Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number ). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
It takes a bit to accept your (10^0 m) place in the universe on the length scale between the Planck length (10^-35 m), the width of a proton (10^-15 m) and the diameter of the observable universe (10^27 m).
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
251–260 of 310 posts
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae I have no clue about this stuff, but don't black holes also change matter... somehow? I mean, with all that gravity and stuff, crazy things must happen in there, right?
As I understand contemporary physics, once matter crosses the event horizon it becomes part of the singularity. The singularity behaves as a single super-sized particle, so nothing happens inside. However I also have heard that many physicists don't believe that singularities actually exist, it's just the best mathematical model we have for physics that are too extreme for us to measure.
It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#253Earlier 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.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number ). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back and I’m surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount of time, and my mind just can’t wrap itself around the scale of agriculture. One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per year, and the orchards around here are probably around 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year. Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the parts that we eat, th…
So your avocado orchard is converting incident sunlight to food calories with an efficiency of about 0.025%.
(This ... isn't wildly inefficient for photosynthesis, though typical values range from 1--3% AFAIU, though I've not computed this on a per-acre / per-hectare basis.)
Mind too that you're getting more than just avocado meat, there are also the skins and pits as you note, as well as leaves and wood, all of which could be used as fuel should we really want to.
Ecologists look at the net total energy conversion of ecosystems, often expressed not in terms of energy but as carbon fixation --- how much CO2 is captured from the atmosphere and converted to biomass.
And that amount is ... surprisingly limited. We'll often hear that humans use only a small fraction of the sunlight incident on the Earth's surface, but once you start accounting for various factors, that becomes far less comforting than it's usually intended. Three-quarters of Earth's surface is oceans (generally unsuitable for farming), plants and the biosphere require a certain amount of that activity, etc., etc. It turns out that humans already account for about 40% of net primary productivity (plant metabolism) of the biosphere. Increasing our utilisation of that is ... not likely, likely greatly disruptive, and/or both.
Another interesting statistic: In 1900, just as the Model T Ford was being introduced, and local transport (that is, exclusive of inter-city rail and aquatic transport) was principally dependent on human feet or horse's hooves, twenty percent of the US grain crop went to animal feed. (And much of that ended up on city streets.) We had a biofuel-based economy, and it consumed much of our food supply.
(Stats are for the US but would be typical of other countries of the time.)
This isn't an argument that fossil fuels are "good", or that renewables are "bad". It does point out, however, that changing our present system is hard, and any solution will cause pain and involve compromises.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I definitely will mis-speak/mis-write, but my mathematic (also flawed) tells me that if Gold + 1 = Mercury, then Something + 1 = Gold, so we can find that "something" add 1 of the thingie, and booya!! gold!! (right?) (please read the above with silly humor) In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previ…
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?
No, but in the Medieval days, it was a common hobby to try to figure it out, called Alchemy. They figured lead and gold were otherwise so similar, why can't you just... convert it? Because it requires nuclear physics instruments, or neutron stars. Some suspected it might be complicated, maybe impossibly so. Imagine going back to the 1500s and telling one of those guys "yes, it is possible, but it's not as simple as m…
Turns out though that gravity was the philosopher's stone he was looking for.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#257The 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.
Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#258Earlier 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.
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#259Earlier 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…
Re: ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
#260It is not the first transmutation of lead into gold by far. A transmutation from lead into gold-197 as been done in 1980.
In all these cases, the gold is produced in quantities so tiny that its value as a precious metal is effectively zero.