Earlier quoted context omitted.
At 10 picograms per year, that'll be a while
They just need to build a few billion LHCs to scale up production
With that kind of potential, you could get an OpenAI-sized valuation!
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
171–180 of 310 posts
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The stable isotope of gold is produced by the collision of two neutron stars, which is unlikely to happen in our stellar vicinity any time soon.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#173Finally! Isaac Newton is pleased.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wou…
Good point. Of course this presumes that we understand the physics at that scale, and that there's nothing akin to a quantum tunneled nervous system, etc.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#175The means have finally justified the end!
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#176Earlier 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…
The analog is no good because it assumes people have an intuitive understanding of the volume of the Earth, which basically 0 people do because it's stupidly absurdly counter-intuitive (like volume in general). So let's go for something way smaller. Imagine we take just one little 'cube' of Earth that's just 1 mile on each side. And let's start placing boxes in it that are 1 cubic foot in size, so about the size of a…
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Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wou…
think it's relative upward and downward in scale. an entity at universe scale might be moving similar speed to us in our 3d space
No, I assure you that the constant is not concerned with scale, we're easily able to check that. A bigger device does not make this constant larger or smaller, you may be able to get more accurate results but that scale is unaltered.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is fun. It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)
More seriously you could argue that the whole reason for the LHC is to turn matter/energy of one form into matter/energy ( stuff ) of another. Though rather than lead into gold, it's known stuff into unknown or previously unseen but predicted stuff. So it is, in fact, a giant Alchemy machine. Newton would have been proud.
Particle accelerators smash together stuff we know about in order to make stuff we don't know much about so we can study it. There's an ELI5 for ya.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wou…
It'd have to be much more distributed in its ability to react, like octopuses arms being semi autonomous. They'll continue to pass objects towards the body even after being severed. Or consider the humongous fungus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
Sure, but it's not clear in this case whether say the human species should also count as a single "organism". We don't understand very much about the octopus, which is a healthy reminder of why I shouldn't even speculate about alien life which would almost unavoidably be much stranger than an octopus - but we feel comfortable asserting that the "semi autonomous" limbs of the octopus are not distinct in the way that say, my friends Chris and Caroline are distinct people. So if this galaxy sized organism consisted of smaller units with similarly distinct properties, I think we'd say that's not a galaxy sized organism that's a culture of individuals.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#180The 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.
Is this even news? I remember reading about this ages ago.