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ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
191–200 of 310 posts
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
Only if the LHC doesn't quire gold to operate. If you're using ICs and components that have some gold in them and they need maintenance, you consume more than you produce.
Well, except for in particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae, atoms are never created or destroyed, so if they're creating gold, it's here for good.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#193As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there, but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and…
I agree that there's an interesting question how far we can lean into this space of applying the knowledge and technology capability we have, because for however far ahead of the outer limits of our capabilities get in the outer limits of our understanding from that matter, there's a frontier of applicability that also has to advance in the wake of those. It's interesting to consider if there's any principle that articulates the relationship between that frontier and the frontier of discovery.
In some senses, I've thought we'd hit a wall in part just because of the highly visible challenges to democracy, the wall on processing power of computers, how enshittification has caught up services and taken them down from the inside, not being able to pull off things like high-speed rail, the halting progress of self-driving vehicles, or just realizing that the buildings that exist in cities are going to stay there for a long time and not be subject to any overnight cyberpunk makeover.
But I think if our era was not known for the threats to democracy, pandemics, and war, we might have otherwise have had enough breathing space to remember this historical era as one of true, truly major advances in the frontiers of science. There's plenty on that front that would have been "enough" to mark this historical era as a distinct one. CRISPR and AI, by themselves, are enough to be the signature achievements of an era. And so far as it relates back to your point, I suppose on balance I would say I feel that the advances we have made don't yet testify to an imminent slowdown in our ability to translate from a frontier of our knowledge into applicability. So I suppose I understand your idea but feel a little bit more optimistic.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#194I wouldn't buy one. But fun photo at least. Looks like something that took a long time to build but yet again showed how incapable man really is.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#195Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you’re dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.
I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from lead? They're both soft.
So that you can see the interior of the coin and ensure it's not lead painted over with gold.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if the LHC doesn't quire gold to operate. If you're using ICs and components that have some gold in them and they need maintenance, you consume more than you produce.
Well, except for in particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae, atoms are never created or destroyed, so if they're creating gold, it's here for good.
Except that everyone with a fusor can feed the gold atom a neutron which converts it to unstable Au-198 that decays to mercury. Fun times when you can (theoretically) transmute gold to mercury with stuff you can order on the internet.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#198Earlier 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?
Maybe as an eventually consistent life form using extremely slow message passing. Though gravity becomes a major factor that would limit the size unless it’s incredibly sparse.
One of my favorite episodes of Love, Death, & Robots is “Swarm”. Worth a watch.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms. 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
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.
That's actually how they chose the size of a golf ball.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#200The 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.
I thought bonbardment like that led to made radioactive gold