“The Nature of Substance” by Rudolph Hauschka, published 1950. Quite a book, worthy of several readings, and difficult to quickly summarize.
In the first few chapters, Hauschka reviews previous work on how biological systems can transmute elements, then briefly summarizes his own many experiments, spanning years. Hauschka found several notebooks from a scientists named Herzeile, from several decades earlier. Herzeile’s work was systematically scrubbed from the German chemistry literature, after a sufficient stink was raised because Herr Dr H was exploring how plants could create Calcium out of soil that contained none. Luckily, some notebooks survived in the back room of a lab, Hauschka somehow found them and continued the research.
That plants, animals, and bacteria can transmute elements has been shown dozens of times over at least two centuries. But like all things LENR, the owners of Journals, textbooks, and Science Departments all agree that the experiments show nothing.
Hauschka pulls the thread further, and over 7 years of research, also makes clear correlations between transmutation products/rates with relative positions of the Sun-Earth-Moon.
The late 1800’s and early 1900’s were a time of great inventions in the chemistry of fertilizers & medicines, all starting with petroleum. Hauschka decided to run a long series of experiments testing whether petroleum-derived molecules were in all ways equal to the same molecules derived from plants & soil. I forget the name of the compound, but there was a well-known plant food, a cyclic Carbon molecule, not too large. German chemists had recently invented a process to produce this plant-food molecule from petroleum. Batches of plants were fed the “chemically identical” molecule derived from oil, and derived from plants. The oil-derived version did not help the plants grow.
Hence the ball & stick models like H-C-C-C-NO, are incomplete, because that model says the two molecules should be identical in all ways. Yet clearly the naturally derived molecules have properties the oil-derived do not.
This led to further studies to examine what could be called the “cosmic” properties of the molecular world. Molecules are more complex that ball&stick models. It is not sufficient to know only the chemical structure.
This train of thought is then broadened to the Periodic Table. In a tour de force, Hauschka takes us through most of the periodic table using well-known properties & reactions of the elements, but in a way that explicitly broadens the view, and sees each element as connected up through the cosmos. His thinking is clearly influenced by Rudolph Steiner. That is neither a plus nor a minus to me — just stating the pedigree. By the end, the book has woven a very good sketch of a type of Science that includes so very much more. Very inspiring for people like me. Of course his acceptance of intelligence greater than mankind’s could not be tolerated, so none of his work has been furthered in academics.
I found another book by Hauschka, somewhat biographical. His life was large. His plans were large. Setting up shark skin processing plants in Australia, creating health care centers in Austria, dodging Nazi bullets. He writes about the rise of the Nazi’s as an inconvenience, whereas most people would have made entire chapters about how the brutal decay to violence interfered with one’s plans: like running Hauschka’s team out of several labs, confiscating their work, throwing them in prison. He just kept going, because he had aims, he had things to do.
First time I ever heard of this author and this book, picqued my curiosity intensely already. My go to reference in this topic is the classic and controversial work of Jean Louis Kervran, and others like Visotskii in more recent times. This sentence "also makes clear correlations between transmutation products/rates with relative positions of the Sun-Earth-Moon" struck me because, being an Agricultural Engineer and also a crop producer, formed (or deformed) in the University, I recall the stares I received when I was beginning my career and planned a crop with the seeding in a date that the workers I had to collaborate with, of Quechua ancestry, could not conceive, because it was in the wrong part of the lunar cycle from their point of view. Modern agriculture doesn't at all consider this, but for ancient cultures, the sowing of seed had to be done on full moons, or the crop would not yield the expected amount. I have come across only one professional agricultural engineer, of Colombian origin, that has published research on the topic of lunar influence on crop production and he is very convincing towards a marked influence of it. He proposes it is important for water flow in the crops, but may we have just found another key factor, it's influence in the nutrient synthesis of plants? Fascinating!!!
Makes me want to read it! I might have to search for it.