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Henry Cavendish dropped exhausted onto the only chair in his laboratory. He had just finished lifting the second 12-inch, 350-pound lead sphere into place using block and tackle, and needed to rest before he could start the final suspension. He was building an...

Timothy Farnsworth walked into an auditorium filled with the buzz of excitement. Everyone in the packed hall was chatting, questioning, and some were attempting to explain the new observations. This hastily-gathered convention of physicists, astronomers and co...

The announcement of antigravity took everyone by surprise, but none more than Sam Davis, who was right on top of it. Literally. Sam was a retired civil engineer from Chicago who came to Utah to not be surrounded by buildings anymore, thank you very much. On a ...

Professor Timothy “Philo” Farnsworth, known to his neighbors only as Philo, a physicist who retired young and looked no more than 50 years old, stood tall on his front lawn, looking southwest. He was watching for the panel but could not make it out. He knew wh...

The second person to know something was happening was Geophysics PhD candidate Terrice Young. She saw it on the seismographs at 3:20 pm. Sharp transients, with no lingering S-wave or P-wave signals. Shallow or on the surface. Located west of Utah Lake. Man-mad...

To Sam it seemed as bright as the sun, as if the panel were composed of mirrors. To those across the lake it was bright, eye-catching, and entirely unmissable. Thousands of phone videos of this were captured in the two hours it was lit. The panel read: ANTIGR...

At 4:00 pm sharp the transmitter went on the air, took a moment for the variable LC network to tune the antenna, and began transmitting prerecorded messages for two hours. Tonight would be the transmitter’s only time in service. It was a “pirate” broadcast, un...

Provo Airport was located on the eastern shore of Utah Lake. It had a manned tower, and those manning the tower had the best view of the panel from anywhere in the valley. The controllers tower listened to this transmission and realized that all the inbound an...

Sam Davis heard none of this. He was still trying to understand the thing he’d just witnessed. About 4:30 he saw the dust of hundreds, no, thousands of cars headed his way, from the north and from the south. By 5 he was the center of an enormous scrum of ATVs...

Philo Farnsworth was again on his front lawn. His neighbors and a few others who knew where he lived were gathered on the street. No news vans. Philo didn’t mind. They weren’t stepping in his flowerbeds. At 6:00 p.m. a sphere floated to a position three feet ...

This is my timeline of Alchemy and all the influences it received and produced.  This is a work in progress. Links take you to my blog at https://blog.kf7k.com Ancient dates are uncertain.  10000 BC Invention of the plow and using domesticated draft ...

What is known of how much chemistry was done before 600 BC?  Lots, and none. We have artifacts. Lots of them. Glass from Egypt. Clays and potteries from everywhere. Metals from India, Persia, and all around the Old World. Even some early samples of steel. G...

There are four Egyptian creation myths, all similar. The different creation myths have some elements in common. They all held that the world had arisen out of the lifeless waters of chaos, called Nu. They also included a pyramid-shaped mound, called the ben...

Plato inherited the four-element idea from Empedocles. About 360 B.C. he wrote Timaeus where the foundations of alchemy are set forth. These underpinnings take the form of two concepts: Being & Becoming, and Transmutation. Note that Plato was not an alchemist....

Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, is considered one of the best minds the world has every produced. I'm afraid is just wasn't so, but ask anyone before 1600 who was the smartest man to ever live, and Aristotle would be the only answer you heard. He was seriou...

Diogenes tried hard to challenge the ideas underpinning alchemy. He was a troll, attending lectures and making fun of what was said or otherwise distracting from the solemnity of the moment. He wore only a blanket, slept where he wanted, tried his best to live...

Alexander III, son of Philip of Macedon, was at the age of 16 a pupil of Aristotle. As his pupil he would have heard of Plato. Philip was obsessed with conquering Persia, current-day Iran/Iraq, as a consequence of Persia conquering all the known world around 5...

Alchemy, astrology and Magic always seem to go together. They were combined in the early renaissance as a deliberate act, but early on they were informally combined as they all fit the same cosmology and religion. We have seen a hint of this in Plato, where h...

Democritus around 350 B.C. had a nice theory of atoms. He said any bit of matter can be divided up to a point. When the particles are small enough, they can be divided no further. He called these "atoms." Plato hated him, Aristotle ignored him, and he taugh...

The first writings we have on Alchemy are recipes. A little obscure philosophy, mostly instructions. This is dated first of second centuries A.D. but it could be as late as 400 A.D. Martelli puts this at 60 A.D. [Martelli, Matteo, The Four Books of Pseudo-Demo...