Paracelsus,a Transmutational Alchemist

A scholarly consensus has long held that in redefining alchemy, Paracelsus rejected metallic transmutation. I show here, however, that for most of his career Paracelsus believed that it was possible to change one metal into another, and even late in his short life he did not break with that view. Furthermore, in certain places in his works he also represented himself, occasionally directly and more often obliquely, as a practical transmutationist. Because Paracelsus not only acknowledged that metallic transmutations were theoretically possible but also claimed to have carried them out in practice, we must regard him as (among other things) a transmutational alchemist. As such, he had more in common than historians have generally admitted with both his medieval predecessors and his posthumous followers. The Paracelsian alchemists of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not wrong to situate Paracelsus within the alchemical tradition, nor to connect their own goldmaking interests to his.     

Books,Gold, and Elixir: Alchemy and Religious Orders in Early Modern Naples

In the early modern period Naples was a European centre of learning where a number of scholars engaged with alchemy. Variously perceived as a legitimate scientific practice or as a mendacious trick for gullible minds, alchemy engaged Neapolitan scholars in an ongoing dispute that involved members of the clergy. In this article I consider convents as research centres mainly engaged with medical alchemy. Specifically, I reconstruct the activity of the Dominican friar Tommaso d’Eremita. Upon his arrival at the Neapolitan convent of Santa Caterina a Formello in 1609, d’Eremita set up a laboratory where he spent years working on alchemical procedures in order to produce an elixir of life for the benefit of all. Beyond this charitable mission, I argue that members of religious orders in Naples engaged with alchemy for different purposes. In so doing, I discuss the cases of some members of religious orders in Naples who practised chrysopoeia with the aim of producing artificial noble metals.     

Modelling of a tubular solid oxide fuel cell with different designs of indirect internal reformer

The cell performance and temperature gradient of a tubular solid oxide fuel cell with indirect internal reformer(IIR-SOFC) fuelled by natural gas, containing a typical catalytic packed-bed reformer, a catalytic coated wall reformer, a catalytic annular reformer, and a novel catalytic annular-coated wall reformer were investigated with an aim to determine the most efficient internal reformer system. Among the four reformer designs, IIR-SOFC containing an annular-coated wall reformer exhibited the highest performance in terms of cell power density(0.67 W cm-2)and electrical efficiency(68%) with an acceptable temperature gradient and a moderate pressure drop across the reformer(3.53×10-5kPa).IIR-SOFC with an annular-coated wall reformer was then studied over a range of operating conditions: inlet fuel temperature, operating pressure, steam to carbon(S : C) ratio, gas flow pattern(co-flow and counter-flow pattern), and natural gas compositions. The simulation results showed that the temperature gradient across the reformer could not be decreased using a lower fuel inlet temperature(1223 K–1173 K)and both the power density and electrical efficiency of the cell also decreased by lowering fuel inlet temperature. Operating in higher pressure mode(1-10 bar) improved the temperature gradient and cell performance. Increasing the S : C ratio from 2 : 1 to 4 : 1 could decrease the temperature drop across the reformer but also decrease the cell performance. The average temperature gradient was higher and smoother in IIR-SOFC under a co-flow pattern than that under a counter-flow pattern, leading to lower overpotential and higher cell performance. Natural gas compositions significantly affected the cell performance and temperature gradient. Natural gas containing lower methane content provided smoother temperature gradient in the system but showed lower power density and electrical efficiency.     

Bad Chemistry: Basilisks and Women in Paracelsus and pseudo-Paracelsus

The basilisk of the pseudo-Paracelsian De natura rerum is the evil twin of the homunculus. Created from menstrual blood by artificial ectogenesis in an alchemical laboratory, the basilisk embodies the poisonous character traditionally ascribed to catamenial women, but magnified and concentrated by its mode of generation to the degree that it can kill by its glance alone. How does this remarkable thought experiment relate to other instances of the basilisk in the genuine and pseudonymous corpus of Paracelsus? The present paper outlines two primary uses which emerge repeatedly: first, in works other than De natura rerum, the basilisk is used by Paracelsus and his imitators as a means of explaining action at a distance, especially in the case of plague. Relying on a medieval association between the basilisk’s deadly gaze and the putative ability of menstruating women to damage mirrors, the genuine Paracelsus links contagious disease to the deleterious action of the female imagination. Second, because the basilisk was traditionally held to be the product of an unnatural birth, being born from an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad, the Paracelsian corpus frequently invokes the monster as a model for unnatural generation in general.     

Alchemy and Mining: Metallogenesis and Prospecting in Early Mining Books

Abstract

Historians have assumed that alchemy had a close association with mining, but exactly how and why miners were interested in alchemy remains unclear. This paper argues that alchemical theory began to be synthesised with classical and Christian theories of the earth in mining books after 1500, and served an important practical function. The theory of metals that mining officials addressed spoke of mineral vapours (Witterungen) that left visible markings on the earth's surface. The prospector searched for mineral ore in part by studying these indications. Mineral vapours also explained the functioning of the dowsing rod, which prospectors applied to the discovery of ore. Historians of early chemistry and mining have claimed that mining had a modernising influence by stripping alchemy of its theoretical component, but this paper shows something quite to the contrary: mining officials may have been sceptical of the possibility of artificial transmutation, but they were interested in a theory of the earth that could translate into prospecting knowledge.     

Some recent developments in the historiography of alchemy

The number of researchers and publications devoted to the history of alchemy has seen exponential growth and diversification in recent decades, to such an extent that some scholars speak of a "New Historiography of Alchemy". On the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, this paper outlines some highlights of the literature since 1990, with a view to identify current trends but also challenges for the future. Some of the most important changes identified are a marked awareness of the risks of presentism, a shift from ambitious histories to contextualised microhistories, a heightened recognition of the internal diversity of historical alchemy, and a greater emphasis on its practical dimensions and its role in the Scientific Revolution. Among the challenges, the paper underscores the potential risks of an excessive historiographical fragmentation, the need for further interdisciplinary training and cooperation, and the responsibilities of alchemy historians towards students and the general public alike.     

Between Aquinas and Eymerich: The Roman Inquisition’s Use of Dominican Thought in the Censorship of Alchemy

In the latter half of the sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition developed criteria to prosecute a series of operative arts, including various forms of divination and magic. Its officials had little interest in alchemy. During that period the Roman Inquisition tried few people for practising alchemy, and it was rarely discussed in official documents. Justifications for prosecuting alchemists did exist, however. In his influential handbook, Directorium inquisitorum, the fourteenth-century inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich had developed a clear rationale for the investigation and prosecution of alchemists as heretics. His position was endorsed in the 1570s by Francisco Peña in his commentary on Eymerich’s handbook. In this article I explore the reasons why alchemy held this ambiguous status. I argue that members of the Dominican Order developed two traditions of thinking about alchemy from Aquinas’s thought. The first, and closest to Aquinas’s own belief, held that alchemy was a natural art that posed no danger to the Christian faith. The second, developed by Eymerich from a selective reading of Aquinas’s writings, indicated specific circumstances in which alchemists could be investigated. The Roman Inquisition’s response to alchemy vacillated between the positions advocated by Aquinas and Eymerich.     

Textual Alchemy: The Transformation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus's Semita Recta into the Mirror of Lights

Abstract

This article explores the strategies of and the reasons behind the reworking of pseudo-Albertus Magnus's Semita recta into the Mirror of Lights. I argue that the redactor sought to provide a more comprehensive defence of the legitimacy of alchemy than found in the Semita recta. In the process of doing so, he reshaped the original text so as to present three units that addressed different parts of the alchemical opus: first, theory and justification of alchemy; second, basic information on substances and procedures; and, third, practice. The redactor employed sophisticated textual tools identical to those seen in scholastic texts. These strategies, I argue, constitute part of the redactor's attempt to bring authority and credibility to his project and to alchemy in general. Certainly, much more attention needs to be paid to these experiments of textual alchemy in order to understand the practice of alchemy in the late medieval period.     

A New Alchemical Poem Attributed to Khālid b. Yazīd (d. ca. 705)

This paper deals primarily with the identification of an inaccurately catalogued alchemical poem attributed to the famous Umayyad prince Khālid b. Yazīd (d. 705), edited, translated, and commented upon here for the first time. The paper also addresses the authenticity of Khālid’s interest in alchemy and connects that interest to the need of the early Islamic empire to develop its own gold coinage as a sign of political independence from Byzantine coinage that was up till then the currency of the lands occupied by early Muslims in the regions of modern-day Egypt and Syria. On the matter of the legendry character of Khālid which was apparently started by Ibn Khaldun and passed on after him to most nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century orientalists, the paper exposes here the inner contradictions in Ibn Khaldun’s theorising on the matter, and his failure to understand why someone like the historical Prince Khālid would be interested in alchemy.     

Application of Plasma Fuel Reformer to an On-Board Diesel Burner

A conventional diesel burner has arisen several shortcomings, such a large supply of air for a stoichiometric combustion, and a long heat-up time to reach the light-off temperature of catalyst in a diesel after-treatment system. This study shows a promising potential of using a plasma reformer for staged diesel combustion with minimized air and fuel consumption, and increased the flame stability with low NOx emission. A working principle of a plasma fuel reformer for staged combustion is explained in detail by both visualizing the plasma-assisted flame and analyzing the gas products. The concentrations of H₂, CO, NOx and the unburned total hydrocarbons were measured by gas chromatography and a commercial gas analyzer. Considering the operating condition of diesel exhaust gas is too harsh to maintain a stable diesel flame with a conventional diesel burner, plasma fuel reformer has distinctive advantages in stable flame anchoring under the condition of low oxygen concentration and fast flow speed. The re-ignition and stable flame anchoring by entrapment of oxygen in exhaust gas is mainly attributed to the low ignition energy and high diffusion velocity of hydrogen molecule. From an economic point of view, plasma reformer is also the only technology which can use only 1/3–1/8 of the air required for the stoichiometric burning of a conventional diesel burner. A conventional burner was simulated and analyzed to consume up to 30 % more fuel compared to the plasma reformer with the staged combustion to get the same level of temperature elevation in a real diesel engine scale.     

Fuit Ille non Empiricus Mercenarius: Apprehensions to Alchemy in Colonial New England

While recent historical studies have uncovered the intercontinental reputations of New England alchemists, much still remains to be known about actual attitudes concerning alchemy in the early colonies. Focusing on a corpus of roughly a dozen untranslated, and all but entirely unexamined Latin orations (ca. 200 pages) composed by Harvard College’s presidents and students in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, I argue that these new sources reveal the ambivalent, occasionally antagonistic attitude that educated New England men held towards the art of alchemy. Appreciating what they regarded as, in some cases, selfless, Christian efforts to cure diseases, these Harvard elite speakers still worried that alongside pious investigators had cropped up some self-serving charlatans, those who cared not for the communal promises of the art, but only the base financial reward.     

Translating Ancient Alchemy: Fragments of Graeco-Egyptian Alchemy in Arabic Compendia

Translation played a vital role in the development and transfer of alchemy in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Since its origins in Graeco-Roman Egypt, alchemy was encapsulated in Greek texts which allegedly relied on Persian or Egyptian sources. Later, a variety of Greek and Byzantine writings were translated into Syriac and Arabic, and these translations were in turn fragmented and disseminated in later Arabic compendia. This paper will first review the main phases of this historical process of transmission of alchemy from one language and culture to another. Second, this process will be examined using two significant case studies: a close analysis of various quotations from Graeco-Egyptian authors (Pseudo-Democritus, Zosimus of Panopolis, and Synesius) as presented in two Arabic dialogues on alchemy, The Tome of Images and The Dialogue between āras and the King Caesar. These sources demonstrate some of the concrete textual realities that underlie general patterns of translation and reception.     

Acceleration of catalyst discovery with easy,fast, and reproducible computational alchemy

The expense of quantum chemistry calculations significantly hinders the search for novel catalysts. Here, we provide a tutorial for using an easy and highly cost‐efficient calculation scheme, called alchemical perturbation density functional theory (APDFT), for rapid predictions of binding energies of reaction intermediates and reaction barrier heights based on the Kohn‐Sham density functional theory (DFT) reference data. We outline standard procedures used in computational catalysis applications, explain how computational alchemy calculations can be carried out for those applications, and then present benchmarking studies of binding energy and barrier height predictions. Using a single OH binding energy on the Pt(111) surface as a reference case, we use computational alchemy to predict binding energies of 32 variations of this system with a mean unsigned error of less than 0.05 eV relative to single‐point DFT calculations. Using a single nudged elastic band calculation for CH₄ dehydrogenation on Pt(111) as a reference case, we generate 32 new pathways with barrier heights having mean unsigned errors of less than 0.3 eV relative to single‐point DFT calculations. Notably, this easy APDFT scheme brings no appreciable computational cost once reference calculations are performed, and this shows that simple applications of computational alchemy can significantly impact DFT‐driven explorations for catalysts. To accelerate computational catalysis discovery and ensure computational reproducibility, we also include Python modules that allow users to perform their own computational alchemy calculations.     

Hydrogen production capacity of membrane reformer for methane steam reforming near practical working conditions

Currently, H₂ production techniques for application to proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) are intensively investigated, aiming to realize a clean hydrogen society. Due to the limitation by the thermodynamics of methane steam reforming (MSR), multi-reactions and multi-steps should be performed before the generated H₂-rich gas could be delivered to PEMFC, which inevitably increases the cost of H₂. However, using a thermodynamic shifting membrane reformer, H₂ could be produced compactly from MSR, provided that the catalyst showed high performance for MSR reaction and membrane efficiently removed H₂ from the reaction zone. We presented here a Pd-based membrane reformer for MSR reaction. In contrast with previous reports, nickel-based catalyst pre-reduced at high temperature was applied in this work, as well as high performance Pd-based membrane. The performances of the membrane reformer in terms of H₂ production capacity were also widely investigated. It was found that combination of an active catalyst for MSR and a H₂ ultra-permeable Pd membrane obtained high flux of H₂ across the membrane and recovery rate of H₂ in the membrane reformer. For instance, 98.8% methane conversion, over 97.0% selectivity to CO₂ and over 95.0% recovery rate of H₂ were obtained under mild working conditions. Simultaneously, the hydrogen flux across the membrane reached 18.6 m³/(m² h), and Pd-based pure H₂ production capacity significantly increased and reached around 387.5 m³/(kg_Pd h) in membrane reformer. Further work on stability investigation may develop an efficient on-site route of H₂ production process for application to on-site power generation using PEMFC.     

Direct minimization of the energy functional in LCAO-MO density matrix formalism

The general multiconfiguration self-consistent-field method is presented along the density matrix formalism. The proposed optimization procedure for orbitals makes use of an orthogonal transformation in the space spanned by the fixed basis set. Acting on the unconstrained parameters of the transformation a direct minimization of the energy expression is performed using a gradient approach. A similar method may also be applied to the optimization of the expansion coefficients. The method works not only for the ground state of a given system, but also for any excited state, yielding an upper bound to the true energy of the considered state.     

Stoicism and Alchemy in Late Antiquity: Zosimus and the Concept of Pneuma

At the beginning of the twentieth century, historians associated the alchemy of the third-century alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis with Platonism and Aristotelianism, explicating his theory of alchemical transmutation under the intellectual umbrella of these philosophical traditions. More recently, scholars of alchemy such as Christina Viano and William Newman have suggested a connection between Zosimean alchemy and Stoicism. Through a close reading of texts in Zosimus’s corpus, this paper posits a Stoic interpretation of several aspects of Zosimean alchemy, focusing on the concepts of pneuma and tension. For Zosimus, I argue, pneuma played a vital role in colouring metals, while tension conferred stability and cohesion upon metallic compounds. This interpretation suggests that Zosimus applied Stoic concepts to describe the alchemical process of tincturing metals.     

Porphyrin-fullerene linked systems as artificial photosynthetic mimics

We have prepared a variety of porphyrin-fullerene linked systems to mimic photoinduced energy and electron transfer (ET) processes in photosynthesis. Photodynamical studies on porphyrin and analogs-fullerene linked systems have revealed the acceleration of photoinduced electron transfer and charge-shift and the deceleration of charge recombination, which is reasonably explained by the small reorganization energies of electron transfer in fullerenes. In this context, we have proposed two strategies, photoinduced single-step and multi-step electron transfers, for prolonging the lifetime of a charge-separated state in donor-acceptor linked systems. The single-step ET strategy allowed a zinc chlorin-fullerene linked dyad to extend the lifetime up to 120 seconds in frozen PhCN at 123 K, which is the longest value of charge separation ever reported for donor-acceptor linked systems. Unfortunately, however, the quantum yield of formation of the charge-separated state was as low as 12%, probably due to the decay of the precursor exciplex state to the ground state rather than to the favorable complete charge-separated state. In contrast, the multi-step ET strategy has been successfully applied to porphyrin-fullerene linked triads, tetrads, and a pentad. In particular, a ferrocene-porphyrin trimer-fullerene pentad revealed formation of a long-lived charge-separated state (0.53 s in frozen DMF at 163 K) with an extremely high quantum yield (83%), which is comparable to natural bacterial reaction centers. These results not only provide valuable information for a better understanding of photoinduced energy and electron transfer processes in photosynthesis, but also open the door for the development of photoinitiated molecular devices and machines.