When the famous 17th-century Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe wasn’t looking at the stars, he spent his time deciphering the composition of matter on Earth. The exact nature of his chemical studies, however, remained a mystery. What secret does the laboratory of a Renaissance alchemist reveal?
A team of researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and the National Museum of Denmark have carried out an analysis of several fragments of glass and pottery recovered from the laboratory of a Renaissance alchemist 35 years ago, identifying clues about what his studies may have involved of alchemy.
On four of the five fragments from Brahe’s laboratory, enriched levels of several elements were found: nickel, copper, zinc, tin, antimony, tungsten, gold, mercury and lead. These findings suggest that these elements, including gold and mercury, often used by alchemists to treat disease, were heavily used in Brahe’s experiments.
What elements were found in the laboratory of a Renaissance alchemist?
“Most intriguing are the elements found in higher than expected concentrations, indicating enrichment and providing information about the substances used in Tycho Brahe’s alchemical laboratory,” says physicist and chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark.
Mass spectrometry was adapted for chemical analysis, whereby sample molecules are converted into charged ions to determine their composition, giving us clues about the activities in Brahe’s state-of-the-art underground laboratory on the island of Ven, which he now owns Swedes.
The most intriguing discovery is the presence of tungsten. It wasn’t identified as an element until 1781, so what role did it have in a demolished laboratory nearly 200 years earlier? Tungsten may have been mistakenly separated from a mineral without Brahe realizing its uncharacterized nature. Alternatively, the scientist may have built on the work of the German mineralogist Georgius Agricola, who took the first steps towards identifying tungsten in tin ore, indicates Science Alert.
“Perhaps Tycho Brahe heard about this and thus knew about the existence of tungsten. But this is not something we can know or say based on the analysis we have done. It is only a possible theoretical explanation for the presence of tungsten in the samples,” says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.
A complex worldview
Brahe lived in an age when sharing experimental knowledge was not necessarily the norm, especially in the field of alchemy. He only shared this part of his research with a few people, but we know that he was working on developing drugs for diseases such as plague, syphilis, leprosy and fever.
Like many of his contemporaries, Brahe believed in the correspondence between the heavens, the Earth, and the human body; thus, for example, the Sun, gold and the heart shared common characteristics. Incidentally, an earlier study of Brahe’s remains suggests that he himself may have taken gold as a form of medicine.
“It might seem strange that Tycho Brahe was involved in both astronomy and alchemy, but when we understand his worldview, it all makes sense,” says National Museum of Denmark curator Poul Grinder-Hansen.
The research was published in the journal Heritage Science.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
