals – including humans – and plant organisms also emit their own glow called UPE (Ultra-Weak Photon Emission). This light in the visible spectrum is so weak that we are in the order of 10-1,000 photons emitted every second per square centimeter of tissue, with a wavelength between 200 and 1,000 nanometers.

Soon physicists will begin to consider more than just closed fields, like many small packages to be opened and seen. The real challenge for them will be to understand what alchemists call a “chain”.

Modern physicists say that at least seven photons must hit a retinal protein to transmit a signal to the optic nerve. What then would happen to those six photons that we would not be able to detect but which nevertheless would go on for infinite bounces and absorptions? If quantum mechanics speaks at this point of infinite probabilities, it is also true that the crossing mediums are composed of electrons that we know absorb and release other photons that in turn, if they hit certain surfaces, release electrons. But even our retinas could not retain photons indefinitely and perhaps would have to release them, through the medium composed of electrons. This is a conjecture, of course. Yet the explanation should not be too different. As for alchemists, and as we have seen that in the section on light, they adopted Al-Kindi’s thesis that the rays came out of the eye and went everywhere.

Here we assume that readers are “ignoramus” interested in the topic of Alchemy and not necessarily so good in physics. Alchemists would have loved the definition of the photon as a small dose of kinetic energy “shot” at a constant speed into immensity, since it had many analogies with the alchemical “cosmic waters”. The only particles with zero mass, which therefore not only travel at the speed of light, but must do so because they have no mass, are photons. Photons are so small that they do not interact with the “jamming” of the Higgs field, so they do not slow down and do not receive mass. During observation, the photon behaves like a wave, when not observed it behaves like a particle. However, when we talk about “electromagnetic waves” we emphasize the wave aspect, when we talk about “photons” we emphasize the corpuscular aspect. The “frequency” of the photon or wave depends on its energy. Low-energy photons are usually produced by vibrational state transitions of atoms or molecules (an atom goes from a high-energy vibrational state to a low-energy one and the energy difference is converted into a photon). Low-energy photons excite vibrational modes of atoms, thereby heating the material with which they interact. Intermediate-energy photons (infrared, light and ultraviolet) are generated by the de-excitation of electrons bound in atoms. When a photon moves from an orbital with higher energy to one with lower energy, a photon with the same energy as the jump is emitted. Intermediate-energy photons can also break chemical bonds or knock conduction electrons out of a metal (photoelectric effect). As for high-energy photons, they are, for example, gamma rays coming from the cosmos. In conclusion, the elusive photon appears to the eyes of an alchemist as the carrier par excellence.

I dedicated a whole chapter on J.Dee’s experiments with optical instruments. As for the idea of photon diffraction, today we talk about it on the basis of electromagnetism, but the use that the true ancients (and not between the Renaissance and the Baroque, which are only ancestors of the modern era) made of some instruments that archaeologists have defined as “optical” (and in fact, those devices really look like quartz lenses) is quite unknown. Anyway, according to classical modern electromagnetism, the speed of light depends on the medium in which it propagates. In a medium that is always endowed with electric and magnetic properties, it slows down according to these characteristics and we perceive the diffractive effect through a change in the angle with respect to the angle of incidence or a variation in speed.

This diffraction can be intuitively read as a demand for continuity by the wave front that experiences a discontinuity from the edge of an obstacle and becomes an edge wave. The obstacle then appears to become a fictitious source of a wave, with cylindrical symmetry, that overlaps both the transmitted wave and the edge wave. In Alchemy it is said that the “waters” were moved in the “origin”. For an alchemist, all this is alchemically “assonant”.

Bosons are already considered the mediators of interactions, but the Higgs boson seems to have its hands everywhere. Obviously, this feature would make it very “alchemical”. Anyway, don’t ask an alchemist for in-depth explanations.

If alchemists were aware of the difference between a photon and an electron they would fall into mental chaos. For alchemists, a photon starts out as such in the cosmos but becomes an electron as it descends the steps of the density scale. Indeed, alchemists are convinced that they know how to transform the ethereal cosmic photon into a more manageable terrestrial electron inside their work tools. The amazing thing is that a modern physicist would define the theory as extremely botched, but not too far from some truth.

Even before Einstein’s discoveries about light, some alchemists found that the electron fit very well with their concept of “motion” and “cooking”. An electron has mass and electric charge. Regardless of the fact that the photon is defined as a boson and the electron as a fermion (and that physicists say that there is a world difference), it seems that the photon, being the mediator of the electromagnetic interaction is, of course, responsible for the electromagnetic field and transmits the electromagnetic force, while the electron is subjected to it. The fundamental difference with the photon is the spin, equal to 1 for the photon and 1/2 for the electron. Thus, the electron  having a half-integer spin does not mediate any field. Fields with integer spin are called bosonic. Those with half-integer spin are called fermionic.

I didn’t mention it because I would have just copied and pasted it. Quantum entanglement is described in Scotus Erigena, Plotinus, Proclus. Ultimately, in Plato.

Photon is the quantum of light energy emitted, in an atom, by the jump of the electron from the outermost orbital to the immediately innermost one. Photon and electron are two different entities but their relationship can be cause/effect. The anecdotal language of physicists has come up with the following story: “You drink the milk but you don’t drink the cow. And yet it is the cow that makes the milk”. Said differently, the photon is the quantum of light energy emitted, in an atom, by the electron jumping from the outermost orbital to the immediately innermost one. The electron gets really excited and moves to an orbit farther from the nucleus. It’s called a “quantum jump”. The orbits are at very precise levels and the amount of energy needed to make the jump is equally precise and is called “quantum”. When the electron loses part of its energy, it returns to its original level and re-emits the photon, but weakened.

Let’s change the lexicon: what you mentioned is “spirit”, and the place where it is found confers “body.” A logical consequence is that by working with bodies, one extracts spirit. Basically, at least until the Baroque era, this was the axiom of alchemical works.

When a material is bombarded with an electron beam, part of the energy is transferred to the internal electrons, allowing a small fraction of them to escape from the solid. This phenomenon, known as secondary electron emission, is the basis of numerous modern technologies, including the cathode ray tubes in old televisions. The new discovery just lies in having identified which electrons have the right characteristics.

The average alchemist’s mindset is not to abandon the old axioms, but to speed up the work. These attempts are known as “the quest for the short art Ars Brevis”.

Alchemists have always worked with the most modern tools available. Perhaps this is precisely what distanced them from their origins.

When light strikes a metal surface, if it hits the right way, it can extract some electrons from the metal, which then move away from the plate. This is the photoelectric effect, and yes, it can be of great interest to alchemists. But perhaps they would describe the phenomenon as “extracting Mercurius directly from the surface of the raw metal”. Of course, the problem would then be to collect this all too elusive Mercurius.

Gold does not respect the Aufbau principle due to irregularities in the sequence of energy values. The further away the orbitals are from the nucleus, the more the energy levels of the various types of orbitals get messed up – to the point of even messing up the order in which the orbitals are filled.

This may be one of the reasons why gold is considered the raw material from which to obtain most of the Mercurius.An atom absorbs and emits photons when an electron moves from one energy level to another. We can therefore imagine that gold in its exercise of electronic elasticity emits photons.

Solar wind particles are mostly protons, electrons, helium ions, and high-energy nuclei.

The strange phenomena resembling aurora borealis that can occur during the Last Cooking failures are experienced by alchemists with a mixture of disappointment, disorientation and fear of the consequences. Alchemists say that these events are related to “ignition”. A physicist would instead attribute the thing to the surrounding electromagnetic environment: the Aurora phenomenon is formed when a “solar wind” comes into contact with a magnetic field. Consequently, if the Philosophers’ Stone were a miniature Earth it should have a magnetic field, if it were a miniature Sun a solar wind.

The aurora borealis/australis is a macro phenomenon due the result of the collision between charged particles released by the Sun and gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. The “solar wind” is a stream of charged particles, (mostly protons and electrons) emitted in all directions. As for the micro aurora due to a catastrophe with the philosophical egg, it is difficult to understand if and where a kind of solar wind comes from.

In fact, for this micro aurora to occur, there must be a collision of electrically charged particles from the alchemical Sun with the alchemical Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

Yes, there is a difference and often these celestial bodies are not even too much in harmony, neither from the esoteric point of view nor from the laboratory point of view. But just as often, instead, there is harmony between Stars and Sun. From the point of view of physics, which is the subject of this page, we know that different particles and wave functions reach the Earth from the Stars and the Sun.

No, this is a modern alchemists’ view, in reality quantum mechanics is consistent with electromagnetism. Quantum mechanics only says that what we perceive as electromagnetism is a macroscopic effect, in fact it makes no sense to talk about photons at our scales where light behaves like a wave. In fact, by changing the observation scale, the descriptive model changes. Quantum mechanics has its own specific branch (quantum electrodynamics) that explains phenomena related to the behavior of the photon in probabilistic terms. The resulting path of a photon moving in a generic medium to then be detected at a precise point, is a combination of the infinite paths that it could take to get from the source to the detector, each contribution to the final path is weighed by the probability associated with it. The sum of all these possible trajectories will give the total trajectory. The single photon has not slowed down but has simply followed all the possible trajectories in a manner consistent with the probability associated with each of them.

As far as alchemists know, the most spectacular event is the transition of colors in the three phases of most humid paths. And, for the few who reach that goal, the opening of an aurora borealis in the environment where a philosophical egg cracks or breaks prematurely. Also, let’s not forget, the transmutation of heavy metals into gold and silver. Today we know that each metal emits its own well-defined electromagnetic frequency and, at least theoretically, the change in these frequencies would be reflected in the transmutation of the elements of the chemical scale.

Ultimately, the whole search for “movement” of alchemical works could appear to a physicist today as a search to produce electromagnetism, not excluding the sound phenomenon of the supreme moments of the last cooking.

If the theory of the identification of alchemical Mercurius with the electron were true, one might conjecture that the theory of mercurial doubling is based on the attraction of the electronic spins, which in fact behave like small magnets.

Alchemists definitely accept that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. But they have a harder time accepting that mass is not something the body possesses (it is not a property), but rather something it does (it is rather a behaviour). In fact the majority of alchemists are always stuck in extracting “power” from raw material.

According to physicists, the photon can be included in the Einstein equation E = mc2. The question an alchemist asks is: is the photon on the side of energy or mass? The quantity m that appears in Einstein’s formula is the so-called “relativistic mass”: this is a different concept of mass from the one we are familiar with; the “relativistic mass” is a measure of the energy of the particle, and varies with the speed. By convention, what we call ‘mass’ in everyday life is not the ‘relativistic mass’ but, in modern terminology, the ‘invariant mass’. The latter is an intrinsic property of the particle and, as can be deduced from the name, is independent of the reference system. Its ‘invariance’ in this sense makes it a useful and conceptually well-defined quantity. Physicists ultimately say that, if we want, we can say that the photon has a non-zero ‘relativistic mass’ – anyway this statement, from their point of view, does not have much following from a practical point of view and in the physical sense.

Once the term “mass” has been clarified, physicists state that, despite zero mass, the photon has energy other than zero.

Until now, modern nuclear physics believed that the most direct way to transform heavy elements and produce different ones was to add or remove some protons. After all, gold and lead are not that different: on the periodic table, the two elements are represented a short distance from each other and are separated by just three protons (82 to 79 for lead). A team has managed to generate tens of thousands of gold nuclei thanks to a series of near-miss collisions between lead atoms launched at a speed close to the speed of light (99.999993%, to be precise).

The scientists explain that the atomic change occurs thanks to a process known as electromagnetic dissociation. In simple terms, the lead atoms travel so fast that they emit short pulses of photons, a phenomenon that sometimes causes oscillations in the internal structure of the neighboring particle, which in turn leads to the ejection of neutrons and protons.

High-energy photons not only interact with matter, like the low-energy ones we are used to (those of visible light), but they can also interact with each other, generating other particles. In short, to interact with matter, a photon must hit matter.

They probably know that, roughly speaking, the energy of a photon is the frequency of its electromagnetic wave.

Physicists have also hypothesized a sort of counterpart to the electromagnetic photon that would act as a mediator between the world of ordinary matter and the “dark sector”, composed precisely of hypothetical dark matter particles. In turn, numerous types of dark photons have been theorized, with variable physical characteristics.

Even physicists must admit that in some cases, as an alternative to photons, other particles, such as electrons, could be used, exploiting the specific properties of their spin. But even if alchemists were aware of this, what would change for them?

I am not a physicist, but at a very basic level, that is, chemical, I believe that alchemists may have unknowingly pioneered some peculiarities of the energy levels of orbitals, in fact, their raw material par excellence was gold, of which the irregularities with respect to the Aufbau principle are known. They may also have discovered the “photonic” potential of watercourses. They may have witnessed how nature manages to switch seamlessly from one wave frequency to another, I mean from gamma rays to the sound of the voice, or the property of ultrasound to host other frequencies. They may have learned how to “induce” life onto a common earth frequency. They may have foreseen a supreme example of quantum entanglement in the “hatching” of the philosophical egg. They may have discovered that we have the property of transmitting our ray heritage to those around us, just as if we were stars. They may have feared to rewind Genesis. They may have been instructed on how to measure the false vacuum between the bodies. They may have discovered that the Moon is a supreme tool. They may have discovered that the dizzying heights of the cosmos use to plummet into the abyssal depths of the earth. They may have witnessed the power of the fundamental frequencies of every substance, of Alchemy is based on the of mind and matter. And finally, how mind and matter share common origin, as well as memory stores located in imaginary worlds. But not with these words.

It is very likely that the ancients considered their knowledge to be highly sacred, and therefore pertinent exclusively to religion. But there is another possibility: this knowledge was brought from other civilizations or by psychic mediums. As far as “almost entirely” goes, there is still a long way to go, if it ever will be done.

Indeed… Alchemists keep saying it. The transmutation of common metals into gold could be based on this property. This idea wasn’t just from alchemists; physicists are also trying it. I’ll make you an interesting copy and paste:

“It happened at CERN in Geneva. One might say that gold and lead aren’t so different after all: on the periodic table, the two elements are represented a short distance from each other, and modern nuclear physics has already demonstrated that it’s possible to transform heavy elements to produce different ones. The research team generated tens of thousands of gold nuclei thanks to a series of near-miss collisions between lead atoms launched at a speed close to the speed of light. CERN explains that the atomic change occurs thanks to a process known as electromagnetic dissociation. Essentially, the lead atoms travel so fast that they emit short pulses. This causes oscillations in the internal structure of the neighboring particle, thus allowing the transformation, albeit for just a few seconds, of lead into gold.”

Alchemy was born perfect and was lost over the millennia. It is modern alchemists who affirm it so peremptorily, a few centuries ago it was said that it was the work of God. Even a beginner understands that Alchemy can only have been revealed. No human tradition could have created it.

In the eighteenth century the terrifying element was the discovery of electricity: some alchemists thought that it would interfere with their work, others thought that Alchemy had been trivially revealed in its most hidden mechanisms. In the nineteenth century, Edison’s invention of the phonograph shocked alchemists because, once again, they thought that the American inventor had arrived at the heart of the alchemical question. Finally, in the twentieth century, the use of radio waves for “trivial” matters, made alchemists, such as Canseliet, think that their massive use made alchemical works impossible. As for me, I am scared of the manipulation of water, especially underground water.

I answer with another question: what is the use of learning about photons, electrons, bosons, fermions, neutrinos and fields when we are completely losing sight of, and have in fact gone out of the field of investigation, the connection of these with the world of sound? Bear in mind, that the supreme alchemical phenomenon is the sound of the higher musical octave. Only the higher octave can explain to us what the Philosophers’ Stone is. Someone might simply observe that for a physicist they are all waves of the infinite range of vibrations, for an alchemist they are all waves of the great alchemical sea.