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[frantyck]

Hi, all. The article below was sent to me by someone, without full 
citation or a link. There is an author's name attached, however, so I 
hope that's all right.

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The Philosopher's Stone 
02/12/2001 

The magic of Harry Potter that turned celluloid into gold for Robert 
Matthews 

I have never read the books, don't like the toys and find the 
publicity exasperating, but I still ended up being dragged along to 
see Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone last week. I have to say 
that I emerged from the cinema with just as daft a grin on my face as 
those on the posse of children with whom I was with. 

On the way home, there was the inevitable discussion about the 
reality of the philosopher's stone, capable of transmuting base 
metals into gold. Alchemists down through the ages have described it 
as red in colour. In Harry's hand near the film's end, it looked like 
a chunk of translucent red plastic - in other words, strikingly 
similar to all the other garish trash gushing from the film's 
merchandising operation. 

Then again, alchemists seeking the philosopher's stone did indeed 
make such a substance during their arcane experiments. Quite what 
they got up to is now largely a mystery because of fears at the time 
that they would succeed. During the fourth century, the Roman emperor 
Diocletian ordered the suppression of alchemical texts out of concern 
that they might contain the means of ruining the gold market, thus 
debasing the empire's currency. 

A great deal of alchemical knowledge was thus lost for ever. Not all 
of it was mumbo jumbo; during their searches for the philosopher's 
stone, alchemists discovered techniques and compounds that are still 
valued today. Isaac Newton became fascinated with the subject in his 
late twenties, and used its many supposed recipes to search for 
metals for his newly-invented reflecting telescope. Not even Newton 
could create the philosopher's stone, however - and no wonder. The 
act of turning lead into gold requires nothing less than the 
conversion of one chemical element into another. As any modern 
chemist will tell you, that cannot be done by anything in the 
alchemist's box of tricks. 

It can, however, be done by something out of the box of tricks 
possessed by physicists. In 1919, Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge 
physicist, turned nitrogen into oxygen by exposing it to radiation. 
Fast-moving particles penetrated the nitrogen atom and left an extra 
proton in the nucleus, thus transforming it into an oxygen atom. By 
using similar tricks, it is possible to turn lead into gold. All that 
is required is to knock three protons out of each lead atom, which 
would then magically turn into gold. It sounds simple, and modern 
textbooks tend to wheel it out as proof-positive of just how much 
cleverer we are than the dolts of yesteryear.

It might not be quite as straightforward as it sounds, however, 
adding that there is no hope of using it to wreck the gold market: it 
is far cheaper to buy gold than to make it from lead. 

Even so, determining who first performed the philosopher's stone 
experiment is surprisingly difficult. As far as I can tell, it wasn't 
achieved until 1980 - and it took the skill of the doyen of nuclear 
chemists, Glenn Seaborg, the Nobel Prize-winning American, to achieve 
the long-sought transformation. Perhaps readers can supply further 
details of this mysterious experiment? Seaborg may not have been the 
first to witness the alchemical transformation, however. It is said 
that, in 1972, Soviet physicists at a nuclear research facility in 
Siberia opened up the lead shielding of their experimental reactor - 
and were stunned to discover that its inner surface had turned into 
gold.