Alchemy/Physics/Black Hole

Sometimes, when the moon is bright and the dense night weighs heavily upon my conscience…what?…, I enjoy thinking about matter; atoms and molecules: how they work and what they get up to. Which is probably why I studied Chemistry – although, there is something to be said for access to some really great solvents – and I love the smell of dichloromethane in the morning (and that sweet tingle it gives me). But I didn’t know much about the beginnings of Chemistry as a Science. So I’ve been reading about Alchemy and how it transitioned into Chemistry.

Eighteenth century alchemists, in an effort to understand matter, did a lot of burning of materials (mainly metals and minerals, with and without charcoal – burning the crap out of things has always been an effective experimental method; plus, fire pretty). They found that some materials gained mass, some lost mass; it was all very confusing and hard to explain. So they came up with the idea of ‘phylogiston’ – a substance (not quantified experimentally) which combines or uncombines with materials as is needed. One of the pioneers of modern Chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), disagreed with the alchemists. Here is what he had to say about phylogiston:

“Chemists have made phylogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it. Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not; sometimes it is free fire, sometimes it is fire combined with an earth; sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it. It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours. It is a veritable Proteus* that changes its form every instant!” **

I think Lavoisier was a little bit of a killjoy.

In 2008, scientists and engineers [actually construction workers, electricians etc…people who probably, at times, risked their health (and lives) during construction] finished building the Large Hadron Collider. They will now be able to smash really tiny particles together at really high velocities (doesn’t sound crazy at all). Physicists are looking for the Higgs-Boson particle (or ‘God’ particle). If it exists it will account for the mechanism by which other particles (eg electrons) acquire mass. (This is the best explanation I can give for something I barely understand).

My point in all this…is that it sounds a lot like phylogiston. Not that this is a bad thing; maybe the alchemists were onto something, but the idea got lost along the way, especially as they were unable to prove anything experimentally.

Of course none of this is going to matter if the particles in the collider reach Black Hole critical mass. The human race, all the nice animals, the bacteria, the plants, the insects (but not the cockroaches – they’ve got those nifty exoskeletons which convert into spaceships) will be compacted into an incredibly dense ball of matter and will suffer endless torment in the eternal darkness. Amen.


*Proteus: (in Greek mythology) a sea god able to take various forms at will/ any bacterium of the genus Proteus, usually found in the intestines – I don’t know which he meant, probably the former. I think it would be fun to be a Proteus, either kind.
**From “The Norton History of Chemistry” by William H Brock, pg.111 (yep, it’s him again – sadly, no ‘corpuscular’ in this quote).