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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
SCORPIO ASCENDING
“A Whiter Shade of Pale”
Atomic Physics – Class 12 – Main Lesson
Harry Truman was the 33rd President of the United States, and is best remembered as the leader who presided over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This was the most terrible single act of violence ever committed; a heinous crime in the extreme again not only its legion incinerated, vaporized or irradiated victims, but also against the Spirit of the Earth itself.
33 is the most important of all numbers in occult numerology; it is the number of the Christ force, especially as it relates to the earth. The 33 years of Christ’s life being the obvious example. For instance there are 33 vertebrae in the human spine, The Tree of Ego. The genesis of the atom bomb devastation began with a 33. In 1921 Hitler was 33 when he became leader of the National Socialists; he was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. He then proceeded to commit the greatest collective crime in the annuls of humankind – the eternally wicked Shoah.
This was a calamitous betrayal of the Holy Number. As such, it cannot be mere coincidence that the atomic bomb betrayal is also one based on 33. Both are deliberate violations against the Sun Spirit. A nuclear reaction harnesses the power of the sun, Mansion of the Ego. Truman could well be thought of as the New Prometheus, he who stole the fire from heaven to not only crush his Asiatic enemy, but in so doing, achieve world mastery; a goal which thankfully eluded The Fuhrer!
Was it also another curious coincidence that this deed was not performed by the 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt; he who conveniently died a mere four months before the terrible event? After all, it was Roosevelt’s administration which initiated the atomic weapons program. How fortunate was FDR to escape the lifelong ignominy of giving the deadly order – and the terrible afterlife Kamaloca consequences!
This is the kind of idle rumination one might have in embarking on the first science lesson in Class 12; and the last Physics unit in 12 years of education. Another is Aladdin. Scheherazade told this as one of the fabulous Tales of 1001 Nights. This brave, smart and talented lady is one of the greatest storytellers of all time; one upon which we Steiner original tale tellers have modeled ourselves over the years. The clairvoyant cutie had access to a panoramic Astral world of images profound and prophetic; a supersensible realm which is of course best accessed at ‘night’ – in this case, 1001 nights! Aladdin – Allah-Din, ominously meaning ‘judgement of Allah’, is prophetic to a fault, foreseeing the genesis, birth – and hopefully death! – of the nuclear monster; to those with ears to hear!
I won’t peel back the layers of every esoteric secret of the story of Aladdin (though a teacher is recommended to cultivate the art of fable interpretation), but one example is the wicked ‘uncle’, who curiously remains nameless. He is thought to be an emissary of Ahriman, being Persian as he was, of the rank of Magi, or an evil counterpart thereof. He was also a stepfather, or false ego, to young Aladdin.
Anyway, the boy’s magician uncle journeyed to a ‘space between mountains’. This describes the topography of Alamogordo, or indeed Hiroshima. Here the meretricious magus cast a power powder (uranium oxide?) onto a fire. This exploded with a cataclysmic roar, and the earth opened ‘like a watermelon splitting’. The crater created by the first bomb tested at New Mexico was many meters long, and fused miles of the surrounding sand to mottled watermelon-green glass!
In fact an interpretive reading of this all-time classic tale of a boy (young ego) and a black magician (Shriman-inspired scientist?) reveals astounding correlations with the evolution of the nuclear industry at every turn – more examples later. The following is an article I had published in the newspaper The Australian a few days after India’s five nuclear bomb tests in mid-May, 1998.
Nuclear Blast Inflames Lasting Scars
Little wonder the Japanese reacted so swiftly to the resumption of nuclear testing by India, says
Alan Whitehead
Following India’s announcement of underground testing of first three, then a further two nuclear bombs, five strong letters of rebuke were sent to the Indian Government by the mayor of Hiroshima. How do I know? Because it is a policy of the Hiroshima Prefecture to do so for every nuclear test anywhere in the world – and has been for decades.
A copy of each letter is added to the hundreds already immortalized on the Wall of Outrage in the Atomic Bomb Museum, a few hundred meters from the hypocenter of the euphemistically named Little Boy that devastated the city on August 6, 1945.
I feel braided into these events. Not only have I worked regularly in Hiroshima, but my grandson’s birthday is on that day – International Peace Day. A further irony is that he was, well before he was born, named Mars, Roman god of war. Mars is a macaroon compared with India’s Kali, cannibal goddess of destruction. Let’s hope her garland of skulls is not an omen for a subcontinent nuclear holocaust.
The Indian Government, awash with domestic euphoria (it has even declared a day of celebration), seems bewildered by the global condemnation that exploded as the news hit the wires. Already, Japan has suspended $30 million of grants as a first step, and further measures are being considered. The US has imposed economic sanctions, and Australia has cut defense ties and withdrawn non-humanitarian aid. There are fears that Pakistan may crank up its a-bomb programs. The logical outcome of a country joining the nuclear race is that it is much more likely itself to become a target of nuclear attack.
It is almost 53 years since the Hiroshima tragedy. For visitors to the city, the question of whether the use of the nuclear option was morally justified is eclipsed by the chill in the blood as one stands in silence before the peace memorial in Hiroshima.
This was a large public building with a beautiful elliptical dome. Its charred concrete and twisted girders were left just as they were after the explosion. It was the only building left standing near the center of the blast. Perhaps the Indian powerbrokers should peer into its gloomy interior to feel the stark reality; hundreds of men and women were instantly turned to ash and melting flesh right there, in that foyer, on those stairs.
Despite a litany of humiliation visited upon the Japanese people by the war, being nuclear targets is the singular event that has left an enduring scar. This takes the form of smoldering anger and a nameless heartache. Perhaps this perennial pain is exacerbated by the duplicity of the US attack plan. Right through the previous night they sent dummy airborne sorties over the city. These were greeted by the usual sirens and searchlights; the citizens became complacent, not deigning in the end to even get out of bed, let alone scuttle down to the shelters.
When the sirens wounded the approach on the Enola Gay and Little Boy at 8:15am, the busy peak-hour crowds barely looked up into the hot, blue sky. This sinister timing was to ensure the maximum human flesh was on the streets. The motives? A nefarious mix of vengeance and scientific curiosity. This is the main reason that the larger Nagasaki bomb, Fat Boy, dropped several days later, had considerable fewer casualties – they weren’t going to be caught in the open a second time. Japan’s residual rage is probably what prompted it to be among the first nations to respond in a tangible way to India’s heinous initiative.
There is an air pf serenity in the Peace Park in Hiroshima, built adjacent to the bomb site. As well as the heartrending Tomb of the Victims with its eternal flame, there are more transitory memorials in the form of chains of paper cranes made by school children – thousands of them, from tiny jewel-like creations to giant peace birds.
Half a kilometer to the east, is a Shinto sanctuary, is the only living thing that is known to have survived in close proximity to the inferno: It is a gnarled old Australian red gum; on the blast side is an ugly charred scar, but on the other it flourishes this tree is a testament not only to the endurance enshrined in it fire continent provenance, but to redemption. Even after Kali’s unprecedented assault, life not only survives, but burgeons.
The peace memorial is a sepulcher, empty but for the ghosts of the slain who still seem to haunt its crumbling walls in bewilderment. The long-suffering red gum is the tree of life. Perhaps its sickle leaves shivered when its tired old roots detected the shock waves from India. The tree, and many of Hiroshima’s survivors, know from experience the horror of nuclear conflagration; they were there. They know that no fatuous policy of nuclear deterrent is worth that kind of risk.
Alan Whitehead is a freelance writer based on the NSW north coast.
“Radioactivity has only been present in the earth since the time of Golgotha”.
Rudolf Steiner, June 1918
The illustration which accompanied the Australian article above: An Indian fakir pipes a cobra from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Eighteen years before the first atomic explosion, Nobel Prize winner Walter Nernst presciently observed in relation to the splitting of the atom: “We may say that we are living on tan island of gun cotton. But, thank God, we have not yet found the match that will ignite it.”
Of Rudolf Steiner’s 12 Philosophical Points of View, that of Cancer is Materialism – The Crab, with its nominal Sense of Touch, is the sign inspiring, of the 12 Subjects, Science. A study of uranium-based nuclear technology, whether for military or peace-time purposes, is one of ultimate materialism; uranium being the most compacted, the heaviest, natural element as it is. In perverse irony, the word uranium is from Uranus, the lofty sky god of Ancient Greece.
But then there’s the hydrogen bomb, based on a manipulation of the lightest of all 92 elements, that belonging, not to the inner earth – the core indeed! – as does uranium, but to the sun. This is an element not of compaction, but dispersal. Of course uranium is still the power base in a hydrogen bomb, which requires an atomic explosion just to detonate it!
The hydrogen is converted to helium (‘sun gas’) in this particular nuclear reaction. There was a test firing of a hydrogen bomb in 1952 on the perfect paradise Pacific island of Elugard. What? You can’t find Elugard on a map? That’s because this lovely emerald in a sea of aquamarine was not only destroyed, but totally vanished under the equivalent of 20,000,000 tons of TNT! This was too much even for the beribboned hawks of the US military, who reluctantly resized from the truly awesome power they beheld. They continued however to expand their growing arsenal with common all-garden, user-friendly atom bombs!
The Pacific (‘peace’) hydrogen bomb blast was the loudest sound ever created by man; one which rang out into the universe as a cry of pain from a violated earth. Worse still perhaps is the ‘sound of silence’ that followed, the subsequent sinister assault of radiation on all living things in its path.
Death by the Big Bang, or later by the small silence, is truly the Devil’s Alternative of nuclear conflagration. As such, fire has become, not a purging as of old, but a poisoning, an evil invasion of the sanctuary of the Salamandas by the Nameless One.
Man of course is merely a tool in this black arts plan, but a culpable one nevertheless. Our task as teachers is to counter this occult malevolence with the white magic of Prometheus-inspired, morally sound creativity. This is a giving back of the Sun Fire to its original home. The whole of Steiner Education is focused on this singular goal.
Whether white, black or even red magic, all depend on decisions made by the human Ego, and the Ego’s handmaiden, thinking. St. John penned the 4th, the Ego-though Gospel, as he did the Book of Revelations. In the latter he describes the ‘four horse of the Apocalypse’ – a white, a red and a black horse, and lastly the oddly-named ‘pale horse’.
This white-red-black-pale sequence is the evolutionary incarnation of Ego-thought itself. In the symbolism of the four cardinal domestic animals, dog, cat, cow, horse, the last is the Ego animal, with its square form, upright posture and proud demeanor. So the four horse of the Apocalypse are four aspects of the Ego. The horse is also a timeless symbol of intelligence – if winged, like Pegasus, of cosmic intelligence. So the White Horse of Revelations represents a long-ago era of divinely-inspired, spiritual or Ego-thought; “He that sat on him as a conqueror.”
Although sequential, the respective influences of the four horses continued through the ages, right into the present, and even into the misty future, we presume. As such, it is still possible for the individual to have recourse to divine-white thinking; the ‘conquering’ aspect being over evil and injustice rather than mere enemies, like political foes.
The Red horse of Ego-thought represents the color of the earth, of red clay, such as the name ‘Adam’ means – of blood itself, of passion, for good or ill. This was a new sense-bound thinking: “…and power was given to him that sat hereon to take peace from the earth…”.
Thirdly the Black Horse; this is an emblem of rational or purely intellectual thought, that which can be independent of, and unenlightened by, both spirit and earth: “…and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand…”. Women generically exercise more red horse or sentient thought; men more rational, logic or ‘balanced’ black cognition.
Finally the ominous image of the Pale Horse; here the white, red and black have first combined, then faded to the point of insipidity. This 4th is a wholly moral zone, one where ego-hood and its attendant thinking can be either blessed or damned. Evil is the losing of one’s spiritual identity, a product of a fallen, faded or pale Ego. Virtue is rather evidence of an exalted, intensely luminous one.
When Hitler launched his era of ‘Aryan’ white supremacy (‘palefaces’) with his white, red and black ‘crooked cross’, the ensuing world conflict which stamped the 20ths Century as the lowest ebb in the history of humankind, was concluded by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Thankfully the morality of those with their finders on the bomb button is the post-war period has prevailed; has been sufficient at least to prevent a follow-on atomic holocaust.
Mankind today has the power, through nuclear technology, to destroy every living thing on earth. The pale horse and its grim rider is invisibly abroad in the power corridors of every nuclear nation: “…and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth (four is the Ego number, as it is that of the manifest earth, and the pale horse itself), to kill with sward, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” Sound familiar?
Of the four main lesson streams, Science represents, of the four ‘bodies’ of man, the Physical Body – Materialism again, but of a higher, fully justified kind. On the eternal Know Thyself path, Science, and its metaphysical counterpart, Spiritual Science, is the journey humankind must take to comprehend the mystery of physicality. If Science was the Art of the 20th Century, then Spiritual Science will surely be that of the 21st.
Class 12 students, in their great revisiting of evolution, are in their 20th/21st Century year; hence their interest in Science, if imaginatively presented, is often intense. Nuclear science of course is exclusively a spawning of the 20th Century.
In the Educational Zodiac, Class 12 is the Gemini Year; an aspect of this development is the arrival of the Doppelganger in the 18th year – a spiritual double, or ‘twin’. Even children have a ‘double’, but 18 is the first age we can choose to be influenced by it – or not. Only now can a young person be considered as an Ego-bearing individual; as being truly capable of evil even. Prior to this they can commit evil, but more in the sense of being a vehicle for external influences only.
Of the 12 Senses, the Sense of Ego is of Gemini; the Ego line in the Lord’s Prayer being “deliver us from evil”. Teachers must be tuned to this incipient Ego arrival. The numerological number of Ancient Persia is 9 (starting 1 in Ancient Saturn, 2 Old Sun and so on). 18 is of the 9; 1+8=9. The sun rose in Gemini in the vernal equinox in this great civilization, 5067 to 2907BC. So 18-year-olds are not only Gemini-inspired, but in a deeply subliminal sense, Ancient Persians as well. Our task is to aid them in their struggle to behold their light, and vanquish their darkness.
High School Science has three strands, Physics, Chemistry and Biology, calling primarily on the three soul forces of will, feeling and thinking in the same order. Atomic Physics is of course programmed in the Physics/Will strand. The most primal expression of Will, whether earthly or human is Fire – most appropriate to our subject in light of the foregoing observations (Persia means ‘fire lane’)! In spite of some of our nuclear industry content sliding into the negative on the open-ended morality scale, the teacher’s aim is to present a balanced, unbiased 3-week main lesson on the pure science – the cold, hard facts – surrounding the evolution of nuclear consciousness.
My class visited Australia’s sole nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney. Here we were shown over the sprawling, immaculately maintained complex, and given a talk in the lecture theater. The most impressive sight to the student (apart from the omnipresent security) was peering down into a tank containing spent uranium rods submerged in water. This renders them temporarily benign – not that you’d believe it from their eerie blue glow!
As I write, the Japanese are trying to deal with “the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl” at Tokaimura (an area from which Susan and I have recently returned on a lecture tour!). One worker described “an eerie pale blue glow” inside the conversion unit. This was a danger signal that ‘criticality’ was occurring – with the worst possible implications!
This did give me cause for pause about the reliability and safety of our Lucas Heights experience!? The disaster was caused by “the fateful decision to vastly increase the final amount of uranium power…”. Shades of Aladdin’s uncle! Apparently safety precautions were so slack that the laconic workers were carrying the stuff around in buckets!
The following is a light-hearted piece I wrote for a general readership inspired from my class’s visit to Lucas Heights:
SIN ROCK? SYNROCK?!
What’s it matter, it doesn’t work anyway!
The public relations man at the atomic energy research station was explaining to my Year 12 science students how Australia is leading the way in solving the insoluble – the problem of atomic waste disposal. I sat at the back of the lecture theater smiling smugly to myself, wondering how his smile would fade if he knew that it was I who was the real (unsung) inventor of the clever technique he was describing.
State-of-the-science nuclear waste disposal is now in the form of blocks of man-created stone, in which their deadly contents are securely locked. The blocks are radiation-insulated – a child could play with them! They are then stored in a stable environment where they sleep on, perhaps for thousands of years, until research has found a way to destroy their imprisoned poisons in an even safer way.
P.R. man’s voice droned on with its poly-syllabic, hi-tech jargon as my mind slipped back to an otherwise unremarkable day in 1964, as I browsed through a city book shop in my lunch hour. I was curious about a new release with a photo of a dead bird on the cover. It was that Very remarkable book, that starting gun for the new environmental awareness, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
Even a preliminary scan revealed a horrific story of the depredations of DDT, and other poisons. That night I devoured the book cover to cover; I was appalled that not only birds, but all forms of wildlife, and even that widest life of all, man, was threatened with this insidious chemical menace. They must be stopped! They…but hang on?! I was a ‘they’! By the time I’d sorted out my pronouns, I realized that I had in my possession a veritable arsenal of life-inimical toxins.
So before I carried the battle to ‘they’, I would have to sweep clean my own garden-shed doorstep. But what to do with all the boxes, bottles and baits I had collected over the years?! Silent Spring detailed the dangers of doing just about anything with them; I couldn’t bury the stuff, it might enter the ground-water supply – I couldn’t tip it in the ocean, it might enter the food chain. I could not even commit it to the purging fires of an incinerator; who knows what reactions might take place with my poisons as they turned to gases n that great chemical laboratory in the sky?
My perplexity accompanied me as I trudged down to the ferry next morning. Then a radon-bright flash hit me as I saw a line of trucks pouring concrete into the new sea wall under construction. The job had been proceeding for some weeks, and I had walked past every day, with at best mild curiosity. But not today! This busy site would solve my disposal problems – permanently!
In the office I hatched my plan well, between ringing phones and inconsiderate interruptions by the boss. The next morning I came to work very early, clutching my hateful poisons; in the dawn light I carefully wedged the well-sealed plastic bag between two concreate blocks f pyramidal scale and covered in with sand. This was the spot I calculated would be filled with concrete that very day – and it was! The idea, I must confess, is not entirely original, the Mafia have been doing this kind of thing for years, but not with poison waste.
My shameful deposits are probably there still today, an accusing time-capsule to perhaps be found centuries hence when – hopefully – a simple but brilliant process has been discovered to turn DDT into drinking water!
Ah, the nuclear energy lecture seems to be over; should I mention my early breakthrough in ‘igneous containment’? A little later maybe, because one of my students is responding to the invitation for questions – commendable intellectual curiosity!
“And what do our descendants do with these thousands of radioactive-waste blocks if science fails to come up with a radiation-deactivation solution?” he said.
“Smart Alek!” I thought as the now unsmiling R.R. man saw us ceremonially through the security gates!
Yes, the sceptics in my class did question the viability of the nuclear waste disposal ‘solution’, or synroc as they cleverly called it. Fifteen years later, this ‘synthetic rock’ is still at the experimental stage; the hateful toxic material still being buried in leaking drums in deep desert holes; a death-dealing legacy for our embittered descendants.
The following is a precis of my Atomic Physics main lesson, that which was the culmination of the 5-year high school physics strand. The other four units, beginning in Class 8, were: Electrical Physics (see my book La Pleroma); Sound and Light Physics Classes 9 and 10 (see A Spiritual Science); and Heat Physics (earlier in this book).
As in my wont, I transported my 18-year-olds, via the magic of Time Travel, back to the origins of Energy, as myth and legend would have it. This began with the Titan kleptomaniac, Prometheus (‘future spirit’), who purloined the most sacred of all cosmic substances, fire – diving energy – from heaven in order to create man. This fire was the primal Ego-substance, or Spirit. In fact all core knowledge originated in Ancient Greece, even of Atomic Physics. This wisdom was either woven in dramatic images in legends, or espoused by the eminent philosophers of the Classical age. The first element, fire, was not recognized again as a separate member of the four elements until the atomic age, and renamed Plasma. Democritus actually coined the word atom (atomos – ‘against division’) in his striving to understand the mystery of matter. His theories were correct in essence, especially his contention that the atom can never be seen – and it still hasn’t!
The Alchemists of the Middle Ages kept the spirit of scientific curiosity alive in their malodorous kitchens until the Age of Enlightenment. Knowledge of the (today a classical 92) elements and their multitudinous compounds was a foundation for John Dalton’s work in the 19th Century on atoms and their clusters, molecules.
Galileo broke through the tyranny of Aristotelian science when he discovered the home of God to be infinitely greater than even the scriptures indicated. He did this with his crude but effective telescope. Leeuwenhoek did the same for Heaven’s anti-realm with his microscope.
Lavoisier found to his surprise that the products of combustion were heavier than the original substance; due to burning ingesting oxygen. By 1790 he had catalogued 28 elements. Avogadro asserted that an atom is the smallest particle of an element; a molecule being the smallest particle of a compound. The atomic weight of an element is the number of times it is heavier than a hydrogen atom. By watching a grain of pollen in a drop of water, it was found that molecules (or atoms) are in constant movement.
One cubic centimeter of air has an astounding 27 trillion molecules, each moving at about 2000 kph and colliding 5 billion times a second. The temperature of a substance is determined by its molecular speed. From 1870 Mendeleef’s periodic table of elements became the reference standard of all the physical sciences.
In 1895 Rontgen discovered, through his experiments with cathode rays, the X-ray. The behavior of rubbed amber (‘electron’) was known since Greek times, and friction machines would produce both sparks and delighted puzzlement in bewigged 18th Century courts.
Benjamin Franklin proved, with his hot-wire kite, that the same force existed in lightning. The concept of positive and negative charged particles was developed by Galvani and Volta from their voyeuristic jerking dead frog leg observations. It was soon found that opposite charges attract – like repel. William Crookes developed the cathode (‘way down’) ray tube, which shoots negative particles through an evacuated glass tube; the electrons glow through the action of friction.
Henri Becquerel, in 1896, discovered that uranium radiated through black paper onto a photographic plate. Marie and Pierre Curie a year later proceeded with experiments with this mysterious, heaviest of all elements, and found that its penetrating power is neither affected by temperature, light or even pressure; they called it radioactivity.
For four years they labored to refine its essence from tons of pitchblende (uranium ore) to extract the most powerful substance ever known, radium. This produced, when burnt, 250,000 times as much energy as coal, and in its decay it created helium and lead. The brilliant Marie, winner of two Nobel prizes (physics 1903, chemistry 1911) finally succumbed to radioactive poisoning in 1934.
Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander, discovered in 1906 the trinity of this new-found power; alpha waves are positively charged helium atoms, beta very fast negative charged electrons, gamma straight waves of short length with great penetrating power. Radioactive material shoots off atoms continually, this determines its half-life: uranium millions of years, radium 1580 years, radon 4 days, C radium one millionth of a second!
The luminous watch lasts so long due to its radium content, released helium atoms collide with ZnSo4. I’ve stopped wearing mine because it gave me a rash! Rutherford found the existence of the nucleus by shooting positive radium electrons through a thin sheet of gold onto a ZnSo4 screen. One in 8000 defected, showing the existence of other positives (nuclei). These are the actual mass of a substance. All nuclei in a human body would be the size of a grain of sand, but still weigh the same.
The atomic number is that of the electrons in orbit around the nucleus, e.g. hydrogen is 1, and gold 79. Therefore the atomic world can be seen as a microcosm of the sun and its orbiting planets, or the earth and its moon. The positive charge on the nucleus determines to which element an atom belongs – divide this by negative charge of one electron (known), which give the number of electrons. Lead 82 can be charged into gold 79 by the removal of three electrons – just like the alchemists said!
Rock age can be found by determining the amount of lead in the deposit; lead is spontaneously created from uranium by decomposition. Organic age rather is found by carbon dating; measuring the rate of radioactivity emitted from once-living matter. In 1918 Rutherford bombarded nitrogen with superfast alpha particles of radium; the result was oxygen and hydrogen. This was the first time the atom has been separated in the lab. He achieved only eight successes in 23,000 plates; as usual, the results were recorded on a ZnSko4 screen. The two nuclei had to overcome the forces of repulsion. As the atom can never be seen, a way was found to see where it had been, like fox prints in the snow. This was done using a cloud chamber.
Albert Einstein propounded the theory of relativity; this included the concept that no physical calculations can be complete without relating them to other factors, like gravity, speed of light and mass. He contested the most sacred Newtonian principle, that light travel in a straight line.
He proved this by observing an eclipse of a star, which should have been behind the sun. This showed that the sun somehow bent the light rays. Einstein distilled the universe down to three principles, energy, mass and speed: E = MC2 (C being the speed of light). Unlike Rutherford, whose success came from the experiments, Einstein’s only tool was mathematics. He stated that the speed of light (300,000kps) through a vacuum was constant, whether the observer was traveling towards or away from the source, like the earth. This is because as the speed of an object changes, so does its mass and size! A still 1-meter rod would measure only a centimeter when traveling at the speed of light. Steiner contested this mode of thinking, saying that rods can’t move at the speed of light; thus relegating the concept to theory only, not reality.
As energy increases, so does mass, therefore energy and mass are the same. Matter can become energy and vice versa. A stunning exercise is to calculate how much energy there is in a single pea of uranium weighing 0.5gm: E = quantity of energy; M = mass is grams; c – speed of light in centimeters, so E will be in ergs (36 million ergs = 1 kilowatt hours)
. Enough to power a small school, which uses about 12,500 kwh per year, for 10,000 years!
James Chadwick in 1932 discovered an aspect of the nucleus which appeared on a plate but did not make a could track; therefore it had no electrical charge – it was neutral. Hence it was named a neutron. He found that the neutron had the same mass as the hydrogen nucleus.
He also found that some kinds of elements have two atoms, e.g. neon, with Atomic Weight 20.2, comprises 9 atoms of AW 20 and 1 atom AW 22: average AW = 20.2. These stray atoms were called isotopes(meaning occupying the same place in the periodic table). In the 102 scientific elements (different from the natural, with 92), there are 320 isotopes.
The Atomic Number of mercury is 80 (in periodic table), therefore it has an AW of 200; hence mercury has 120 neutrons. The orbits of electrons are shells, and the outer shell determines the chemical character of the element. Outer orbits with eight electrons (maximum) are always inert gases, like argon, because the shell is full and won’t react with other elements. Chlorine, AN 17 – with three shells 2, 8, 7, easily combines with sodium AN 11 – three shells 2, 8, 1. One plus seen combine to form a sodium chloride (salt) molecule.
All elements of the same AN multiples have similar characteristics, like fluorine, bromine and chlorine. All end in 7 and all smell strongly. These are the families of the elements. The sodium atom loses one negative electron and becomes positively charged. The chlorine atom gains one negative electron and becomes negatively charged.
As positive and negative attract, the two atoms combine to form a molecule of salt. This constitutes the movement of an electric current. When atoms are subject to excitation, like heat, electrons can jump from one shell to another, registering color and other changes.
In 1929, Ganow created the High Tension Impulse Generator, whose antecedents can create 10,000,000 volts. They are used to bombard elements with proton impelled with terrific electrical force. These hydrogen nuclei (positive) were repelled only half as much as alpha particles, therefore they could penetrate and separate the element.
Mass
Lithium nucleus 7.0182 units (one sixteenth mass of Oxygen atom – plus
Hydrogen proton 1.0081 – equals
8.0263 – minus
8.0078 – equals
Helium X 2 0.0185 units!
3+1=4 (Beryllium) split into two alpha particles – Helium
Watt’s this?! 0.0185 of unit gone? Where? Transformed into pure energy that’s where, into 17,200,000 electron volts. E = Mc2! This was the first observed transformation of mass into energy. Somehow the images of the old fairy stories of pointy-hatted wizards’ manipulation of matter was a reality. The rod of uranium in a nuclear reactor are like magic wands; the bombarded element like the sacred crystal.
Ernest Lawrence, again in 1929, invented the cyclotron: this was designed to bombard nuclei. The first one was only eight centimeters wide; its antecedents now weigh thousands of tons. The two ‘D’s have alternating currents which provide the spinning nucleus with acceleration every time it jumps the gap – positive pushes positive away.
An example: 1000 gap jumps across the D magnets each of 20,000 volts creates a nucleus speed as if impelled by 2,000,000 volts.
In 1933, freak cosmic rays which appeared in a cloud chamber collided with a nucleus. This revealed the existence of the positron – an electron with a positive charge! It was equal but opposite, but had a lifetime of only one thousand millionths of a second. It was found that a gamma ray could change into a positron, and vice versa – energy into mass, the stuff of wizardry again!
When positrons are thrown off by the positive nucleus, those emitted are radioactive, or radioactive isotopes. They are inimical to life because they attach to negative electrons in molecules, destroying their balance (pos.-neg. charge), hence can create cancer. A proton can change into a neutron emitting a positron. A neutron can change into a proton emitting an electron. Neutrons and protons are held together by close proximity – the binding force.
Enrico Fermi in 1943 bombarded heavy elements with neutrons. These have no repulsion component. And he changed lead to gold! He then bombarded the heaviest element, uranium, AW238 AN92, and created the first man-made element, Neptunium, AN93; which led to the big daddy of nuclear fission, Plutonium – AW239, AN94. Ahriman incarnate!
With this remarkable breakthrough, the sacred concept of 92 natural elements was shattered. This Magician of Materialism was the same who, when his colleagues grew nervous about the moral implications of the atomic bomb they were working on, said dismissively “Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples, after all, the thing’s superb physics.”
Nuclear fission was discovered by Hahn and Strassman. Uranium 92 produced barium 56, and another unknown element. The resultant loss of mass produced 200,000,000 electron volts of energy. With each collision of a uranium atom with a neutron, there new neutrons were liberated, creating a chain reaction. This is like the grains of wheat on the chessboard numbers squared – a huge release of energy instantaneously.
Uranium AN92 is a mixture of three isotopes – AW238 99%, AW235 0.75%, AW234 (infinitesimal). 235 is best for a chain reaction because it can be separated by slow and fast neutrons. By 1940, only one thousand millionth of a gram of 235 had been refined. It took another two years to produce six tons. The first atomic reactor was built in Chicago in 1942, using blocks of uranium, uranium oxide and graphite. The last is used as a modifier to reduce speed of neutrons. Rods of cadmium are used to absorb and control neutrons, hence reaction. The whole thing was called a ‘pile’; it was 10 meters high and the size of a tennis court. Ominously it took the form of a human brain, the slightly squared hemisphere.
The Manhattan Project then began to produce the atom bomb, the largest and most secret industrial project ever. It employed 150,000 workers and cost billions of dollars. The Dupont company was commissioned to produce plutonium form uranium. The President requested they only make $1 profit; even though they had to build a whole town to do it. This was in accord with the spiritual principle that Ahriman must be paid his due. The graphite supplier had to provide many tons of the black carbon to a purity of one part in a million.
By 1943, plutonium was being produced in Tennessee at one tenth of a gram per day, for a cost of millions of dollars a gram – making gold a poor man’s metal in comparison. An 8-lane highway was built as an escape route if things got out of hand. The biggest factory in the world, covering 660 acres, was built to refine uranium hexafluoride by gas diffusion. This was also obtained by the mass spectrograph method using 5-meter (pole diameter) magnets and 220,000 pounds of silver wire.
Everything about the nuclear industry is an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of untold riches, from the treasury of precious metals and minerals, to the silver and gold used in the sub-earth processing technology. Aladdin lived on the sales of silver plate for some years. He was also made Commander of the army; indicating a martial destiny for nuclear power.
A huge complex (Aladdin’s palace?) was built at Los Alamos, with the best physics labs on earth. This led to the first atomic test, July 16, 1945, which not only gave the world it first mushroom-shaped cloud, but a miles-high pillar of purple fire.
A pall of radioactive dust spread over the earth and into the stratosphere. On August 6 at 8:15am, Hiroshima was utterly annihilated – from that moment, the world changed forever.
Research into killer weapons continues with the sinister C Bomb (cobalt) and the N Bomb (neutron, killing by radioactivity alone. This demonic pair conveniently destroy life, but not precious buildings!
Uranium was first used, in the 18th Century, to tint glass yellow-brown; now it provides world power. Early predictions however have not been realized, i.e. that half the world’s electricity would, by the 1980s, be nuclear. Public resistance to a brave new nuclear world has seen to that. Calder Hall in Britain was the world’s first nuclear power station. Admiral Richover with his nuclear submarine was successful, but the predicted nuclear plane never, um, got off the ground- thank the kind saints!
There are three kinds of nuclear power stations: 1. Homogenous, fuel dissolved in a moderator. This ‘primitive’ kind has to be stopped to clean out the ash! 2. Heterogenous, fuel in the form of rods and balls. 3. Fast, using liquid sodium (boils at 1ATM) with no moderator, creating new fissile material, plutonium from uranium 238 or 235 from thorium. This is a breeder reactor – creating more fuel than it uses!
The basic processing is 1. Mine the uranium ore. 2. Refine ore to yellowcake. 3. Reduce yellowcake to metal. 4. Extract plutonium through reactor. 5. Depleted metal returned for reprocessing to 3. 6. Extract uranium hexafluoride. 7. Regine highly-enriched 235. 8. Partly-enriched gas returned to 3 for reprocessing.
There was an intense class debate on the blessings and brickbats of nuclear energy; the arguments for included: No atmospheric pollution; small fuel volume; long fuel life; cheaper per unit cost; less industrial pollution; promotes technological progress; represses war ambition via MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
Some of the arguments against the technology were: High capital cost; high processing cost; rare fuel reserves; high technological expertise required; waste disposal problems; public disapproval; serious accident potential. This last was a desperate attempt by the class anti-nuclear lobby to gain a point – Chernobyl occurred just a year later!
With the discovery of over 1000 radioactive isotopes, called Labelled Atoms, many areas of industry have benefited, such as agriculture. An accurate measurement of the rate and time of nutrient absorption has aided fertilizer programming. Animal behavior has been studied by applying radioisotopes to wasps to determine mating and nesting habits. Insect and animal sterilization for plague control etc. Food sterilization kills bacteria extending a product’s shelf life. Many amazing facts have been discovered with the help of labelled atoms. Radio isotopes in fowl feed showed that the egg contents were formed from protein eaten one month before; yet the shell was made from calcium eaten on the same day!
Human cell replacement was found to occur completely (teeth and all) each year, with the exception of red blood cells. Most food energy is used for this cell replacement Isotopes can be used to mutate living organisms creating strains like rust-resistant wheat, fatless beef and giant oranges.
Of course radioactive isotope used is common in modern medicine. Many manufacturers benefit from labeled atoms, as in finding underground pope leaks, and stress fractures in engines. They are also used to trace underground water.
Atomic physics is leading humankind into the future by the nose; such massive power and breadth of application was unthinkable even 50 years ago. The manipulation of the atom and the release of its hidden forces will either destroy the earth, or guide us along a path back to universal intelligence; that is if we can contain the Genie in his lamp.
This was certainly not the case at Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and its genesis, Alamogordo. The cruel irony here is that this triumph of the Anti-Christ, the very first atomic explosion, was achieved under the holy gaze of the nearby Sangre de Christo mountains – “The Blood of Christ”.
And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
The Russian word Chernobyl means wormwood.
Redoubtable Australian Red gum, nearest living survivor of the 1945 atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima. The mystery of the red, black and white creating incarnadine deepens, as the tomb culture of Ancient Egypt attest. This is in the alchemical processes of transforming living spirit into matter, or human flesh, to be precise. The three major stages were the rubedo (red), the negredo(black), and the albedo (white). This is known in occult circles as The Life of Osiris – birth, death and resurrection, in the same order; and obvious precursor to the Golgotha event.
This still-life in colored pencil by student Stephen Whitehead is inserted here in the spirit of beauty-i-truth to provide prismatic relief from head-heavy science concepts.
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