Читать книгу Modern Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone - Wilfried B. Holzapfel - Страница 40

Helen and Marie were familiar with the first of these forces, but had only a vague idea of the nuclear forces. There were other terms in the illustration that they had not seen before. Marie was familiar with the term photon, but even she had not seen the words baryons, leptons, bosons, or gluons.”

Professor Wood explained that physicists also describe the binding forces in this microcosm as particles. That only added to the confusion that the students were experiencing. He was about to explain the difference between baryons and leptons as they appeared in the chart, when Helen blurted out, “I am getting a headache from all of these particles.”

Professor Wood paused a moment. “You are right. I am getting carried away again. I forget that the two of you are just in your first year of studies here at the university. Perhaps we should call it quits for today. If I can entice you to come back next week, I’ll wrap up this summary of the microcosm so that we can go back to the world that the ancients knew. I just felt that it will be helpful for you to have some familiarity with the way we think of fundamental building blocks of nature today before we continue our search for something that we can compare to the quintessence.”

“I was afraid that we had lost track of that idea,” Helen said. She was visibly relieved to hear that there might be some philosophical light at the end of this sub-nuclear tunnel.

The young women thanked the professor and took their leave. On the way back to the dorm, Helen asked Marie, “What did you think of that session?”

“It was interesting,” Marie answered. “Like you, I was not really aware that it is now common knowledge among physicists that nuclear particles are composed of quarks. I am also curious about the Greek letters in the lower left-hand part of the chart. I know that the e- refers to an electron, but I didn’t recognize any of the other leptons, if that’s what they are.”

“I just don’t see where this is going,” Helen grumbled. “I thought we were going to talk about quintessence. But we were getting all wrapped up in – what was it, particle physics?”

“Well, if you think about it,” Marie said, “the material prima was supposed to be the stuff from which the other essentia were made. If today we view everything to be composed of atoms, and atoms to be composed of nucleons, and nucleons to be composed of quarks, then maybe quarks are the materia prima of today.”

Helen had to agree with Marie’s conclusion. “That’s also what I was thinking,” she said. “But then why didn’t Professor Wood just say that instead of hinting that there was something else he needed to tell us about?”

“You’ve got me there,” Marie replied. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

They parted, each anticipating a break from their studies as well as a break from Modern Alchemy over the weekend. There was an important football game that would take place on Saturday and they each had plans with other friends that would provide them an excuse to avoid any heavy philosophical conversation for at least a day or two.

Marie was planning to attend the game with some of the other students from the dorm. That would have included Helen had Helen not been a member of the football marching band. That meant that Helen would leave the dorm after an early breakfast to go to the band building for a final rehearsal before marching onto the field and pre-senting the pre-game ceremony. Helen would watch the game from the section of the bleachers that is reserved for the band. After the game, Marie and her friends would treat themselves to a pizza party at one of the off-campus eateries downtown.

For her part, Helen was more than a little excited about the day’s activities. From her seat in the flute section of the band room she could not help but notice the cute guy playing second-chair trombone. He seemed very sociable and confident. He was always laughing and talking with the other trombonists, sometimes to the annoyance of the band director. She had asked other band members in her seating section if they knew who the boy was, but none of them could even tell her his name.

But recently, even several times over the past weeks, she had noticed him looking her way as the director cued up the next number. He had even returned her smile a couple of times! Of course, once the band moved outdoors to the practice field, she had no idea where he was. It was enough just to keep her own position in the formation and play the right notes.

Then, this morning, as they were walking back to the band building to stow their instruments and pick up their book bags for the rest of the day, he had caught up to her and introduced himself. It turns out that his name is Max Gillett and he is an architecture student. Most importantly, Max would be taking Helen to dinner and a movie on Saturday evening after the game…..

Marie was feeling lazy on Saturday morning. She had no commitments to anyone until lunchtime when she would meet with her friends and head over to the stadium. After breakfast, despite her best intentions to avoid doing so, she switched on her computer and entered the word lepton into her search engine. She quickly discovered that the other symbols on Professor Wood’s chart referred to three “generations” of leptons, specifically electrons, muons and tau particles, together with their associated neutrinos. All six of these have anti-particles. They also exhibit a property called “spin” that has a value one-half. As Professor Wood had mentioned, the electron is very light. It has a mass of about one one-thousandth the mass of a proton or neutron. The muon is roughly twenty times more massive than an electron and the tau has a mass that is nearly twenty times that of the muon. Only the electron is stable, meaning that it does not spontaneously decay into some other particle. On the average, a muon decays into an electron within about two millionths of a second after being created during a collision that has taken place in one of the large particle accelerators that the professor had mentioned. The tau decays a million times more quickly than that!

“Helen is going to go crazy if Professor Wood goes into all of that kind of detail,” Marie thought to herself.

When Helen and Marie arrived at Professor Wood’s office later that week, he was heating up some water for his afternoon coffee. “May I offer you some tea or coffee?” he asked them.

They both felt that this was one of those days when a little “pick me up” would be just right. When they both indicated a preference for tea, Professor Wood said, “I can offer you a nice selection of tea bags, but I’m afraid that I don’t have any dainty china tea cups to go with them. Will these coffee mugs do for the purpose? I can preheat them for you so that they don’t cool the water too much.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Marie said, looking at the coffee mugs. “Just pour the hot water into the mugs and we’ll take it from there.”

Marie glanced at Helen as the professor poured hot water into the same colorful mugs he had used the last time, the ones with the miniature copy of the poster behind his desk (Figures 6 and 7). They had learned a lot of things from Professor Wood about modern science, even something about how modern science mirrors the ancient ideas of the alchemists, but they had not made much progress in understanding that chart or how it relates to the sculpture in the professor’s front yard. That was what had started this whole conversation in the first place!

Marie decided not to ask about the mugs or the chart. She waited in anticipation for Professor Wood to announce the topic for the day. She secretly grimaced to herself when the professor brought out the chart with the baryons, leptons and bosons (Figure 16). She had hoped that they would be past that by now.

“The last time we met,” Professor Wood began, “we were examining this chart. I just wanted to recount a couple of things before we move on to another aspect of modern science.”

Marie took this indication of a limited discussion of particle physics to be a hopeful beginning to the day’s lecture.

Professor Wood continued. “First, the nuclear forces that are represented by the two bosons on the right half of the figure only act over very short distances. That, in part, is why nuclei are so small. These are the forces that are involved with the radioactivity that we spoke about last time.

“Second, the baryons are built up of three quarks.

“Third, there are three generations of quarks, each having two ‘flavors’: up, and down; strange and charm; and bottom and top. “I bring this up with you today mainly to point out how frequently the number three tends to show up in modern physics.”

Professor Wood looked expectantly at the two students. He fixed his gaze on Helen.

“Okay,” Helen said finally. “That does remind me of Plato’s idea that the atoms proposed by Democritus should be constructed of nothing but triangles, three-sided figures. But the number three had also a divine meaning to the ancients. I remember how important the number three was in the writings of Hermes Trismagistus whose very name means Thrice Great. He described himself as ‘wearing three hats,’ as we would say today. Later writers described him as having been a ‘Priest, Philosopher and King.’ Pythagoras was among his students. Isaac Newton translated some of his writings into English. But historians are uncertain as to whether he actually existed or if his ‘works’ were a compilation of three other writers. According to the Wikipedia entry that bears his name, the mystical Thrice-Great Hermes claimed that he knew the three parts of the wisdom of the whole universe and that the three parts of the wisdom were alchemy, astrology and theology.”

“Today, we might say that these three parts of knowledge are theology, philosophy and science,” Professor Wood added. “Apparently Hermes felt that religion should be based upon the wisdom of the alchemists and the secrets of the stars. I intentionally renamed and re-ordered his list to match the traditional faculties at classical universities. There, even now, these faculties refer to our individual mental development. As children we start out believing everything we are told. Later, we question what we are taught and want to know ‘why?’ Once we reach puberty, we begin to look more critically at our environment.”

“From what I hear on the news,” Marie said, “a lot of people never make it to that last phase.”

Professor Wood chuckled at Marie’s comment before asking Helen if she had any other insights to share with them.

“Along those lines,” Helen added, thinking about what Professor Wood had said about Hermes Trismegistus’ characterization of the three parts of the wisdom, “I have heard it said that ‘Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.’ That would support your rearrangement of the three terms I found in Wikipedia. I can also appreciate updating Hermes’ term of astrology to today’s science of astronomy. On the other hand, there are obviously still many people who have stuck with older practice.”

“That’s part of what I meant,” Marie said. “That, and the way some people still hold on the biblical version of creation and many other ideas that they believe are ‘fundamentally true’ despite scientific evidence to the contrary. But, I think I interrupted you, Helen. I believe that you might have had something else to say of the persistence of the number three in Christian dogma.”

Helen nodded. “One 10th century source suggested that Hermes ‘was called Trismegistus because of his praise of the trinity, saying there is one divine nature in the trinity'. That was interpreted by some theologians to be the same Trinity that is still a keystone of the Christian religion today in the form of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Christian dogma also mentions the three Holy Kings who visited the baby Jesus. Sometimes God is represented in Christian paintings by a triangle with an eye. I’m sure that there are many other reflections of the number three in the esoteric branch of alchemy.”

The professor nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And some of these spiritual triads are still important to some modern scientists as well, even if they don’t take the story of Adam and Eve to be factual.”

Professor Wood paused for a moment as he scanned the diagram with the massive particles and the forces.

“Oh, oh, here come more elementary particles,” Marie thought to herself.

Noting the look on Marie’s face, the professor announced, “We don’t really need to worry about quarks and gluons right now, or even with the leptons for that matter, except to say that many of these particles were first observed in cosmic rays coming to us from outer space. It is possible that even more elementary particles will be found as our research takes us to even smaller dimensions on the way to the smallest meaningful length.”

This was music to Marie’s ears. “You mean the Planck length of 10^-35 meters, right,” she said hoping to put the discussion of subatomic particles to rest for the foreseeable future.

“Yes,” said Professor Wood. “By the way, Marie, have you read anything about the search for the Higgs Boson and the recent experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN?”

“I have read some popular articles about it in the newspaper, but I really didn’t understand them. Is the Higgs Boson important to our search for the quintessence?” Marie asked, still trying to steer the conversation away from elementary particles.

“We don’t really need it,” the professor said sensing a hint of anxiety in Marie’s voice. “I just wanted to point out that if we look in the direction of the whole universe, into the macrocosm, we are likely to meet some of these particles again.”

“Speaking of the universe,” Professor Wood said, abruptly changing the subject. “Have you ever tried to imagine how big the universe is? It is useful to scale the huge distances that we know about in the same sort of way that we scaled the very small distances within the atom. As you know, we measure ordinary distances on Earth with units that are meaningful to our bodies and our lives. We talk about distances comparable to our fingers, our feet, our forearm, or our stride. To be more precise in our communication, in science today, we use multiples and fractions of the standard meter.

Neither student was surprised to see the professor return to his stack of charts and illustrations. “Take a look at this,” he said. (Figure 17).