旷世奇书《神秘化学(Occult Chemistry)》的故事（二）

    A race was thus triggered between theosophists and orthodox phy-

sicists to discover the true nature of matter, the former by delicately 

employing their yogic vision, the latter more crudely by bombarding 

atoms with parts of atoms.

    In 1909 physicist Ernest Rutherford, a big, gruff New Zealander 

with a walrus mustache, set the pace in his laboratory in Manchester 

when he found that the element radon naturally and spontaneously 

emitted particles to which he gave the name “alpha” (later discovered 

to be the nucleus of a helium atom bereft of its electron mantle). By 

placing a source of alpha particles in a lead case with a narrow hole, 

Rutherford was able to aim emitted particles at a piece of very thin 

gold foil, which deflected the path of the particles onto a surrounding

wall of zinc sulfide. The zinc sulfide then gave off a flash of light each

time it was struck by an alpha particle.

    From this procedure Rutherford was able to deduce that the only 

thing that could be knocking the alpha particle off course would have

to be a more massive particle, positively charged, and that this particle

must be the nucleus in each gold atom, occupying a very small volume

in the center of the relatively large atom, actually less than 1 percent. 

For this discovery—that Democritus’s solid atom had a hard, separable

nucleus—Rutherford received the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics, along

with the title of baron from a grateful King Edward VII.

    Yet Rutherford’s nucleus was just what the theosophists had been 

viewing for some time with their siddhi powers and describing in great 

detail in various publications, although, as later developed, theirs were

actually pairs of nuclei, duplicated by the disturbing act of clairvoyant

observation. In 1908, well before Rutherford proposed his nuclear 

model of the atom, and twenty-four years before another physicist, 

James Chadwick, actually discovered the neutron—a discovery that 

led scientists to conclude that atomic nuclei must consist of neutrons 

and protons—the two theosophist had accurately depicted the number 

of protons and neutrons in the nuclei of both arsenic and aluminum. 

Yet neither they nor their contemporary scientists yet know that atomic

nuclei differed from one  another only by the number of protons and 

neutrons they contained.

    During this same period, fifty-six more elements were studied and 

described by the theosophists, including five as yet unknown to sci-

ence—promethium, astatine, fancium, protoactium, and technitium—

plus six isotopes, though it was not then known that an element could 

have atoms of more than one weight: its isotopes, Isotopes consist 

of nuclei with the same number of protons but a different number of

neutrons, and an element can have as many as ten or more isotopes. 

Neon (mass number 20) and a variant meta-neon (mass number 22)

were correctly described in The Theosophist in 1908, some six years

before Frederick Soddy, another British physicist, introduced the con-

cept of isotopes to science, for which he, too, received a Nobel Prize.

    The theosophists, whose estimates of the atomic weight of ele-

ments, specified to two decimals, showed remarkable agreement with

accepted scientific values, were simply describing what they could see

with the use of their siddhi powers, As later physicists admitted, there

was no scientific reason for them or anyone else to suspect a second

variety of neon and certainly no purpose in the theosophists fabricting

one. What Leadbeater and Besant were trying to accomplish was 

merely to bring what they were seeing inside their "atom" into line 

with the table of elements formulated in mid-nineteenth century by

the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. The table predicted

that if elements were appropriately tabulated by atomic weight, they

would fall into groups of families having similar chemical properties.

The theosophists simply came across the isotopes as they noted that

elements in the same group in the table, with the same properties, all

had the same complex geometric shapes, which they painstakingly

depicted in their diagrams.

    With few exceptions, all the inner structures of their "chemical 

atoms" appeared in seven basic shapes: spikes, dumbbells, tetrahe-

dra, cubes, octahedra, bars, and star groups. All the inert gases app-

eared to be star shaped. The five Platonic solids—the only complete-

ly regular solid geometric figures in nature—were all to be found in 

the theosophists' archetypal atoms and molecules. None of this, 

however, could be corroborated by contemporary physicists, still 

waiting for the development of X rays, the electron microscope, and 

supercolliders.

    The result of the theosophists' work was published by Annie Besant

in 1908 in a series of papers in The Theosophist, followed by the first 

edition of Occult Chemistry. A further twenty elements were studied by

Besant and Leadbeater at the headquarters of the Theosophical 

Society in Adyar, Madras, and a second edition was published in 1919.

It was edited by Janaradasa, who amusingly describes a party of theo-

sophists moving off into the woods with rugs and cushions every after-

noon when the weather was fine so that Leadbeater and Besant could 

make their siddhi investigations while the others sat around listening or

reading, By 1933, the year before Leadbeater died, all the then known

elements—from hydrogen to uranium—and several unknown isotopes 

had been studied and depicted, along with an assortment of compound-

s. Besant's drawings are still in Adyar, mounted in a special book, as are

Leadbeater's drawings, all with the relevant correspondence. From this

material Janarajadasa put together the 1951 edition of Occult Chemistry.

    Yet the book was totally disregarded by the scientific community. And

because it claimed to show particles far smaller than protons, a concept 

at that time hopelessly at odds with orthodox science, the book could 

safely be disregarded as fantasy. Also, as Professor Smith points out,

few physicist had even heard of Occult Chemistry. Books by theosoph-

ists were read mostly by theosophists, few of whom had the training in 

orthodox physics required to support their beleaguered colleagues.

    When Janarajadasa was asked what he could do to remedy the situ-

ation, he answered, "nothing. Wait until science catches up."(2)

(2) In a letter to Professor F. N. Aston, inventor of the mass spectrogragh, an 

instrument for detecting isotopes, Janarajadasa had pointed out that Besant 

and leadbeaterhad discovered the neon-22 isotope four years before neon 

was found scientifically to have an isotope and that the helium-3 isotope an-

nounced by Aston in 1942 had been described in The Theosophist as early 

as 1908. Aston sent back a cursory reply: "Dr. Aston thanks Mr. Janarajadasa 

for sending his communication of January 8 and begs to return same without 

comment as he is not interested in Theosophy."

    Orthodox physicists, unable without siddhi vision to see inside atoms,

could pursue Rutherford's method only by bombarding atomic nuclei with

atomic particles in a determined effort to break up a nucleus and find 

what it contained. Their best projectiles were electrons and protons, the

former easily obtained by heating up a wire to incandescence, the latter

by removing an electron from an atom of commercially available hydro-

gen. Either particle could then be sufficiently speeded up with an accel-

erator to shatter a targeted nucleus.

    Man-made accelerators are designed to propel particles around a

circuit to increase their energy and mass. In principle, all one needs is

a standard car battery with terminals connected to copper plates a

short distance apart in a vacuum. An electron from the negative terminal

will invariably jump the gap toward the positive terminal, gathering 

energy as it jumps. If the positive terminal is made of wire screen, most 

of the electrons slip through to create a beam of electrons. Repeat the

process along a several-mile circuit, add a million-volt battery (plus mag-

nets to keep the electron beam from wandering off its steeplechase

track), and you can accelerate electrons to an energy of several million

volts. These can then create an impact strong enough to smash the nu-

cleus of the atom into which they collide.

    Physicists analyze the debris, not directly, as did the theosophists, but

by means of a black box in which the scatterings are parsed by sophis-

ticated electronic equipment. More and more expensive colliders were

built in the 1950s and '60s, including Stanford's Linear Accelerator Cen-

ter, known as SLAC, and Europe's Center for Nuclear Research, known

as CERN, and Fermilab outside Chicago, named after the Italian-born 

physicist Enrico Fermi, developer of that superincubus, the atom bomb.

From these multimillion dollar colliders issued man-made particles by 

the thousands, mostly infinitesimal ephemeral particles that disappeared

in microseconds—as little as a billionth of a trillions—through a couple of 

hundred heavier particles remained substantial long enough to be called

hadrons (from Greek for heavy) and were given Greek-letter names such

as sigma and lambda. Many of these, being synthetic varieties of protons

and neutrons, were not much use in determining the basic substance of 

matter: whereas a natural pronton can last virtually forever, atom-smash-

ed hadrons vanish under scrutiny. And in any case, none matched the 

theosophists' UPAs of which they counted nine in a proton.

    The first indication of a possible reconciliation between what the theo-

sophists described and what the physicists might concede only came in

the mid-1960s when a particle smaller than a proton was mathematically

postulated by theoretical physicists. In 1964 Murray Gell-Mann at the 

California Institute of Technology and George Zweig at CERN indepen-

dently proposed the existence of what they referred to as "mathematical

structures": three smaller constituents of a proton. Although such postu-

lated particles—quirkily called quarks by Gell-Mann—were mathematic-

ally "logical constructs" based on the patterns of hadrons or organized 

protons and neutrons that appeared in the black boxes, they showed too

many unlikely features to be taken seriously by the rest of the scientific 

community.

    Believing in quarks, said eminent professor of physics Harold Fritsch,

required the acceptance of too many peculiarities, not the least of which

were their unconventional charges: the new mathematical theory required

quarks to have not integral but an unheard-of fractional charge of 2/3 or

—1/3. So far all particles had been measured in wholenumber multiples 

of the charge of an electron.

    In view of this attitude, what was latter to become accepted by science

as one of the great theoretical breakthroughs of the century had to be 

ushered in as a joke during an amateur cabaret show in Aspen, Colorado.

As reported by Barry Taubes in the publication Discover, Murray Gell-

Mann jumped up from the audience on cue and babbled wildly what 

seemed like nonsense about how he had just figured out the whole theory

of the universe, of quarks, of gravity, and of everything else. "As he raved

with increasing frenzy, tow men in white coats came on stage to drag him

away, leaving the audience in laughter."

    Even the manner in which the new particles were named was enough 

to incite ridicule. The word quark in German describes a special kind of 

soft cheese and is synonymous with nonsence. Gell-Mann claimed it was

the number three that led him to introduce the word, inspired by a pass-

age from James Joyce's Finnegans wake:

         Three quark for Muster Mark!Sure he hasn't got much of a bark 

         And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.

    Reaction to the quark model in the theoretical physics community was

also far from begin. "Getting the CERN [European Center] report publi-

shed in the form that I wanted," wrote Gell-Mann (later to receive the 

Nobel Prize for physics), "was so difficult I finally gave up trying. When 

the physics department of a leading university was considering an ap-

pointment for me, their senior theorist, one of the most respected spoks-

man for all of theoretical physics, blocked the appointment at a faculty 

meeting by passionately arguing that it was the work of a "charlatan."

To which Gell-Mann added, modestly, "The idea that that hadrons 

[protons and neutrons], citizens of a nuclear democracy, were made of 

elementery particles with frctional quantum numbers did seem a bit rich.

The idea, however, is apparently correct."

    And correct it was. At SLAC, where protons were routinely being

bombarded by electrons at very high energy, an alert technician noted

within a proton three rapidly moving pointlike constituents. Could these

be quarks?

    When the experiment was repeated at Fermilab and at CERN using

muons as projectiles (muons are identical with electrons, only two 

hundred times heavier and ten times as energetic), the conclusion was

inevitable: a proton consists of three quarks.

    What the theosophists sixty years ealier had seen so clearly with their

siddhi vision could be revealed only now to physicists. The magnitude of

the effort this required can be judged by the fact that to study one atom

the physicists needed one electron-volt of energy, but to reveal a quark

—whose radius they estimate at .0000000000000000000001 of a centi-

meter, or a million times smaller—required ten billion electron-volts. As

for the theosophists' UPAs, or "subquark," it was still clearly many dimen-

sions smaller.

（未完待续）