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THE PHENOMENON AND THE PROTOTYPE OF ALCHEMY

V. Vinokurov, M. Vorontsova

Abstract

In the modern world, various projective images of alchemy, of the alchemist, of the В‘great workВ’ and of the philosopher's stone were formed. The aim of the work is to search for the prototype of an alchemic operation and to prove that it is an operation to create a measure for measuring an unknown quantity that can be chemical, geometric, psychological or of some other nature. The method of investigation is a representative measurement theory based on assigning numbers to things; in this case, things are the letters that make up the word В‘alchimВ’. The assignment of figures to things in alchemy happened so that they began to present facts. This representation is due to the fact that the sequence of letters formed a word having historical origins, and the numerical sequence formed a digit having a mathematical meaning. The article distinguishes between the word and the term В‘alchimВ’. As the term В‘alchemyВ’ is not the genesis of a word from some language but an artificial construction, one of the representation of the number В‘?В’ (Ludolph's number). The side result was the search for approximations to the value of the number В‘?В’. The alchemists achieved a numerical approximation of the number В‘?В’ and considered В‘?В’ to be 3.1415 or 3.1418.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/2.2/S10.094

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