Rick Baudé Wrote:
> Yep you're right on the money there! However from
> what I'm reading they also thought that mercury
> and sulfur were the magic ingredients to
> transmuting lead into gold too.
Not to mention finding a real fast way to DIE! Horribly! Look up 'Mercuric Oxide' (HgO), or Hydrogen Disulfide (H2S).
> From what I'm reading they definitely thought they
> could transmute elements and with damn good
> reason. They were making and breaking some rather
> complicated compounds. They knew the y could make
> mercury appear and "disapear" i.e. it was
> transformed into something else. Sulfur is a very
> active element and they zeroed in on that element
> with the accuracy of a cruise missile. The knew
> that by combining lesser "metals" copper, tin,
> etc. you could make stronger metals brass, bronze.
> Theoretically there was nothing wrong with what
> they were trying to achieve. It was just that
> there theory was still weak....
There's where they went wrong: They did not know the difference between an element and a compound. Sure, they knew of Gold and Mercury and other elements, but they didn't know they were elements. A possible irony is that they could/should have known seeing as how the idea of atomic structure goes back at least as far as Plato.
