281–290 of 310 posts
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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.
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
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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.
The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.
And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.
It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?
So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.
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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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I don't think "the findings" are the only thing that comes out of CERN. In the end we are communicating (and doing many other things) over something that originated as a CERN innovation ( https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web ). Not to mention the indirect benefits such as education and networking of the scientists (which, if you talk with people there, seem to be an integral part of the mission even if maybe…
Don't get me wrong: CERN is fantastic, the summer student program is (or at least was) a revelation. The place, the people, everything. But it costs a disproportionate amount of money for what it brings to humanity. Budgets in science are tight and CERN is a real blackhole
The 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
The 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.
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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.
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…
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Atoms are large enough to have noticeable Brownian motion visible with an optical microscope. They're small but not impossibly so.
mmmm, not exactly. you cannot see atomic brownian motion with an optical microscope, what you can see is visible brownian motion of otherwise visible particles caused by their collisions with molecules/atoms. this says as much about the momentum/energy of the collisions as it does about the mass (which bears some relationship to the size which bears direct relation to optical visibility)