Arthur Conan Doyle has a story called "The Discovery of Raffles Howe." Her hero invents a way of converting chemical elements from one to another, respectively - and the production of gold. But the scientist is in no hurry to make his discovery public. In this case, Howe argues, gold will immediately depreciate, and something else will take its place.
The scientist prefers to trade his gold in secret, and uses the proceeds for charity and helping those in need. The opposite task is set by the engineer Garin at Alexei Tolstoy. He rushes to the inexhaustible reserves of the Earth's gold in order to bring chaos to the world economy and seize power.
Gold is the eternal dream of alchemists, and not only them. They laugh at alchemy - pseudoscience, they say, and nothing more. Indeed, no one has yet learned how to "bake" gold in their kitchen. But if we still admit that people once possessed the secrets of the transmutation of elements?
Emperor Diocletian's wrath
In the early Christian era, not many doubted that the priests of Ancient Egypt knew the secret of obtaining gold. And thanks to the activities of the Alexandrian Academy in the II-IV centuries, this conviction only strengthened. It got to the point that the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a special decree in 296. It ordered to burn all Egyptian manuscripts about the artificial production of gold.
Diocletian was undoubtedly preoccupied with the troubles that such knowledge was fraught with for trade and the economic welfare of the state. The enlightened emperor was hardly so ignorant that he issued such a decree without good reason. What grounds these were - now it is impossible to establish. Many treasures of human thought perished in the flames of wars and conflagrations, let us recall the libraries of Alexandria and Carthage, plundered and destroyed. What hidden knowledge was stored there?
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Legend of the Star City
In early February 1517, the Esperanza caravel under the command of Captain Raphael Rodriguez was wrecked near the island of Jamaica, 300 miles southeast of Cuba, which was ruled at the time by the governor of the Spanish king Charles V, Diego Velazquez. In the half-broken skiff, almost without food and fresh water, there were 13 people, led by Rodriguez himself. For 10 days the fragile boat was carried along the waves of the Yucatan Strait, until it washed up on the Mexican coast.
Of the 13 sailors, only seven survived … They were captured by the Mayan Indians under the leadership of Hala-Kayar and taken to the city of Champoton. The ruler of the city of Moch-Kouo ordered to immediately sacrifice five captives to the gods … Two survived, Rafael Rodriguez and Martos Sanchez - their turn had not yet come. The Spaniards were locked in a house, but they managed to dismantle the wall and escape into the forest.
After a month of hungry wanderings, the sailors joined the expedition of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, who arrived in Mexico on three ships in March 1517. Their story became known to the world. It was believed that Captain Rafael Rodriguez and six sailors of his unfortunate crew were the first Europeans to set foot on Mayan land.
But according to the legend that will be discussed, this was not the case. In 1514, with the blessing of the Holy See, Alvaro Aguileri, Bishop of Toledo, turned to His Majesty, whom no one in Rome wanted to see because of his excessive cruelty even for an inquisitor. Aguileri invited the king to equip an expedition to Mexico in order to bring the lost peoples the light of Christianity and place them under the protection of the Spanish crown. The project was accepted, but kept in strict secrecy - so it was easier in case of failure to hide the shame of defeat, and if successful, to dazzle with the brilliance of the triumph.
Aguileri set about preparing the expedition. More difficulties arose than he had expected, and it was not until mid-July 1516 that an armed detachment of 100 men landed in Mexico from the 30-gun ship Spain. After careful study of the area and interrogation of the Indians, the detachment moved into the interior of the country.
Aguileri led his people not to the powerful empire of the Aztecs, where Montezuma ruled, but to the south, to a city hidden behind forests and mountains, called the Star in the language of the Indians (is it not the mythical Eldorado?). The innumerable riches of the Star City, about which the Indians told, was what called the bishop on his way.
Two months later, the Aguileri detachment, thinned by a third due to insidious ambushes, attacks of predators, unknown diseases and bites of poisonous snakes and insects, reached the goal. Having penetrated the city by deception, the Spaniards in a few hours suppressed all resistance of the inhabitants, who had nothing to oppose to the firearms of foreigners. A city full of gold and temptations lay at the feet of Aguileri, and in magnificent temples, instead of broken idols, Catholic crosses were raised.
It would seem that it's time to send the king a report of victory and chests of gold … However, it was not. Aguileri had other plans. Seeing a lot of gold around, the bishop set himself the goal of getting to its source. To his extreme amazement, no gold deposits were found for miles around … So, gold was brought to the Star City from afar? But where and how, in such huge quantities, in the complete absence of communication lines and vehicles?
Information about the fate of Aguileri's expedition in Spain did not wait, and soon they forgot about it, for the loud exploits of Cortez overshadowed the first attempt at a civilizing mission in the country of idolaters. Aguileri, obsessed only with gold, did not pay attention to the numerous deposits of copper, or to the strange rites of the priests associated with the melting of metals. He died without solving the riddle.
To what has been said, the following must be added. In 1978, in Bulgaria, near the city of Varna, during archaeological excavations of burial grounds of the 6th-5th centuries BC, the richest treasures of golden objects were discovered - a total of more than 400 kilograms!
Meanwhile, there were no gold deposits in the Balkans and there are no, but there is copper in abundance. Gold and brought here from afar? Maybe. But gold treasures are found in Nigeria and Mesopotamia, where there is no precious metal either, but there is a lot of copper. So, did not copper once serve as a raw material for obtaining gold?
Medieval transformations
But what about medieval European alchemists? What were their successes in this field? One of the indefatigable enthusiasts of the "gold rush" was the famous Dutch alchemist van Helmont. True, he personally did not manage to invent the philosopher's stone. But he repeatedly received samples of this mysterious substance from other alchemists, with which he undertook transmutation.
So, he wrote that in 1618 he turned eight ounces of mercury with a quarter grain of this stone into pure gold. The possibility of deception on the part of the alchemist who delivered the sample, according to van Helmont, was excluded, since he was not present during the transmutation.
There were also cases of public demonstration of such transformations. Sometimes after the death of famous alchemists, gold bars were found. Leonardo da Vinci recommended in his notes: "Carefully examining the branches of gold, you will see at their ends that they slowly and gradually grow, turning into gold what they come into contact with."
Is this possible in principle? And if possible, how?
How is this possible?
The carrier of the chemical properties of any element is its electronic shell, but its structure is "encoded" in the nucleus of the atom. With the help of chemical reactions, you can add or subtract electrons, but as long as the nucleus is unchanged, the element will still remain the same. Therefore, any transmutation of elements is a nuclear reaction. Are they possible under ordinary conditions, without gigantic temperatures, attainable only in an atomic explosion?
A number of leading scientists believe: yes, this is possible with the help of catalysts. In chemistry, these are substances that accelerate the course of a reaction many times over. But that is chemistry, and are nuclear catalysts possible? In theory, yes. If it was possible to "unfold" the nucleus of an atom, to bring it closer to another, then it would become possible to obtain gold from lighter copper. Theoretically, this is irrefutable, but in practice, modern science is still very far from such results.
So could ancient scientists have such knowledge? It is difficult to answer unequivocally. But it must be borne in mind that transformations in nature are its universal property and they can be accelerated many times by selecting the appropriate catalysts. In addition, we often rediscover what has long been discovered, albeit not in a rational way, but by an intuitive train of thought.
Curiosities
And I would like to end this article with amusing curiosities related to our topic. So, in 1854, a certain Theophilus Tiffero came to the French Academy of Sciences and presented … two bars of artificial gold, which he was allegedly taught to make in Mexico. This incident caused extreme irritation in D. I. Mendeleev, who perceived it as an attempt on the very foundations of chemistry.
And at the end of the 19th century in America, the scam of Jonathan Emmens made a lot of noise, who suggested … to turn Mexican silver dollars into gold ones. A corresponding joint-stock company was created, which soon burst safely. It is curious that the swindler was so convincing that he attracted the attention of such prominent scientists of the time as Archibald Geiky and William Crookes.
However, let's leave charlatans on their extremely dubious Olympus. As for alchemy, as the medieval scholastic, monk and heretic Marcus Delmonte argued, “the inner meaning of this science is all-conjugation, that is, the relationship of the whole with its constituent parts. Correctly understood, alchemy deals with a conscious force governing mutations and transmutations within matter, energy and even within life itself …"
Andrey BYSTROV