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People should remember that Newton spent the majority of his life trying to turn lead into gold. People can be incredibly smart and still pursue crackpot ideas

by spaceman_2020 3y ago

People should remember that Newton spent the majority of his life trying to turn lead into gold. People can be incredibly smart and still pursue crackpot ideas.

cowl 3y ago
In retrospective you can say that Transmutation was a crackpot idea but that was not known at that time. Many "alchemists" where very rigorous chemistry experimentalists and Ultimately it turns out you can turn lead into gold, but you need fission to do it and not transmutation that was thought to be simply a chemical process. The thing to note is that if you are not ready to risk being lost into a crackpot idea, than you are not ready to have a suffecintly transformative idea.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  My hazy recollection was that this didn’t seem all too crazy back then since chemistry and scientific standards were either non-existent or in their infancy
  - cowl 3y ago
    Exactly, back then we didn't even know that gold and lead were two single elements. We had the concepts of atoms yes but not of different elements that were "stable" on their own or that one atom could be different from another atom. If everything is comprised of atoms the belief that you can rearange somehow the atoms of lead to create gold was not so farfetched as we know it to be today. Robert Boyle, who is considered the father of chemistry came to most of his chemical work because of his "Alchemist" research.
jonhohle 3y ago
They're only crackpot until they're proven. LBNL turned bismuth to gold in 1980[0], but it required a particle accelerator and more energy than could have been fathomed in Newton's day. The yield wasn't great and cost about 10 orders of magnitude more than the price of gold at the time, but it was done (theoretically), and by a Nobel prize winner, even! 0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago
Which explains computer programming

People should remember that Newton spent the majority of his life trying to turn lead into gold. People can be incredibly smart and still pursue crackpot ideas.

cowl 3y ago

In retrospective you can say that Transmutation was a crackpot idea but that was not known at that time. Many "alchemists" where very rigorous chemistry experimentalists and Ultimately it turns out you can turn lead into gold, but you need fission to do it and not transmutation that was thought to be simply a chemical process. The thing to note is that if you are not ready to risk being lost into a crackpot idea, than you are not ready to have a suffecintly transformative idea.

tnecniv 3y ago
My hazy recollection was that this didn’t seem all too crazy back then since chemistry and scientific standards were either non-existent or in their infancy
- cowl 3y ago
  Exactly, back then we didn't even know that gold and lead were two single elements. We had the concepts of atoms yes but not of different elements that were "stable" on their own or that one atom could be different from another atom. If everything is comprised of atoms the belief that you can rearange somehow the atoms of lead to create gold was not so farfetched as we know it to be today. Robert Boyle, who is considered the father of chemistry came to most of his chemical work because of his "Alchemist" research.

jonhohle 3y ago

They're only crackpot until they're proven. LBNL turned bismuth to gold in 1980[0], but it required a particle accelerator and more energy than could have been fathomed in Newton's day. The yield wasn't great and cost about 10 orders of magnitude more than the price of gold at the time, but it was done (theoretically), and by a Nobel prize winner, even! 0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead-can-be-turned-into-gold/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago

Which explains computer programming