The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science

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Atwood’s vast tome hardly touched upon science at all, arguing that alchemy was precisely not related to any modern science. However, alchemy was also present for the newly emerging science of radioactivity. In an oft-quoted exchange between the chemist Frederick Soddy and the physicist Ernest Rutherford in their lab at Canada’s McGill University in 1901, when they realized that radioactive thorium was transforming into an inert gas, to quote nuclear historian Spencer Weart, 21 MARK S. ” “For Mike’s sake, Soddy,” his companion shot back, “don’t call it transmutation.

Soddy 1909: 211) Soddy continued to push the idea that gold is not wealth, but just a convention of exchange, and continued to advocate that real wealth was a function of energy (Soddy 1912: 187). G. Wells. Wells was inspired to write his 1914 novel The World Set Free by Soddy’s 1908 lectures and The Interpretation of Radium. Wells’s novel, the first to envision nuclear warfare, picked up on Soddy’s interest in alchemical transmutation in relationship to the new science, as well as his concerns that the synthesis of elements would undermine the gold standard – which occurs in Wells’s novel as one of the catastrophic consequences of rapid scientific change and the control of vast powers of energy without a change in social structure and economy.

Ullman, E. (1997) Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents, San Francisco: City Lights. ——(2003) The Bug, New York: Doubleday. Vinge, V. (1983) “First Word,” Omni, January 10. ——(2006) Rainbows End, New York: Tor. Wiener, N. : MIT Press. 16 2 ALCHEMY Mark S. Morrisson For many, the word “alchemy” conjures up visions of deluded fanatics wasting their lives, health, and fortunes on a futile quest to manufacture gold from other metals, the so-called “puffers” of early modern art and literature whose bellows fed the flames of their furnaces and their unrealizable ambitions.