The man with the golden nose

The history of science is full of strange characters, but surely one of the most peculiar was Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.  Born in 1546 in Knutstorp, Sweden (then owned by Denmark), he came from a long line of wealthy and noble landowners.  Best known for his contributions to observational astronomy, his pinpoint-accurate measurements of the positions of stars and planets firmly convinced him of the correctness of the Copernican heliocentric model -- and were what allowed his contemporary Johannes Kepler to devise his three laws of planetary motion.  (Themselves instrumental in allowing Isaac Newton to develop his own three laws of motion, and more importantly, the Universal Law of Gravitation, a century later.)

He used his wealth and influence to good purpose.  He built the observatory of Uraniborg, the best of its kind at the time, on the island of Ven not far from Copenhagen.  His mapping of stellar and planetary positions, all done painstakingly by hand, had a staggering average precision of one arcminute.  Because his work was so careful, it gave Kepler no room to hang on to his precious "everything in the heavens moves in perfect circles" notion, and forced him to acknowledge that orbiting objects travel in ellipses -- a great example of the quip by Thomas Henry Huxley that "the great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."  Brahe's reputation as a careful observer was unimpeachable.

He was also, however, a very odd man.  At age twenty, he was at the engagement party of a friend and quarreled with his cousin Manderup Parsberg over (I shit you not) who was the better mathematician.  The only way for two mathematicians to settle such a quarrel was, of course, a duel in the dark with swords, and Brahe got the end of his nose cut off.  After receiving medical care, he had a local goldsmith fashion a golden nose for him that he attached to his face with glue -- he apparently also had silver and brass ones for everyday use, reserving the gold one for special occasions.  (He and Parsberg evidently made it up afterward, and remained friends.  I don't know if they ever settled who was the better mathematician, but my money is on Brahe, given that hardly anyone knows who Parsberg is anymore.)

Tycho Brahe by Eduard Ender [Image is in the Public Domain]

He owned a tame elk, that he kept in the castle with him -- until one day it drank too much beer, fell down the stairs, and died.  He had the odd combination of loving luxury and simultaneously disdaining it; I guess if you're ridiculously wealthy, you can afford to be contemptuous of money.  Offered a lucrative position at the court of the Danish king, Frederick II, he turned it down, telling a friend, "I did not want to take possession of any of the castles our benevolent king so graciously offered me. I am displeased with society here, customary forms and the whole rubbish."  Critics of his scientific publications were met with stinging rebuttals, and given his skill as an astronomer, Brahe was usually proven right.  However, his abrasive personality finally caught up with him -- when Frederick died in 1588, he was succeeded by his son Christian IV, who didn't like Brahe and ultimately forced him into exile.

Brahe's death was as peculiar as his life.  In October of 1601, the story goes, he was at a banquet in Prague and had to pee, but thought it was rude to excuse himself even for something that quick.  When he returned home, he found he couldn't pee, and died in horrible agony eleven days later.  The blame was laid on his stubbornness at refusing to leave the banquet, but the truth is, that can't be responsible for his death.  You can't injure yourself by holding it -- ultimately your sphincter just refuses to cooperate and you wet your pants.  It's almost certain that Brahe had a physiological problem like a urethral blockage or prostate hypertrophy, and that's what ultimately caused his demise.

But there's no doubt that the bizarre story of his death adds to his already notorious reputation for being peculiar.

The reason Brahe comes up -- besides his just being an interesting person -- is that there's a new analysis of the stuff left behind in his alchemical laboratory at Uraniborg.  He had a less-well-known fascination with alchemy, and ran a laboratory in the basement that conjures up images of the mad scientist, with a dungeon lab with stone walls and floors and various liquids bubbling and fuming in glass retorts.  When Brahe fell out of favor, and (especially) after his death, Uraniborg was pretty well taken apart, but there were bits and pieces left behind -- in particular, some glass shards from his alchemy equipment that still contained residues of the materials they'd last held.

A new analysis of the shards at the University of Southern Denmark has found significant traces of nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury, and lead.  Some of them, such as gold, lead, and mercury, are unsurprising; those were stock raw materials for the alchemists' eternal dream of turning base metals into gold.  Others, though, are more puzzling.

"[T]ungsten is very mysterious," said Kaare Lund Rasmussen, co-author of the study.  "Tungsten had not even been described at that time, so what should we infer from its presence on a shard from Tycho Brahe's alchemy workshop?"

In fact, it wouldn't be isolated for almost two centuries, when chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was able to extract it in pure form, something he was also the first to do with molybdenum and barium.  But it's possible that Brahe accidentally stumbled upon a method for extracting it -- or, perhaps, that it simply remained behind as an impurity in some other mixture he was concocting.

So Brahe was an odd amalgam in another way -- a dedicated and exacting empirical astronomer, and a subscriber to one of the weirdest discredited models humans have ever come up with.  "It may seem strange that Tycho Brahe was involved in both astronomy and alchemy, but when one understands his worldview, it makes sense," said Poul Grinder-Hansen, who also co-authored the study.  "He believed that there were obvious connections between the heavenly bodies, earthly substances, and the body's organs.  Thus, the Sun, gold, and the heart were connected, and the same applied to the Moon, silver, and the brain; Jupiter, tin, and the liver; Venus, copper, and the kidneys; Saturn, lead, and the spleen; Mars, iron, and the gallbladder; and Mercury, mercury, and the lungs.  Minerals and gemstones could also be linked to this system, so emeralds, for example, belonged to Mercury."

Once again illustrating that the scientific method only works where you choose to apply it.

In any case, the recent study shines more light on the life and work of one of the strangest scientists who ever lived -- Tycho Brahe, the man with the golden nose, whose work so profoundly inspired such greats as Kepler and Newton.  That he was also involved in alchemy may seem weird, but you can't be right all the time.  And given his reputation for oddity, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that he continues to confound our expectations, over four centuries after his death.

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Alchemy class

Frequently, when I'm asked why I'm opposed to science teachers being required to teach "alternate explanations" along with teaching evolution, I respond, "It's interesting that no one is asking teachers to present 'alternate explanations' in other areas of science.  No one, for example, expects chemistry teachers to advocate alchemy as an 'alternate explanation.'"

By now, you'd think I'd know better than to use the phrase "no one" in a statement about belief in some crackpot idea.

Meet Jay Weidner, film director responsible for such masterpieces as Timewave 2013, Infinity: The Ultimate Trip, and (most significantly, for our purposes) The Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.  On his website, Weidner outlines his three laws of the universe, which are poised to oust Newton's Laws as fundamental rules governing nature:

• Weidner's First Law: "Whatever ideas are the most suppressed are the most likely to be the closest to the truth."
• Weidner's Second Law: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures."
• Weidner's Third Law: "The only people who call conspiracies 'theories' are the conspirators."

The First Law would seem to suggest that we should go back the Four Humors Theory of Medicine (all illnesses are caused by an imbalance between the Four Bodily Humors -- blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), as that was suppressed back when they noticed that patients treated according to the recommendations of this theory usually died.  The Second Law means -- never mind, I don't know what the fuck the Second Law means.  But the Third Law would seem to indicate that I'm a conspirator.  I guess that given that I call most conspiracies "theories," and worse still, ridicule them frequently in my blog, I'm not only a conspirator, but I'm really high up in the hierarchy of the conspiracy because I'm so determined to convince everyone that it isn't real.

How about that?  I'm in such a high echelon in a top-secret conspiracy that the fact was secret even from me.  Now that's what I call a secret conspiracy.

In any case, Weidner is a big believer in alchemy, especially as it pertains to the production of the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that can give eternal life.  I thought that Dumbledore had destroyed the Philosopher's Stone way back in the first book of Harry Potter, but Weidner disagrees; he said he has discovered a book that shows you how to produce it, using "materials costing less than a thousand dollars," and he illustrates this on his website using a picture of Aquarius, symbolized by a guy with a Fabio hairstyle, huge pecs and biceps, a six-pack, and almost no clothes, pouring water out of a jar, wearing an expression that seems to say, "Hey, baby, you wanna partake of my Elixir of Life?"

Now there's a symbol that's worth a thousand pictures.

Anyway, the book that describes the process for making the Philosopher's Stone is available for free here.  Weidner cautions us all to download the book before the Evil Conspirators find out that it's available and "hit the internet kill switch."  Because we all know how much the people who run the internet care about the presence of wacky, absurd ideas out there online.  We can't have that.

Curious, I took a look at the book (The Book of Aquarius), since it's free.  When you go to the "Read Online" page, you get a set of chapter headings, and not wanting to slog through the pages of quasi-metaphysical bullshit, I decided to cut to the chase, and skipped to Chapter 14: What Is It Made Of?  And I found out that, to my great shock, the Philosopher's Stone is only made from one ingredient.  And that ingredient is...

... wait for it...

Urine.

Yes, you read that right.  I know, because I had to read it several times before I was convinced that I was reading it correctly myself.  And I thought, "Well, at least Weidner was right when he said that you can get the ingredients for less than a thousand dollars."  Here's the relevant passage from the book:

I must explain that the Stone could in theory be made from anything, since everything contains the life-energy to some degree, which is the active ingredient of the Stone.  Urine contains this life-energy in high concentration, due to the fact that it has just come out of you, and you, as a living animal, are full of life-energy...  From the urine we will need to extract a distillate (water) and a salt.  The life-energy is in the water, and since the life-energy is so volatile it will remain with the water even when the water is distilled (evaporated and condensed).  Our bodies do not want to reject the life-energy in the urine, but have no choice since the life-energy is attached to the water.  Secondly, urine is the perfect ingredient because it is as of yet undetermined.  That is, it has been well filtered, broken down and purified.  It contains all kinds of different minerals, but in minute particles not yet assigned to any purpose.

At this point, I had to stop reading, mostly because it's hard to read the computer screen when your forehead is on your desk.

Anyhow, I encourage you to peruse Weidner's site (I especially recommend the stuff about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing) and The Book of Aquarius.  But if you succeed in making the Philosopher's Stone, please don't tell me about it.  I don't want to know.  For one thing, it will mean that you'll have been playing around with your own urine, or, god forbid, someone else's, and that's just nasty.  For another, at that point you'll have discovered the Secret of Eternal Life, and being that I'm one of the Conspirators, I'd be duty-bound to kill you.  That'd just be unfortunate for a variety of reasons, the most important one of which is that I need all the readers I can get, and if I went around killing them it might discourage people from following my blog.

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