Well I have not read much about modern alchemy but mostly works trying to bridge experiments and philosophy underlying the discipline.
By the way, one of the things that is apparent in the field is the role of very long periods at high temperature, something you never really do in ordinary chemistry, these days nobody works on experiments that encompass ten days or even months of heating for the sample. This is pretty much equivalent to say that our scientific laws sometimes do not have data for very slow processes - a low-frequency cut-off. In this respect it is really interesting to think of the famous 1/f noise as involved in the alchemical processes.
The other aspect of alchemical work is that it seems (see below about Hauck) that who perform the experiment is an integral component of the experiment: this is not a new concept at all as we know in QM, but even in classical physics not everybody is able to have their experiments working... and maybe there is more about this than simply not being fit for experimental work...
Not a concrete idea, really. Last year I noticed that the most popular transmutation between alchemists, those of Hg to Au, is actually exotermic. It goes Hg201->Pt197+Alpha->Au197+beta. But the mean life dor this to happen is as long as the life of the universe, according common model of alpha disintegration.
The alpha in Hg201 is just above E=0, thus deep under the barrier. So I guess that a perturbation of the barrier does not help a lot (BTW, the maximum enhancement with this method is recorded about 15-20% in very deformed atoms).
Well it was just an improvised guess, I am happy enough with a 15-20% for now. What is worth to remember is that even though the binding energies of nuclei are enormous, there are very low energy processes (thermal neutron bombardment) that make them incredibly unstable: when Fermi started bombarding uranium nuclei, nobody expected he would actually be able to break them into two big chunks... Thinking of nuclei as heavily charged liquid droplet helped a lot in those days
Perhaps it could be possible to take advantage of the near-threshold status of this alpha and to induce some resonance mechanism. I have never seen such beast, but who knows.
Well my knowledge of resonance processes in high energy physics is quite poor and even poorer for nuclear physics so... If you are referring to some mechanism by which our alpha is able to collect more and more energy by some oscillating source something like a multiphoton process still ultrashort laser pulses would be my choice... nevertheless I do not see how being near-theresold plays a role...
Or are you thinking to create a lot of these alpha states inside a nucleus? Promoting a lot of nucleons to bind into an alpha state would create some instability?
Who is Dennis Hauck? Url do u have 4 it?
Dennis Hauck (
www.alchemylab.com) is an Austrian guy (now leaving in California) who has done plenty of research on alchemical science and his conclusion is that it was a science where the observer/alchemist was influencing the results of the experiment so deeply that the experiment outcome were actually portraying the status of the observer, something he likes to call his level of consciousness or evolution. A perfectly reasonable quantum mechanic possibility, only the experiment is observing the experimenter and not viceversa... Even though this might sound lot like phylosophy (and partly is) the guy casts a lot of light on experimental alchemy too and more important on the key to read the heavily symbolic language present in ancient texts. If you are used to 'understand' by a logic, detail-oriented, left brain approach this might just seem 'bull****' but if you complement this point of view with an analogy-based, synthetic, right brain approach, there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle that you can start putting together, a bigger picture come together that will sound intuitevely appealing; even though still hard to put down into equations it can be an excellent research guiding tool.
