Chapter One
FARMING FOR GOLD
Page One

The Science of Myth -- The Farmer
& the Philosohpers' Stone

David Hudson describes what happened next: ‘What happened was that after the material dried it exploded. It exploded like no explosion I had ever seen in my life and I’ve worked with a lot of explosive materials. There was no explosion and there was no implosion. It was as if somebody had detonated about fifty thousand flash bulbs all at one time -- just poof. All the material was gone, the filter paper was gone and the funnel was cracked.’

‘So I took a brand new pencil that had never been sharpened and stood it on end next to the funnel and started drying another sample. When the material detonated it burned the pencil about 30% but did not knock it over and all the sample was gone. So this was not an explosion and was not an implosion. It was like a tremendous release of light.’

Taking some of the powerful precipitant that had been dried under laboratory conditions, Hudson’s next move was to conduct a crucible reduction. This involved mixing the power with lead and heating the mixture until the lead melted. In this process metals that are heavier than lead stay in the lead and lighter ones are precipitated out of it. When the lead flux had settled the original precipitate powder formed a layer below the lead ‘just like it was gold or silver.’ Pouring off the slag, then the lead, this material came away as a separate constituent of the mix. Filtering this material, still slightly tainted with lead, left a bead consisting of gold and silver on the filter paper.

Taking samples of these beads to a number of commercial laboratories, the verdict was unanimous: ‘nothing but gold and silver there.’ Except . . . . There is no known alloy of gold and silver that is not soft, mallable and ductile. These beads, however, were different. If struck with a hammer they shattered like glass.

Realizing he was in possession of a unique and possibly unknown material, David Hudson got serious. Separating the gold from the silver left him with a black precipitate which commercial labs told him was a mixture of iron, silica and aluminium. Hudson knew this could not the case because the black material could not be dissolved even in hydrochloric nitric acid which is the only acid that dissolves gold.

With a curiosity he could afford to fund, David Hudson hit Cornell University where he hired himself a PhD who claimed to be an expert in precious elements. The first analysis came up with the same iron/silica/aluminium combination that other tests had produced. Over to Hudson: ‘We worked in the chemistry laboratory all the rest of that day and we were able to remove all the silica, all the iron and all the aluminum. We still had 98% of the sample and that was pure nothing.’

Having already spent $22,000 and under pressure to put another $35,000 into researching this material, Hudson was still no further in understanding what the material actually was. He just knew that it was something. Confounded, disillusioned and poorer but still not thwarted in his pursuit to understand the strange, new, mysterious, powerful but enigmatic material he had discovered, David Hudson returned to Phoenix.

Although Hudson was no closer to understanding what the substance in his possession was, he had acquired considerable knowledge about how to find out. One bonus from his inconclusive adventures in laboratory land was a book published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. A gift from one of the many assay chemists Hudson had encountered, the book was called ‘The Analytical Chemistry of the Platinum Group Elements’ by Ginsberg. It became clear to him that the only way to go in his quest for knowledge was into the realm of spectrometry.

Spectroscopy is the science of light waves. The first spectroscope was invented in Germany in 1814 and used a simple prism. Spectroscopes can measure the intensity of light, its wavelength, or its polarization. These instruments are based on the principle of light diffraction. When light passes through a diffracting substance or object, such as water or a prism, the waves of light are bent, or diffracted. Some wavelengths of light are diffracted more than others, so that diffraction of light waves enables scientists to isolate different wavelengths of light, and measure their properties. Spectroscopes are used by chemists to identify the molecular or atomic structure of a substance. When matter is heated up to a particular temperature, it is said to become incandescent, which means that the matter has been heated to a point at which it is emitting heat in the form of light waves. The characteristics of the light waves that are generated can be used to identify the molecules or atoms that make up the substance, almost like a signature.

The modern science of spectrography was developed with the advent of the camera. Spectrographs are built using similar principles to spectroscopes, but the use of a camera in the device allows measurements that are more accurate. In modern spectrometry, spectrographs are the most commonly used tools, largely replacing the original spectroscope, and with advances in digital photography, modern spectrographs provide extremely accurate measurements. Astronomers often use these devices to determine the chemical makeup of celestial bodies.

Luck was on David’s Hudson side. For, asking around in the Phoenix area, he came across an eminent spectroscopist who had not only been trained in West Germany at the institute for spectroscopy but had also been the senior technician for a company building spectroscopic equipment. Here was a man who really knew spectrographs, who had blue printed them, designed them, constructed them and then taken them into the field and made them work.

According to the book published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in order to read platinum group elements it was necessary to do a 300 second burn. Traditionally (not that there was much of a tradition in this new science,) the incredible temperatures required to heat an element to incandescence were produced using carbon electrodes through which an electrical charge is passed to create an arc. This can be maintained for 15 seconds after which both the electrodes are burned out and the sample is gone.

Taking the instructions in the Russian book in train, Hudson and his spectrographer put their heads together and came up with piece of equipment that could do the job. As it is oxygen that causes the carbon electrodes to burn out within 15 seconds, Hudson reasoned that the way to go was to isolate the carbon electrodes from that most pervasive of gases.

Working from scratch, Hudson and his spectrographer designed and built an excitation chamber which could be flooded with the inert gas, argon, that would protect the electrodes from oxygen and sustain them for the three hundred seconds required to obtain the desired readings. Finding that the usual one and a half meter prism in use by most universities did not give him the spectral range he required, Hudson developed a three and a half meter instrument. With a machine 30 feet long and nine feet high, Hudson was ready to run his tests.

Fade in dramatic music.

With a particle of his unique material in place between the carbon electrodes, Hudson ran his first pass. Fifteen seconds and the reading was showing iron, silica, aluminium, traces of calcium, some sodium and occasional traces of titanium. ‘Twenty seconds, twenty five seconds, thirty seconds, thirty five seconds, forty seconds, still got nothing.’ Forty five seconds, fifty seconds, fifty five seconds, sixty seconds, sixty five seconds, still nothing. But, looking through the coloured glass viewing panel ‘sitting there on the carbon electrode is this little ball of white material. There’s still something in there.’

At seventy seconds, exactly when the Soviet Academy of Science said it would show, palladium begins to be read. And after the palladium, platinum shows up. Slowly, as the burn goes on, all six of the elements in the platinum group -- rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium, palladium and platinum -- appear in the spectrographic analysis.

Like iron, cobalt and nickel, these are elements that have an atomic weight and appear in the periodic table. They are, however, amongst the rarest and most precious elements known. Although we all know gold and platinum, the most valuable precious metal, from their use in jewellery, the other elements are less well-known. Although it is difficult to pin down an average price in a constantly changing bullion market, at the time of writing (January 2011) platinum and rhodium seemed to be selling for between $12,000 and $13,500 per troy ounce, whereas gold was selling at around $950 a troy ounce. (The troy ounce of 31.1035 grams is traditionally used in the weighing of precious metals. Troy weights are derived from the Roman monetary system. The avoirdupois ounce weighs 28.3495 grams.) It is, of course, their rarity that makes these elements so valuable. Although it is mined in the Ural Mountains and in Canada, the best known deposit of platinum ore is in South Africa where the main seam is 18 inches wide and half a mile under the ground.

The results of the first spectral run were so astounding that David Hudson spent two and a half years checking and re-checking them. By the time he had finished it was possible to do a quantitative analysis. The results were almost beyond belief -- ‘six to eight ounces per ton of palladium, 12 to 13 ounces per ton of platinum, 150 ounces per ton of osmium, 250 ounces per ton of ruthenium, 600 ounces per ton of iridium, and 800 ounces per ton of rhodium. Or a total of about 2400 ounces per ton when the best known deposit in the world is one third of one ounce per ton.’

Although Hudson and his spectrographer were bemused to find that there were such huge amounts of previously undetected extremely rare and precious elements in the source material, they had to believe two and a half years of spectral analysis. But Hudson needed some external validation of his discovery.

Stopping the burn at 69 seconds, Hudson let the machine cool down and then, using a small pocket knife, he dug a small metallic bead out of the top of one of the electrodes. He sent this small bead to Harlow Laboratories -- one of the most prestigious analytical facilities in the world -- in the UK. Once again he received a negative result -- ‘no precious element detected.’ As the bead had been taken from the carbon rod at the point in the burn when palladium concentration was at its highest, David Hudson was confused. Yet the bead had been examined by Harlow Labs using neutron activation, which analyses the nucleus itself -- the deepest form of element analysis.

The conflicting analytical results made no sense to him at all but he was merely confused, not beaten. Clearly he needed more information. His next step was to seek out a leading analytical chemist specialising in the separation and extraction of individual elements from unknown materials. Working for nothing until he was sure he could prove David Hudson wrong and tell him where his error dwelt, at which time he would write a report costing $15,000, the analytical chemist got to work.

Three years and a hell of a lot of complicated chemistry and analysis later, Hudson got his report and a bill for $130,000, which he gratefully paid. Over those three years they had seen their source material go through some incredible transformations. At the end of the day, having tested the source material in every way possible and come up with exactly the same quantities of precious elements as had the spectrographer, the analytical chemist was as confounded as Hudson. He told David Hudson that: ‘what you are working with is going to cause them to rewrite physics books, to rewrite chemistry books and come to a complete new understanding.’

Between 1983 and 1989, with a staff of three chemists and two technicians, Hudson continued to explore his obsession. Literally learning how to do qualitative and quantitative separations of all the elements in his source material, David Husdon started to recast the paradigms of science. His breakthrough occurred when he bought a high pressure liquid chromatograph. Taking this cutting-edge technology and adapting it to his own needs, he concentrated on the extraction of rhodium, one of the most distinctive elements amongst those in which he had an interest. Hudson was entering the deepest levels of science -- cluster chemistry in catalytic materials.

More than ever convinced that he was onto something unique and indefinable, Hudson was excited to hear that General Electric were building fuel cells using rhodium and iridium. Having run the gauntlet of GE’s patent lawyers, for the first time David Hudson’s discovery was being taken seriously. Through their own sometimes explosive experiments with rhodium, GE had discovered that it became a transformative material that did not analyse as well as it once had. Therefore, when Hudson told them that he had a material that didn’t analyse at all but still contained rhodium they could understand how such a phenomenon was possible.

General Electric were interested. They charged David Hudson with producing a quantity of rhodium for them to test in their fuel cells. If it worked, they said, it could only be rhodium or an unknown rhodium alternative.

It took Hudson’s team six months to refine the amount of material required to the level of purity desired. By the time he was ready, GE had sold on their fuel cell technology but Hudson was still in touch with the former head of the Division, who had set up his own fuel cell company. With the offer of free testing no longer available, Hudson contracted with this company to build fuel cells on his own behalf. When these were ready Hudson’s rhodium was sent to them. Analysed on receipt, it did not show any rhodium content whatsoever, yet when it was mounted on carbon in the fuel cells it ran under test for several weeks doing what only rhodium had been found to do.

Clearly a startling and revolutionary discovery, David Hudson was advised to patent his process and the materials it produced. In March 1988 he filed US and worldwide patents covering Orbitally Rearranged Monatomic Elements.

As he worked with the source material and its constituents, using larger and more elaborate machines to do so, Hudson was able to reveal many unusual, verging on impossible, attributes possessed by his strange minerals. Using thermo-gravimetric analysis, he gained complete atmospheric control of the chambers in which his samples were irradiated. This produced some unexpected changes in the weight of the sample. When oxidized, the sample’s weight increased by 2%, when hydro-reduced -- cooled -- it weighed 3% more and when annealed, which turns the material into a white substance, it weighed only 56% of the original weight. This dramatic change in weight without removing any of the material is a scientific impossibility. But there was more. Heating the material to a point where it fused into a black glass-like substance brought it back to the original weight. Another scientific impossibility. Working with a variety of inert gases surrounding sample while he heated, cooled, reheated and cooled his material many times, Hudson found that in a cooled state his material would weigh 300 to 400% of its original weight whilst in a heated state it would actually weigh less than nothing.

Not only did the material weigh less than nothing but the pan that contained it was also without weight.

These effects were so beyond current scientific understanding that, at first, David Hudson assumed his machine was not working correctly. In reporting his results to the machine’s manufacturers, he said: ‘Every time we use the machine it works fine unless we make the pure mono-atomic material and when we do it turns snow white and doesn’t work correctly any more.’ The only response from the machine manufacturers was that the cooled material was superconducting. As for the heated material, they had no idea.

Superconductivity is a relatively new development in science that has opened up whole new fields of discovery. Superconductors are a macroscopic quantum phenomenon in which materials have no resistance to the flow of electricity. Once set in motion an electrical current will flow forever in a closed loop of superconducting material. Superconductors have many applications with new ones constantly being discovered. Medical imagining, particularly MRI scans, rely on superconductivity. Superconductors can also produce magnetic-levitation, as used in the Maglev bullet train in Japan. One of the most exciting and cutting-edge applications for superconductors is in the super-collider projects at Fermilab, in the USA, and CERN, in Switzerland. These apply superconductivity to create massive magnetic fields that drive protons on a collision course that reveals the sub-atomic particles they contain.

IAnd, so, we enter the field of quantum physics where nothing is as it seems and reality is a concept lost in the infinite emptiness of space.