Philosopher's stone: what it is and is it real?

The philosopher's stone is the substance that, according to the alchemists, turned common metals such as lead or mercury into gold or silver and also served as a medicine, the “elixir”. None has ever been found. Today gold can be made, but not with a stone: in particle accelerators, atom by atom, in amounts too small to see and almost always radioactive.¹ The previous article told how Indian alchemy sought, with mercury, a body that does not die more than gold; the stone of Latin Europe promised both. Here is what three texts I read in whole or in part say: that of a physician in The Hague who claimed to have seen it, the letter of Spinoza, who went to check, and the book that turned Nicolas Flamel into an alchemist, and what physicists have measured.

What is the philosopher's stone?

According to Wikipedia, the earliest known written mention is in Zosimos of Panopolis, around the year 300; Arabic alchemists called the transmuting substance al-iksīr, which gave us “elixir”, and imagined it as a red powder.¹ It had many names: the tincture, the powder, the medicine. And it had opponents early on: Avicenna, in the 11th century, wrote that alchemists cannot change one species of metal into another, as another article in this Diary told. The two promises, gold and health, appear together in the most detailed account I know by someone who claimed to have held it.

The stone Helvetius saw in The Hague

Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, known as Helvetius, was a physician in The Hague. According to Helvetius's little book Vitulus aureus (“The Golden Calf”), published in Latin in 1667, which I read in the English translation of 1670, on 27 December 1666 a stranger of “three or four and fourty years of Age”, plainly dressed and claiming to be “a Melter of Orichalcum”, came to the house. The visitor asked whether Helvetius believed in a medicine that could cure all diseases, and Helvetius answered that no adept had ever crossed the doctor's path. Then the stranger, whom the book calls “Elias the Artist”, took out an ivory box with three fragments “scarcely equalizing a small Walnut”, glass-like, “of the colour of pale Sulphur”.²

Helvetius had expected something else, having read that the stone of philosophers was ruby or purple; Elias answered that this did not matter, and refused to part with even a piece the size of a coriander seed. Helvetius confesses to having scraped a little off with a fingernail while holding the stone, and to throwing it into molten lead, with no result: most of the lead went off into the air and the rest became a glassy earth. “You could more dexterously play the Thief, than apply the Tincture,” Elias said, smiling.² In the end Elias handed over a crumb “as big as a Rape-Seed”, broke off almost half of it with a thumbnail and threw it into the fire, and promised to come back the next day to show how to use it. Elias never came back.

That night, according to Helvetius, the doctor's wife wrapped the crumb in yellow wax and threw it into “half an Ounce, or six Drachmes” of molten lead. Within a quarter of an hour the lead turned “most green”; when poured out it took “a colour like Blood”, and when cold it “shined with the colour of the best Gold”. A goldsmith valued it at 50 florins an ounce. The next day, among others, the General Examiner of the Moneys of Holland, Porelius, came to see it, and in the workshop of a silversmith named Brechtel they gave it the test of the “quarta”: melting the gold with three or four parts of silver and dissolving the silver in aqua fortis. The gold, Helvetius says, not only lost no weight but turned some of the silver into gold.²

Spinoza went to check

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza lived near The Hague, and a friend, Jarig Jelles, asked Spinoza to find out what was true. The reply, of 25 March 1667, survives in a Latin version (the original was Dutch).³ Spinoza first went to see the scholar Isaac Vossius, who laughed and was surprised to be asked about “these trifles” (de his nugis). Spinoza paid no attention and went to the silversmith, Brechtelt, who gave assurances that the gold had gained weight during the test “by as much as the silver weighed” that had been put in, and that other gentlemen present had found the same. Then Spinoza went to see Helvetius, “who showed me the gold and the crucible, still coated with gold inside” (qui mihi et aurum et crucibulum, interius etiam tum auro obductum, ostendebat), and who said that barely a quarter of a grain of barley or mustard had gone into the lead. Spinoza ends: “this is what I could find out” (Hæc de hac re potui resciscere).³

Spinoza gives no verdict. The editors of the letter, in 1895, add a note with what Christiaan Huygens wrote to a brother, Lodewijk, on 11 February 1667, giving thanks for “the story of the philosopher's stone, without however giving it entire faith, because I know this little doctor and know that he is not a very reliable author”.³ What can be said with the texts in hand is little and clear: Helvetius never did it again, Elias never reappeared and nobody could repeat the test. I do not know what happened in that crucible, and I am not going to invent it.

Did Nicolas Flamel really exist?

Yes, but not as an alchemist. According to Wikipedia, Nicolas Flamel lived in Paris from about 1340 to 1418 and was a public scribe, one of those who drew up contracts, letters and petitions for people who could not write; Flamel married Perenelle, who brought the wealth of two previous husbands, and owned several houses, one of which, from 1407, still stands at 51 rue de Montmorency; Flamel's tombstone is kept at the Musée de Cluny. There is no indication that the historical Flamel had anything to do with alchemy.¹

The alchemist was born in 1612, almost two hundred years after Flamel's death, with a book published in Paris under Flamel's name: the Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques, which I read in the 1659 edition. In it, Flamel tells in the first person of buying for two florins an old book made of bark, with copper covers, of three times seven leaves, signed by “Abraham the Jew”, and, after years of work and a journey to Santiago de Compostela, of making the projection: the first time on mercury, “about half a pound”, turned into silver “on 17 January, a Monday, around noon”, with only Perenelle present, in the year 1382; and on the following 25 April, with “the red stone”, into gold.⁴

In 1761 the abbé Étienne-François Villain published a Critical History of Nicolas Flamel built on the couple's deeds, and noticed that date: 17 January 1382 was not a Monday but a Friday, and it cannot be a copyist's slip, because “Monday” and “Friday” look nothing alike.⁵ I did the calculation in the Julian calendar and got the same: Friday; and if the year was counted from Easter, as was the custom in France, the 17 January of “1382” would be that of 1383, which was a Saturday. In a note, Villain concludes that dates “so visibly false” are enough to regard the story as “invented at pleasure”. And according to the documents Villain collects, Flamel and Perenelle lived as comfortable burghers, “in an honest middling state”, not with the wealth of the legend.⁵

And Harry Potter?

In the 1997 novel, Nicolas Flamel is the maker of the philosopher's stone that gives the book its title. According to Wikipedia, in the United States it was published in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because the publisher thought “philosopher” sounded archaic; Rowling later expressed regret, and a scholar, Philip Nel, has pointed out that the change lost the connection with alchemy.⁶

So is the philosopher's stone real?

As a stone, no: nobody has ever produced one that could be examined. But turning another element into gold is possible, and the reason is physics, not alchemy: an element is what it is because of the number of protons in its nucleus (gold has 79, mercury 80, lead 82), and changing it means acting on the nucleus, which no furnace and no powder can do.

In 1941, Rubby Sherr, Kenneth Bainbridge and Herbert Anderson bombarded mercury with fast neutrons at Harvard and obtained three radioactive isotopes of gold, one of which lasts about 65 hours.⁷ In 1980 a team including Kjell Aleklett and Glenn Seaborg fired carbon and neon nuclei at bismuth in Berkeley and measured the gold isotopes that came out;⁸ according to Wikipedia, a few thousand atoms.⁹ And in 2025 the ALICE experiment at CERN reported that, in lead-on-lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, nuclei that brush past each other without colliding sometimes lose three protons and become gold. They estimate that between 2015 and 2018 some 2.9 × 10⁻¹¹ grams were produced, that is 29 trillionths of a gram, almost all of it unstable and lost against the walls of the accelerator; and they write: “The transmutation of lead into gold is the dream of medieval alchemists which comes true at the LHC.”¹⁰

This piece puts what was claimed and what was measured on the same ruler:

The gap between the measured and the claimed marks is about twelve orders of magnitude: four years of gold from the world's largest accelerator weighs nearly a trillion times less than what Helvetius claimed to have made in a quarter of an hour. None of this proves what happened in The Hague. What it does show is why physics has not found the stone: gold can be made, but making it costs far more than gold.

What I could not read

I did not read Zosimos or the Arabic alchemists: the origins come from Wikipedia. Of Helvetius I read the 1670 English translation, not the 1667 Latin. Of Spinoza, the Latin version of the letter in Van Vloten and Land's edition, checked against the image of the page; not the Dutch original, which according to the editors was partly translated by a friend. Of the Livre des figures I read the account of buying the book and of the projection, not the figures. Of Villain, the chapter on the dates and the passages on the fortune; I did not check Villain's documents, nor read the study by Mary and Richard Rouse that, according to Wikipedia, corrects other points of the biography. Of Sherr and of Aleklett and Seaborg, only the abstracts; of ALICE, the conclusions. Seaborg's number of atoms comes from Wikipedia; the equivalents of the half pound and the drachms are approximate, because those measures varied from city to city.

What we do with this

Anima Mundis makes nothing: the Observatory counts the voices that arrive, and one voice counts as one. From this story we keep Spinoza's method, which works for any marvel: go and see, ask the silversmith, ask to be shown the crucible, and write down only what you could find out.