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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

#271

Post by addaon »

HenryBemis wrote: post #225
dachris wrote: post #197

Earlier 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…

> I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously

Comparing a slight tweak to the mix ratio of 304L stainless steel alloy to transmuting elements is a stretch...

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

#272

Post by cwillu »

svachalek wrote: post #235
oblio wrote: post #218

Earlier 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.

Particles with any (rest) mass can have lots of things that happen inside.

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

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

#273

Post by kjkjadksj »

reactordev wrote: post #264
cenamus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can still recover the gold from old parts though. Quite fitting actually, alchemists scamming investors with needing a "starting" amount to get their reaction going

You mean like gas money?

Seed money

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

#274

Post by kijin »

dredmorbius wrote: post #256
hnuser123456 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Irony is that Newton was seriously pursuing alchemy. The whole gravity thing was a side quest. Turns out though that gravity was the philosopher's stone he was looking for.

Gravity is boring, at least in Newtonian physics. It involves a whole bunch of calculation but not much to experiment with IRL.

Alchemy on the other hand was the perfect hobby for any medieval or early modern nerd. Alchemists were basically trying to hack chemistry together. There was a promise of gold, sprinkled with an air of mystery, with lots of booms and bangs along the way. It must have felt like Dungeons and Dragons.

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

#275

Post by kijin »

saghm wrote: post #269
dheera wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that this can one day be scaled, even if 100 years into the future. I do not want gold to be prized as a store of value. It is too useful as a material (inert, doesn't oxidize, food safe) that it would be vastly beneficial to society if it were possible to produce in limitless quantities. Pick something that isn't useful as a material to be a store of value.

I can't help but worry that the technology wouldn't be enough to solve the way social problem of existing stakeholders not wanting to lose the value of their investments. I'm not sure exactly how comparable it is from a utility perspective, but diamond seems like there would at least some incentive to have available cheaply given how durable it is, but my understanding is that its scarcity is almost entirely artifici…

There is no scarcity of diamonds for industrial use, only for ornamental use -- and both are equally "real".

An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.

So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!

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

#276

Post by levocardia »

mattheww wrote: post #147

Did my thesis research at Brookhaven National Lab, home of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which is the predecessor of the heavy ion program at the LHC. While there, one of the more senior scientists relayed an exchange from an ongoing review of the program. At the time, RHIC was colliding gold in the heavy ion program. One of the reviewers asked if RHIC could save money by switching to a cheaper element,…

I worked at a lab for a while that had a atomic layer deposition setup for gold. I believe they charged a modest amount (a few cents? a few dollars?) per single-atom layer of gold. The device had a bell-shaped chamber that you would place your wafer into, but of course no matter how big or small the wafer was, the entire interior of the chamber got an even coating of gold. The technician who operated it had a ring he would put inside the chamber alongside his own samples, so over the course of several years he had gradually accumulated enough layers to "turn it into gold."

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

#278

Post by lloeki »

GuB-42 wrote: post #260

Note that the gold produced is gold-203, which is radioactive and decays into mercury-203 (also radioactive) in a minute. It is not the gold that we know of, which is gold-197. It 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.

> mercury-203 (also radioactive)

What a horrible combination, mercury is poisonous enough by itself, it truly has no business being radioactive.

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

#279

Post by bruce511 »

HenryBemis wrote: post #225
dachris wrote: post #197

Earlier 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…

The whole concept of "turning lead into gold" is somewhat self defeating. Because turning lead into gold doesn't make lead as valuable as gold, it makes gold as valuable as lead.

This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.

A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.

Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.

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

#280

Post by throwaway2202 »

bruce511 wrote: post #279
HenryBemis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The whole concept of "turning lead into gold" is somewhat self defeating. Because turning lead into gold doesn't make lead as valuable as gold, it makes gold as valuable as lead. This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum. A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared…

There was a point in history when science was not public. Even after it became public, moat was still a thing.
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