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Newton the Alchemist

literaryreview.co.uk

26 pointsunquote22 comments

I'm just wrapping up reading The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. The collection, the Baroque Cycle, dramatizes much of Newton's alchemikal endeavours. It's a brilliant read.

Agree. It's a great example of a science fiction writer who brings their SF perspective to historical events / technologies (in this case the invention of science and modern financial systems) that to the characters are massively disruptive.

The beginning and end events (spoiler...) where the same character as a boy witnesses the hanging of a witch and as a (very) old man sees a commercial steam engine are great bookmarks on a massively transformative period of history.

Alchemy was their String Theory. A long shot, but not obviously false at the time.

It was also their internet currency. If only it worked, it'd be as big as Bitcoin if not bigger. But they could only come up with Flooz.

The funny thing is - we now CAN transmute lead to gold :) It's just not profitable :)

Ironically, it's much easier to turn gold into lead. Simply leave a bar of gold near a fission reactor or other neutron source for a couple of years, and eventually it will turn to lead.

Does tungsten turn into anything different?

It is tremendously a trait of innovators, albeit a measure non-admitting even within their very own (this effect increasing with time development; the more contemporary) cognitive administrative architecture (which in extent signifies further development and refinement/ complexity of it's heuristic use); individuals whose cognition ordinarily traverses the realms of particularly pristine& volatile perceptual/ mental artifacts to gesture rhetorically or rather as a mechanic of latent functional measure in their productive procedure to affirm ideological scientific outsiders in the described& mentioned -customized- regard, and while transferring it vertically sub and supra explicattion (mechanism of formal non-necessity; logico-formal decostructive (active) dodging)via their analytic process (extra category of consideration acts as cognitive surplus), for their powerful evaluatory productive engine augments itself in accord to affirmed ideologically derived motivational/generative hyper(regular)-excitation to (seeking, calculating, articulating) derivation of efficiency ordained further normally agreeing to tended psycho-developmental trajectories / pathways these kinds of individuals incline to make (rec sum as projective subsequent cognitive architecture:ego-regulatory accessibility; success; hyper(regular)-excitation + ~ well dispersed and replicated across domains efficiency) all while the operative or ontological/formal/proof associated non-relatedness of this custom signifies reflectively a special objective orientation whereas pre-affirmed premise stands repeatedly not fulfilled duo to it's non(less)-pragmatic virtue, leading to long-term (macro-scale) assembly of supra-regular array of multiple (inter/intra-category) objectives or elements pertinent to a partial / near (in perceptioN) complete realization of novel objectives supported via a such internal paradigm stance, rendering(producing) a greater magnitude of content quality of outcome(s) and higher rate of return in attempted schematized configurations of resolvative compound propositions to open-problems.

Could you try to articulate that in a simpler way? Without proper punctuation this is hard to follow. Thank you.

"Schizophrenia or AI" would make a good game

You took the words right out of my mouth

This looks so much like an output of a markov chain experiment of posts from /r/iamverysmart

I actually bear a contention to the purported truths herein exposited. The pragmatic psycho-developmental trajectories inherent to greater schematized efficacy is contrary to the supra-regular array of hyper-excitation stimulated by the cognitive architecture latent to domains such as this. I'm sure many here would concur with this rather apparent folly in your conjecture.

Wut?

(frowns, copies text and eliminates subclauses)

I think PlayfulTrick means:

Innovators ...

gesture rhetorically ...

while [thinking] ...

leading to long-term objectives ...

producing [better] quality of outcome(s) ...

to ... open-problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG0375yYPRI

The interesting question to me is why people in earlier times valued gold at all (i.e. before understanding its uses in electrical circuits, etc.). Why would people care for it? I mean, OK it doesn't rust, but why's it so special?

Essentially for the same reason people value Bitcoin today.

> it doesn't rust, but why's it so special?

"Power resides where men believe it resides" - Varys, Game Of Thrones

You could trade gold for almost anything.

So, anyone who had enough gold could afford most of things - without worrying about the reason the gold is valued.

Many smart people work for Google and Facebook and a lot of them do not care about negative effect of ad economy on the society because the wages which they pay enables them to afford a house in a good locality and good enough lifestyle and probably interesting work.

Most people don't look at things from fundamental level.

Well, the key property is it doesn't rust :P. 2nd key property is that it is hard to come by. Gold has a big advantage over, say, (picking a random substance that is expensive by weight) printer ink because with printer ink if you don't store it properly it is likely to lose its value. Gold storage can be delegated to any idiot (such as a central bank official, heh heh) and as long as they do not lose it everything will be fine. Doesn't burn, doesn't rust, doesn't dissolve in water.

Anything as difficult to extract as gold is worth about as much (gold isn't especially profitable to mine). Gold just happens to be about as indestructible as anything we know of and have a very convenient value/volume ratio to procure. It is also a pleasing shade of yellow, which counts for something.

If we are trading without me having something you need right now then I need a way to show you that I'm not some layabout asking you to do stuff for free. Gold is a guarantee that if we unwound the chain of trades at some point someone did something real. That sounds really silly, but it turns out that some axiom like that is needed for trading to make sense.

According to [1] which references [2]:

An element must meet four qualities to stand alone as a premium currency... First, it can't be a gas — gases simply are not practical for currency exchange... Second, it can't be corrosive or reactive... Third, it can't be radioactive. [Fourth, it] must be rare enough to be valuable, but not so rare that it's impossible to find.

That brings us to five elements: rhodium, palladium, platinum, silver and gold. Although silver has been used for currency, it tarnishes easily, so it's out. Rhodium and palladium were discovered only in the 1800s, so they'd have been of no use to early civilizations. That leaves gold and platinum. Platinum, however, has a melting point around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,600 degrees Celsius), which could only be attained in a modern furnace, so early civilizations would not have been able to conveniently shape it into uniform units.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/32863-gold-best-element-money.ht...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131430755/a-ch...

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