Radness
The Philosopher’s Stone is not just a spiritual metaphor but an actual substance that can transmute lead or mercury into gold. The Stone is a product of Alchemy. Unlike chemistry, which only deals with physical matter and energy, Alchemy makes use of etheric and astral energies to reconfigure matter at the quantum level. Alchemy is to chemistry what a cube is to the square; it is a superset of chemistry and is capable of so much more.
How Etheric Energy Overrides Physical Laws
Alchemical achievements require successfully gathering, concentrating, and multiplying etheric energy. When this energy reaches a critical threshold, it overpowers the normal laws of physics and allows seemingly miraculous processes to take place. I believe it does this by biasing probability. By amplifying the probability of minor quantum effects, which are normally limited to the subatomic scale, they manifest on the larger atomic scale. In this way, one element spontaneously transforms into another.
The world around us is made of subatomic particles that regularly undergo unpredictable jumps, teleportation, bilocation, superposition, and other strange quantum behaviors. Why don’t everyday solid objects do likewise? Because the random quantum jittering of their subatomic particles collectively average out to zero. Think of a large crowd of people; seen from the air, the crowd as a whole is stationary, even though individuals within the crowd move in seemingly random directions. It’s because their movements are random and uncoordinated that they average to zero net movement on the whole.
The world we see around us is merely a crowd of subatomic particles whose individual quantum jumps aren’t apparent because they average to collective stillness. Physical laws that govern our everyday world, known as the deterministic laws of classical physics, are merely the laws of the crowd. These laws are what’s left of quantum physics after the unpredictability is removed through statistical averaging. They are not absolute laws; they are just the most probable manner in which matter and energy behave.
Physical laws can be bent. While the probability is incredibly low that enough coordination and coherence develops among the quantum jitters to manifest on a collective scale, that is exactly what etheric energy does. It alters probability and thereby skews the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, electromagnetism, and chemistry.
Alchemy does not violate the laws of physics, nor does it always follow them, rather it bends them as needed. It operates upon the quantum foundation from which these laws arise in the first place, via etheric energy affecting the probability of quantum events.
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