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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

#151

Post by tialaramex »

xanderlewis wrote: post #121
jstanley wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller. Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?

The relationship between time and distance is presumed to be a system constant, which we named c.

So, a galaxy-sized lifeform would take a very long time to experience stuff. It takes a tiny but measurable amount of time to go from your brain choosing "Press button" to your muscles all that distance away firing to cause the button press, and then for the button press to have effect - at galaxy scale these periods would be much larger than all of human recorded history.

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

#152

Post by thaumasiotes »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #137
jstanley wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you draw a distinction? The nucleus is the part of the atom that occupies space.

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

#155

Post by uxp100 »

monster_truck wrote: post #87
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t quite put this into words but the idea of a transmutation circle actually being the track of a particle collider is just so funny to me.

This is the plot of countless animes. New magical dude becomes ruler of the city state, constructs 5 new buildings that end up drawing a citywide transmutation circle to harvest all of the souls/etc

I actually can’t think of anything I’ve watched with that has exactly that plot, but I suspect the progenitor of that sort of Geomancy in anime is the novel series Teito Monogatari. (One or two adaptations were released in English under the name Doomed Megalopolis).

Just a tidbit.

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

#156

Post by dclowd9901 »

There's something glibly poetic about having finally found a way to convert lead into gold, but it turns out it's much more efficient and lucrative to build tons of graphics cards and power them and consume tons of water to create digital currencies for what is essentially numerous pyramid schemes.

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

#157

Post by shiandow »

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 large enough to have noticeable Brownian motion visible with an optical microscope.

They're small but not impossibly so.

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

#159

Post by shiandow »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #152
bitmasher9 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you draw a distinction? The nucleus is the part of the atom that occupies space.

The electrons are far better at occupying space. Or at least at keeping out other atoms, which is what counts.

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

#160

Post by bad_haircut72 »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #46
John23832 wrote: post #27

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 leading theory at the time was that metals were grown in the earth, starting as base metals and transmuting over time/under certain conditions into the higher metals, eventually ending up at gold, which they thought was the end point because it never tarnished. It was actually not a terrible theory given the information they had, all metals come from the ground after all - the idea of turning lead into gold wasn'…

replyming to my own comment here but for this audience in particular, consider that given this reasonable train of thought (that alchemy was like an advanced science which, if cracked, would have this really cool financial upside of providing infinite gold) - consider how many companies must have been created, raised money to do R&D, built working prototypes, rewrote the books & sometimes even made money by accident. If you were someone balancing their portfolio in 1700s Amsterdam, from a risk management perspective you would have invested at least a little bit on AlchemyTech just incase it really doesn turn out to be a real thing. People had lifetime careers wrapped up in it !
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