Posts Tagged ‘Jupiter’
“You are an alchemist; make gold of that”*…
From Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Public Domain Review, a macabre morality tale for mid-May…
The man in the oval frame here is Georg Honauer. On the left, we see his unusual execution. A Latinized inscription gives his pretended noble alias, Lord of Brunhoff and Grobeschütz, along with the year 1597 and his age: twenty-four years old. Honauer is richly dressed in an embroidered tunic and is wearing an extravagant plumed hat. Two little devils repose on cushions beneath him.
Spectators cluster round the elaborate gallows. The tall iron construction, complete with finial balls and dangling chains, stands on a specially cut stone plinth. In a gory detail, blood drips down from the hanging figure. There is reason both for the fancy dress and the fancy construction.
Honauer was born in Olomouc, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), in 1572. Passing himself off under his alias as a goldsmith and alchemist, in 1596 he entered the service of Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, in Stuttgart, claiming to be able to convert iron into precious metal using a process that combined alchemical transmutation with the bulk techniques of metal ore smelting.
Most ancient cultures with metallurgy have a version of alchemy, from the Chinese to the Egyptians. Alchemy flourished in medieval Europe, with its promise of divinely assisted immortality and its alluring sub-discipline, chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metal into gold. It came with its own compelling logic that metals in the earth exist naturally in a constant state of evolution toward gold. Ores were near the start of the journey; easily smelted base metals such as lead a little further along. Alchemists believed that with the right chemical agents they could accelerate the process. But others doubted these claims, and during the centuries when some were pursuing alchemy in all seriousness, others — from Chaucer and Dante to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Ben Jonson — made it a topic of derision and satire.
Alchemists nevertheless found patrons among men in urgent need of money, and the duke was certainly one of these. Before the end of the decade, Friedrich would raise the cash to persuade Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, to release his duchy from Austrian control, and was pursuing expensive utopian projects, such as building the new city of Freudenstadt as a Protestant refuge.
So Honauer’s arrival in Stuttgart was well timed. Friedrich was already offering a reward to subjects who discovered promising ore deposits. Honauer claimed he could produce eight hundred ducats’ worth of “fine gold” from a hundred pounds of iron, and a friend said he had seen him using a tincture to draw gold from a lead bullet at a military camp in Hungary. The duke demanded a small-scale demonstration, which Honauer duly performed, and the metallic product passed an assay by the duke’s mining adviser; it was “at least as good as ducat-quality gold.”
Driven by fascination with the subject of alchemy as well as his avarice, Friedrich immediately directed that his Stuttgart summerhouse be converted into a laboratory for Honauer, and granted him further facilities at Kirchheim unter Teck, a short ride away from the city. He placed a large initial order for 200,000 ducats of gold, but Honauer said he did not have a sufficient quantity of the reagents necessary for such a large undertaking. They agreed on a monthly target of 36,000 ducats, to run indefinitely. The duke then arranged for thirty-six hundredweight and eighteen pounds (nearly two tons) of iron to be transported more than 150 miles from his armoury in Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard in France) to provide Honauer with the “raw material” he needed. Honauer’s order for additional chemicals necessary for the operation was equally impressive: 1030 pounds of saltpetre, 1852 pounds of lead, as well as similar quantities of “white copper” (cupronickel) and “mountain antimony”, and other reagents.
However, when he finally saw the scale of the task before him, Honauer lost his nerve and fled the city. Keen to get him back, believing that he had seen transmutation with his own eyes, the duke had his court painter produce “wanted posters” for the vanished alchemist, who was soon apprehended and brought back to attempt the transmutation again. When this failed, Friedrich had Honauer interrogated. Although the duke clearly wanted to believe Honauer could do as he had claimed, the fact that the alchemist had run away could only add to suspicions he was a cheat — a Betrüger, to use a word adopted at this time specifically to categorize alchemists who had been found unsuccessful, and who might or might not have been deliberately fraudulent.
The trial that followed was complicated by the fact that Honauer was indicted for impersonating a member of the nobility as well as the alchemical Betrug. He was quickly found guilty and, despite a personal appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, sentenced to hang in a unique public spectacle. On Friedrich’s orders, all the iron that Honauer had been unable to convert into precious metal was converted instead into his gallows. The thirty-foot structure was then gilded in mockery of his claimed abilities and, on April 2, 1597, Honauer was dressed in robes woven with gold brocade to humiliate him still further, and led out to his death…
“The Gilded Gallows of Georg Honauer,” from @HoooAW in @PublicDomainRev.
* Shakespeare, Timon of Athens (Act 5, Scene 1)
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As we tackle transmutation, we might note that today is the luckiest day of the year… or so suggests the alchemist’s cousin, the astrologer:
On May 18 at 2:36 p.m. EST, we will experience a once-a-year Jupiter cazimi.
Cazimi comes from the Arabic word kaṣmīmī, meaning “as if in the heart.” In astrological terms, a cazimi transpires when a planet is in close or exact conjunction with the sun, right in the infernal heart of it, if you will.
Also known as the “Day of Miracles,” a Jupiter cazimi occurs when the planet of good times, good luck, deep pockets, limitless potential, laughter, wisdom and diamonds on the soles of its proverbial shoes, is within one degree of the sun. A cazimi is something of a solar amplifier/purifier, where the inherent energy of a planet is hyped and heightened by its proximity to that show-boating death star.
On Saturday, the planet of growth, optimism, and abundance is getting a solar tongue kiss at 28 degrees and and we’re all primed to reap the benefits…
… It’s anyone’s guess what an unlucky ruler might do to punish an over-promising astrologer.
“There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before”*…
Analysis of an ancient codebreaking tablet has revealed that Babylonian astronomers had calculated the movements of Jupiter using an early form of geometric calculus some 1,400 years before we thought the technique was invented by the Europeans.
This means that these ancient Mesopotamian astronomers had not only figured out how to predict Jupiter’s paths more than 1,000 years before the first telescopes existed, but they were using mathematical techniques that would form the foundations of modern calculus as we now know it…
Look more closely at the foundations of modern calculus at “This ancient Babylonian map of Jupiter just changed history as we know it.” And read the Science article reporting the findings here.
* Isaac Asimov
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As we calculate the differential, we might send radiant birthday greetings to James Alfred Van Allen; he was born on this date in 1914. A space scientist who learned to miniaturize electronics during World War II, he was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space, and led the scientific community for the inclusion of scientific research instruments on space satellites. The Van Allen radiation belts were named after him, following their discovery by his Geiger–Müller tube instruments in 1958 on the Explorer 1, Explorer 3, and Pioneer 3 satellites during the International Geophysical Year.
Pictures worth a million words…
In his great opus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium published shortly before his death in 1543, Copernicus takes 405 pages of words, numbers and equations to explain his heliocentric theory. But it is the diagram that he draws at the beginning of the book that captures in a simple image his revolutionary new idea: it is the Sun that is at the centre of the Solar System, not the Earth.
A diagram has the power to create a whole new visual language to navigate a scientific idea. Isaac Newton’s optics diagrams [Opticks, 1704] for example transform light into geometry. By representing light as lines, Newton is able to use mathematics and geometry to predict the behaviour of light. It was a revolutionary idea.
Mathematicians had been struggling with the idea of the square root of minus one. There seemed to be no number on the number line whose square was negative. Experts knew that if such a number existed it would transform their subject. But where was this number? It was a picture drawn independently by three mathematicians at the beginning of the 19th Century that brought these numbers to life. Called the Argand diagram after one of its creators, this picture… was a potent tool in manipulating these new numbers [Imaginary Numbers] since the geometry of the diagram reflected the underlying algebra of the numbers they depicted.
Although better known for her contributions to nursing, Florence Nightingale’s greatest achievements were mathematical. She was the first to use the idea of a pie chart to represent data. Nightingale’s diagrams were designed to highlight deaths in the Crimea. She had discovered that the majority of deaths in the Crimea were due to poor sanitation rather than casualties in battle. She wanted to persuade government of the need for better hygiene in hospitals. She realised though that just looking at the numbers was unlikely to impress ministers. But once those numbers were translated into a picture – her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East” – the message could not be ignored.
Read more (and find links to enlarged versions of the images above) at BBC.com, in “Diagrams that Changed the World,” a teaser for new BBC TV series, Marcus du Sautoy’s six-part The Beauty of Diagrams (on air now, and available via iPlayer to readers in the U.K… and readers with VPNs that can terminate in the U.K.)
As we marvel at the power of pictures, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that eight planets in our Solar System lined up from West to East– beginning with Pluto, followed by Mercury, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter, with a crescent moon alongside– in a rare alignment visible from Earth. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn were visible to the naked eye; the small blue dots that are Uranus and Neptune, with binoculars. Pluto was visible only by telescope (but has subsequently been demoted from “planet” anyway…). The planets also aligned in May 2000, but too close to the sun to be visible from Earth.
Readers who missed it have a long wait for the reprise: it will be at least another 100 years before so many planets will be so close and so visible.
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