Path: typhoon.sonic.net!feed.news.sonic.net!news-out.nuthinbutnews.com!propagator-sterling!news-in.nuthinbutnews.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!washdc3-snf1!news.gtei.net!newsfeed.utk.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!panix!panix3.panix.com!not-for-mail From: glass@panix.com (Robert Scott Martin) Newsgroups: alt.magick,sci.skeptic,sci.chem Subject: Re: skeptics in magic land Date: 8 Jul 2002 08:58:39 -0400 Organization: Flying Circus (hyssop) Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: <3CE74D02.6EAC@luckymojo.com> <3D274498.9020407@enteract.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com X-Trace: reader2.panix.com 1026133120 12951 166.84.1.3 (8 Jul 2002 12:58:40 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 12:58:40 +0000 (UTC) Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:309208 sci.skeptic:546918 sci.chem:180428 In article <3D28C1E0.8060204@enteract.com>, Fred Kasner wrote: >Remarkable! You really believe that some of the most fundamental >principles that were developed and bruited as being the glories of >alchemy were shown to be flat out wrong and then divorce alchemy from >them so that you can say that their failures could not be laid at the >door of alchemy and hence show alchemy to be at best a fraud intentional >or not. In my experience of about a dozen contemporary alchemists l have interviewed (my anthropological training reasserting itself, l suppose), none had much time for either "caloric fluids" or "phlogiston", and most were at least sidereally comfortable with the periodic table and atomic theory. Likewise, my library contains a few dozen alchemical texts, most scattered from the 11th to the 20th century, from Europe, China and India. The better ones aren't wasting time with "caloric fluids" or "phlogiston". Neither are anything remotely central to practice. Conversely, the volumes of the New International Encyclopedia in my possession define light as "the sensation of which one becomes conscious through the optic nerve . . . in general, the cause of this sensation is the entrance into the eye of ether waves." Is the understanding of light "bruited as being one of the glories of physics" (thanks, Sir Isaac)? If so, was ether physics "a fraud" or merely a transitional stage? Then again, this particular encyclopedia also defines the Austro-Hungarian Empire as "the largest European country after Russia since the separation of Sweden and Norway", so perhaps the borders of science may be in flux.