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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

#201

Post by mariusor »

cgriswald wrote: post #52
marcodiego wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine who was into alchemy, told me it was because the difference was only three protons. I don't if early alchemists knew that or why not consider metals that are less than three protons different from gold.

Those would iridium, platinum, mercury, and thalium. For varying definitions of "early", these alchemists only knew about mercury and maybe platinum (there was platinum in Egyptian gold, but it isn't clear they knew it was in there or thought of it as anything more than an impurity). Mercury they did try to turn to gold. They thought of it as an ur-metal from which all other metals came. But as the sibling poster sta…

I think that Gold/Platinum alloy is one of the plot points of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it's in relation to Newton's alchemical experiments.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #151
xanderlewis wrote: post #121

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by serf »

greenavocado wrote: post #189
bhaney wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 2.44*10^11 grams of gold in circulation. Let's say the LHC would need to produce 10% of that per year to "flood the market." With the current production rate of 10^-11 grams per year, we'd need 2.44*10^21 (2.44 sextillion) LHCs operating simultaneously to flood the gold market. A single LHC weighs 3.6*10^9 grams, so 2.44 sextillion of them would weigh 8.8*10^31 grams, which is about 50 times the mass…

With this process we could produce about 65.4g of gold with the energy needed to boil the entire ocean once to full vaporization. The Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.4 x 10^21 kilograms of water, which equals 1.4 x 10^24 grams. The average ocean temperature is about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and we need to heat it to the boiling point of seawater at approximately 100 degrees Celsius, for a temperature difference of…

as I have thought with the other numerous "boiled earth" comparisons i've read in the past few weeks : who cares? In what case is this a useful way to describe something to anyone? since when does a laymen comprehend the size of the earth in any meaningful way?

aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.

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

#204

Post by greenavocado »

serf wrote: post #203
greenavocado wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this process we could produce about 65.4g of gold with the energy needed to boil the entire ocean once to full vaporization. The Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.4 x 10^21 kilograms of water, which equals 1.4 x 10^24 grams. The average ocean temperature is about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and we need to heat it to the boiling point of seawater at approximately 100 degrees Celsius, for a temperature difference of…

as I have thought with the other numerous "boiled earth" comparisons i've read in the past few weeks : who cares? In what case is this a useful way to describe something to anyone? since when does a laymen comprehend the size of the earth in any meaningful way? aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.

I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x 10^27 joules is too abstract.

It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances.

Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provides some more tangible if absurd perspective.

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

#205

Post by vlovich123 »

malfist wrote: post #187
jajko wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I don't get - solar system is say 5 billions years old (a bit less I know). Universe is roughly 13 billions, and our Milky way almost the same. What this means is that there must have been quite a few collisions of such before solar system formed, to produce so much of heavy stuff we see in our planet, no? Stars can produce only up to Fe in normal way. Yet it seems such collisions are very rare, and…

Stars produce beyond Fe during supernova. The other thing to keep in mind is that the early universe was filled with giant stars, these stars don't last very long. Ironically, the more fuel you have, the quicker you burn through it for stars, so a lot of supernova have happened before our solar system formed. For additional reading, google "Stellar Population" it's about the amount of metalicity in a star based on ho…

There's also a lot of open questions about how stars and galaxies form and our current models are known to be extremely incomplete based on the JWST data and our knowledge of the upper bound of how old the universe is from repeated measurements of the CMB & other data. So there's definitely a lot unknown about the state of stars in the early universe and how everyday elements we know & love actually came to be in the quantities they did.

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

#206

Post by mannykannot »

jajko wrote: post #185
HappySweeney wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is something I don't get - solar system is say 5 billions years old (a bit less I know). Universe is roughly 13 billions, and our Milky way almost the same. What this means is that there must have been quite a few collisions of such before solar system formed, to produce so much of heavy stuff we see in our planet, no? Stars can produce only up to Fe in normal way. Yet it seems such collisions are very rare, and…

In what appears to be a fairly recent discovery, it seems that flares on magnetars can produce gold and other heavy elements, and these are likely more frequent than neutron star collisions.

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnet...

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

#207

Post by yibg »

HappySweeney wrote: post #172
pier25 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't the s process produce gold too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process

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

#208

Post by jamesjyu »

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?

There is a great classic sci-fi book that explores this: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Cloud-Fred-Hoyle/dp/0140014667

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

#209

Post by c22 »

linotype wrote: post #21
yieldcrv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we just need a bigger transmutation circle bro, trust me, just one more transmutation circle, and we’ll finally turn organic material into gold, bro, just around the whole city bro, one more time

OK Elon. Edit: this was a joke, in case it wasn’t clear.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that most of your downvotes are from people who didn't find your joke funny, not from people who believe you sincerely but incorrectly identified the parent poster.

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

#210

Post by lubujackson »

leshenka wrote: post #145
725686 wrote: post #6

So, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle collider. They were way ahead of their time.

who knew the philosopher’s stone needs to have a ring shape and buried deep under ground

One ring to rule them all! And in the darkness - bind them!
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