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Scientists at CERN have achieved what medieval alchemists once dreamed of by transforming lead into gold using high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
"Yes we figured out how to turn lead to gold. No we are not rich because it cost 5 billion to build the tool and a humungous energy bill and in the end you can't even visibly see the speck of gold we made."
I will pay you with lead, then you can use that FutureGold (TM) to secure a loan in order to buy compute.. I mean Aurum Inception (I call it AI) using my magic accelerator algorithm. the hardware is being built by some Cryptomining firm that pivoted to building particle accelerators. I guaranteed their debts for building the accelerator using my projected purchase of their accelerator time which in turn is funded by venture capital underpinned by your promised purchase of my AI. But don’t worry all that gold is gonna mean you can fire all of your employees and become rich af.
This idea is gonna take $150Bn of capex this year, our revenue will be like, 8% of that but I’m also worth a trillion dollars.
To turn an element like bismuth, lead, or mercury into gold, you have to alter the structure of the atom's nucleus. This requires stripping away or adding protons, which can only be done using massive particle accelerators (like the ones at CERN).
Running these machines requires an immense amount of electricity. You would spend millions of dollars in power bills just to run the accelerator long enough to produce a microscopic amount of gold.
We already knew it could done whenever we felt like it, but i think it was done now just for the giggles? I mean, good to have total confirmation, but we already were turning some elements into other elements a few times.
>The process is rare and short-lived. During LHC’s Run 2 (between 2015 and 2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were formed this way. That sounds impressive—until you realize it amounts to just 29 picograms, or less than one trillionth of a gram. And while Run 3 has already doubled that amount, it’s still far short of enough to mint a single gold coin.
12 picograms is 12x10^-12 g. A 1000 times less than a speck of dust.
You're not achieving anything if you spend more money on the process than what you gain in gold. The dream of the alchemists was to get rich by turning lead into gold. It doesn't count if you use energy or infrastructure that costs more than going to get gold from the ground.
The dream of alchemists was spiritual transformation. Gold was metaphorical.
>In this divine work, there is no room for diabolical magic, and it is as far removed from it [“diabolical magic”] as black magic from the pious man, and as hell from heaven.
-- Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1617)
Isaac Newton wrote more about religious alchemy than he wrote about physics.
They certainly performed chemical experiments, though, as Carl Jung argued, the active watching of some of these reactions was also used as a meditative tool.
But, yeah there were "marketable" skills the alchemists acquired, like the "king's water" as a way to "encrypt" physical gold.
>When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia#History
There's a fascinating alchemical engraving alluding to this, cut by Mattheu Merrian of the de Bry publishing house just before the outbreak of the 30 Years' War:
If you consider that money is fake - purely a form of accounting - the ability to turn tangible goods with less practical value into tangible goods with more practical value is very much an achievement.
"Money" as the metric for what we can do is a big part of the problems we face today, including existential ones.
> If you consider that money is fake - purely a form of accounting - the ability to turn tangible goods with less practical value into tangible goods with more practical value is very much an achievement.
Because the materials needed to build and electricity needed to power a particle accelerator can be paid for in hopes and dreams, sure.
Lol, the base metal alchemy changes into gold is not lead. It is a metal that was never mined and never smelted. A metal that cannot be found, only grown.
hivemind_disruptor | 15 hours ago
Turns out the philosophers stone is a several kilometer length tube lined with ultra strong magnets.
Now on to achieve immortality.
External_Counter378 | 14 hours ago
Magnets. It's always magnets.
Nezumiiro_77 | 14 hours ago
But how do they work?
Strawbuddy | 11 hours ago
Magnetites have different types of iron oxide in gradients and iso- and dodecahedron crystalline structure. Also, electrons wiggle
oForce21o | 7 hours ago
why do magnetic forces exist?
REXIS_AGECKO | 11 hours ago
I dunno but they don’t work in water ;)
Doomdoomkittydoom | 11 hours ago
They're made up of lots of little magnets.
Bearfan001 | 4 hours ago
Just don't get them wet.
SirGranular | 12 hours ago
And steam.... lots of things boil down to the production of steam.....
lordlestar | 12 hours ago
like a transmutation circle like in Fullmetal alchemist, curious how the villain want to do a country sized circle to gain God's power
TJtheShizz | 8 hours ago
Ok now we put a little girl and a dog in the hadron collider and...
ovrlymm | 46 minutes ago
It’s called an AI data center. They’ve been testing in miniature so far but…
ryry1237 | 2 hours ago
Imagine explaining that to old timey alchemists.
"Yes we figured out how to turn lead to gold. No we are not rich because it cost 5 billion to build the tool and a humungous energy bill and in the end you can't even visibly see the speck of gold we made."
CosmicQuantum42 | 19 minutes ago
You can change lead into gold, but it’s insanely pointlessly expensive.
(Not saying this experiment is pointless, good work and all guys, just that we’re not starting any industry like this anytime soon.)
leuk_he | 18 hours ago
Just like they did in 1980 https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nypu4/how_did_seaborg_change_bismuth_into_gold_at/
Can i run this experiment in a home accelerator?
Master_of_Rodentia | 16 hours ago
Yes, you just need a hundred pounds of gold to pay for the facility and personnel.
aaahhhhhhfine | 10 hours ago
So it's like old marketing pitch on 3d printers: just buy the first one and you can totally just print more!
Tjaeng | 7 hours ago
I will pay you with lead, then you can use that FutureGold (TM) to secure a loan in order to buy compute.. I mean Aurum Inception (I call it AI) using my magic accelerator algorithm. the hardware is being built by some Cryptomining firm that pivoted to building particle accelerators. I guaranteed their debts for building the accelerator using my projected purchase of their accelerator time which in turn is funded by venture capital underpinned by your promised purchase of my AI. But don’t worry all that gold is gonna mean you can fire all of your employees and become rich af.
This idea is gonna take $150Bn of capex this year, our revenue will be like, 8% of that but I’m also worth a trillion dollars.
Negative_Gravitas | 12 hours ago
People have been turning other elements into gold since 1941.. CERN itself first did it with lead over 20 years ago.
giveupmymembership | 9 hours ago
To turn an element like bismuth, lead, or mercury into gold, you have to alter the structure of the atom's nucleus. This requires stripping away or adding protons, which can only be done using massive particle accelerators (like the ones at CERN). Running these machines requires an immense amount of electricity. You would spend millions of dollars in power bills just to run the accelerator long enough to produce a microscopic amount of gold.
BarbequedYeti | 8 hours ago
>You would spend millions of dollars in power bills just to run the accelerator long enough to produce a microscopic amount of gold.
So you're saying we need to hook this up to a solar farm and start a new frontier of collider mining?
Buckleclod | 13 hours ago
I keep hearing this, didn't this happen already with some types of reactors? Like, lead on some of the doors changed. Maybe it was fusion experiments.
zennim | 11 hours ago
We already knew it could done whenever we felt like it, but i think it was done now just for the giggles? I mean, good to have total confirmation, but we already were turning some elements into other elements a few times.
Nippahh | 9 hours ago
I think we know how but when it costs several (maybe 100s?) times in energy to the amount of gold you've created then it doesn't really matter.
some_mad_bugger | 14 hours ago
When, finally at last, greed has managed to convert the last atom into gold: will it be enough to satiate the hole in man's heart?
Dan_Felder | 13 hours ago
Only one way to find out!
Besides, you want to go to bat for lead? It’s basically poison.
snoopervisor | 10 hours ago
Don't be excited:
>The process is rare and short-lived. During LHC’s Run 2 (between 2015 and 2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were formed this way. That sounds impressive—until you realize it amounts to just 29 picograms, or less than one trillionth of a gram. And while Run 3 has already doubled that amount, it’s still far short of enough to mint a single gold coin.
12 picograms is 12x10^-12 g. A 1000 times less than a speck of dust.
sharrrper | 9 hours ago
Worth about .00000017568 cents at today's gold prices
OGWeedKiller | 17 hours ago
Is this why my car battery cost $250 now?
Dsrtfsh | 9 hours ago
It’s still ridiculously impossible so don’t get your hopes up
cecilmeyer | 9 hours ago
Turning lead to gold has been done before it just uses more energy that the gold was worth.
corruptboomerang | 8 hours ago
We've been able to do this (at least in theory, since I can't think of us having actually done it before) for decades.
adriantullberg | 8 hours ago
Would a successful alchemist have been charged with counterfeiting?
WraithLaFrentz | 5 minutes ago
See it was totally possible and real the whole time
purplenelly | 12 hours ago
You're not achieving anything if you spend more money on the process than what you gain in gold. The dream of the alchemists was to get rich by turning lead into gold. It doesn't count if you use energy or infrastructure that costs more than going to get gold from the ground.
norbertus | 11 hours ago
The dream of alchemists was spiritual transformation. Gold was metaphorical.
>In this divine work, there is no room for diabolical magic, and it is as far removed from it [“diabolical magic”] as black magic from the pious man, and as hell from heaven.
-- Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1617)
Isaac Newton wrote more about religious alchemy than he wrote about physics.
DismalEconomics | 7 hours ago
Gold also has specific properties that alchemists were extremely interested in- it’s not all metaphor.
I.e. gold is the “noblest” of the metals , it essentially doesn’t corrode , very unreactive etc
norbertus | 4 hours ago
No doubt!
They certainly performed chemical experiments, though, as Carl Jung argued, the active watching of some of these reactions was also used as a meditative tool.
But, yeah there were "marketable" skills the alchemists acquired, like the "king's water" as a way to "encrypt" physical gold.
>When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia#History
There's a fascinating alchemical engraving alluding to this, cut by Mattheu Merrian of the de Bry publishing house just before the outbreak of the 30 Years' War:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Maier_Atalanta_Fugiens_Emblem_31.jpeg
The motto associated with the image reads:
>Of the secrets of Nature; The king, swimming in the sea, cried with a loud voice: He who rescues me will have a great reward.
Many Renassiance alchemists were also obsessed with secrecy, obfuscation, and encryption, skills with great diplomatic use.
The Renaissance alchemist, Kabbalist, and mathematician John Dee had an audience with the Queen, and put the idea of a British Empire in her head:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee
PerpetualProtracting | 11 hours ago
This is only true from a monetary perspective.
If you consider that money is fake - purely a form of accounting - the ability to turn tangible goods with less practical value into tangible goods with more practical value is very much an achievement.
"Money" as the metric for what we can do is a big part of the problems we face today, including existential ones.
vandreulv | 10 hours ago
> If you consider that money is fake - purely a form of accounting - the ability to turn tangible goods with less practical value into tangible goods with more practical value is very much an achievement.
Because the materials needed to build and electricity needed to power a particle accelerator can be paid for in hopes and dreams, sure.
frankentriple | 13 hours ago
Lol, the base metal alchemy changes into gold is not lead. It is a metal that was never mined and never smelted. A metal that cannot be found, only grown.
Alchemy is not about riches. Its about growth.