91–100 of 310 posts
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Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
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CERN's budget has not really had a budget cut or a need to justify its budget. Nor does it have extra money flowing, mind you. It's also really cheap for member states all things considered, I think as a french citizen I "pay" 5 euros per year or something like that for CERN ?
I’m just being glib. As an American I admire the EU’s commitment towards funding scientific endeavors. I still lament that our government abandoned the Superconducting Supercollider in the early 90’s to save money… right around the time our economy was about to boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
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The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms. 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
The relevant part: "The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g)." Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
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Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you’re dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.
I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from lead? They're both soft.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8810/is-biting-...
They found a paper which apparently (I didn’t dig into their sources) says:
> concludes that the coin biting is most probably a cliche in literature and movies.
> The manuscript points out that there are many references to coin biting form early 20th century but not from older (contemporary to the setting) sources e.g. […] They put a possible origin to the cliche to 19th century gold prospectors distinguishing pyrite from gold nuggets by biting.
So, it may have been 19’th century authors speculating about to-them long past history, based on current events.
The relative softness of different widely circulated alloys bounces around quite a bit over the ages, but the author only has to come up with something that is plausible to their audience, after all. Biting a coin is sort of trope of an expert at adventure, right? In some sense it is plausible enough that there’s some difference the property of widely circulated alloys, so whatever that difference is, the expert knows how it feels. Maybe the common fakes of the era are softer lead, maybe they are some harder silver alloy, but the expert pirate knows.
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Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number ). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
Random question. Historically, why have Lead and Gold been so closely linked? Why did alchemist focus on turning lead into gold (and not start with iron, or a rock like quartz)? Is it just because they're two heavy soft metals?
Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish. So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.
Random question. Historically, why have Lead and Gold been so closely linked? Why did alchemist focus on turning lead into gold (and not start with iron, or a rock like quartz)? Is it just because they're two heavy soft metals?
The relevant part: "The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g)." Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
Profitability is just a matter of time. Uber was not profitable for years, too. Just wait until the economy of scale kicks in. Alchemy is here to stay. Element conversion is only getting started!