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ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

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Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#131

Post by davrosthedalek »

izzydata wrote: post #59
elashri wrote: post #33

I just did a funny exercise (details are not interesting) to estimate how long would LHC and Alice need (assuming perfect conditions and ignoring any limitations) to get enough gold to fund FCC (15B CHF assuming today's gold price in CHF) on their own. And it would take about 185 billion years of continuous run. A reminder that the universe is about 14 billion years (ignoring the hubble tension for our purpose here)

It would probably also cost more to produce gold than you get out of it so it is effectively infinite time.

No, negative time!

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#132

Post by ugh123 »

omnee wrote: post #42

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.

If Newton were alive today..

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#133

Post by [deleted] »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #93
Benjammer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#134

Post by cma »

omnee wrote: post #42

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.

Have we already done it before with thermonuclear weapons?

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#135

Post by pier25 »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #57
omnee wrote: post #42

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.

hard to compete when stars do it for free

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#136

Post by timcobb »

omnee wrote: post #42

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.

Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#137

Post by bitmasher9 »

jstanley wrote: post #111
lovecg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy I heard was that if you take a golf ball and enlarge it to the size of the Earth, the atoms in the enlarged golf ball would be about the size of the original golf ball.

It took me a while to understand this comment, because I imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are scaling up the individual atoms. What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth. I'm surprised atoms are so big, I…

Atoms are relatively large and relatively dense in solids, atomic nuclei are small.

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#138

Post by EA-3167 »

bee_rider wrote: post #79
EA-3167 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ars Magna abides I suppose? I really do think that alchemists would find the modern age of chemistry fascinating, if they could get over the horror of realizing that their religious theories of nature would require immense modification.

It would sort of be funny to see the best alchemist get the explanation. “Oh dang, I was not even close.” It is somehow radically simpler in terms of fundamental underlying rules, and radically more complex in terms of… I dunno, emergent complexity or something. Edit: imagine, Alchemist, “But then we were right, it is made up of a small number of tiny discrete elements at the lowest level?!?” Modern physicist: “Oh ma…

Hahaha! Yeah imagine trying to explain to Paracelsus that if you accelerated him enough he'd have an apparent wavelength.

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#139

Post by bitmasher9 »

elashri wrote: post #33

I just did a funny exercise (details are not interesting) to estimate how long would LHC and Alice need (assuming perfect conditions and ignoring any limitations) to get enough gold to fund FCC (15B CHF assuming today's gold price in CHF) on their own. And it would take about 185 billion years of continuous run. A reminder that the universe is about 14 billion years (ignoring the hubble tension for our purpose here)

So we don’t need to worry about diluting the gold supply from LHC, it’s the asteroid mining that’s going to do it.

Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

#140

Post by philsnow »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #93
Benjammer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back and I’m surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount of time, and my mind just can’t wrap itself around the scale of agriculture.

One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year.

Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre.

7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.

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