ALHCemy?
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
11–20 of 310 posts
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#12Alchemists just had a skill issue.
(ETA: technically, so do the physicists if one wanted to actually get gold out of these interactions; the gold nuclei are coming out of the interactions with highly-random trajectories and just spalling into the collector or the downstream pipe, where the nuclei fall apart under the wild energies of a nearlight-velocity interaction. Can't use the gold if you can't slow it down to human-hands speed. Of course, at the energies and quantities we're talking about, it'd be cheaper to go into the asteroid belt, find a gold-heavy one, tow it to Earth, and dump it in a convenient ocean if you really want a bunch of gold).
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#13So, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle collider. They were way ahead of their time.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#14Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#15Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#16It does make you wonder whether the physicists obsession [1] of turning base metals into gold - is the real reason for the LHC :-) [1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#17Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#18Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#19It does make you wonder whether the physicists obsession [1] of turning base metals into gold - is the real reason for the LHC :-) [1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
No, this is fun. It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)