ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

The relevant part: &quot;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).&quot;<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>One of the reviewers asked if RHIC could save money by switching to a cheaper element, like lead. None of the RHIC representatives knew what to say. I don&#x27;t remember the exact numbers, but RHIC used something like &lt; 1 milligram of gold over the lifetime of the program.

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.<p>It is not the first transmutation of lead into gold by far. A transmutation from lead into gold-197 as been done in 1980.<p>In all these cases, the gold is produced in quantities so tiny that its value as a precious metal is effectively zero.

I just did a funny exercise (details are not interesting) to estimate how long would LHC and Alice need (assuming perfect conditions and ignoring any limitations) to get enough gold to fund FCC (15B CHF assuming today&#x27;s gold price in CHF) on their own. And it would take about 185 billion years of continuous run. A reminder that the universe is about 14 billion years (ignoring the hubble tension for our purpose here)

As an aside, I&#x27;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&#x27;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 engineering.<p>We have literal alchemy, but we don&#x27;t have the capability to make useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don&#x27;t know how to, but that it is not practical. How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don&#x27;t think our rate of <i>technological</i> advancement will continue in these fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not immediately applicable to technology.<p>Where I think there is an absolute abundance of applicable and practical knowledge to be collected is in the fields of biochemistry and biology. We haven&#x27;t even scratched the surface there. We may never find a way to travel faster than light but if we can adapt our bodies to last for hundreds or thousands of years in stasis it may not matter. To me, being able to easily manipulate biology is so much more dangerous than nuclear proliferation. Anyways, not an expert of any of these fields.

It does make you wonder whether the physicists obsession [1] of turning base metals into gold - is the real reason for the LHC :-)<p>[1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )

Random question. Historically, why have Lead and Gold been so closely linked? Why did alchemist focus on turning lead into gold (and not start with iron, or a rock like quartz)? Is it just because they&#x27;re two heavy soft metals?

So, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle collider. They were way ahead of their time.

Something from l Ron Hubbard’s mission earth scifi series has stuck with me for years. Basically in preparation for an undercover mission to earth the protagonist (who’s more of an antagonist really) goes to a place in his city full of fusion plants and orders a bunch of gold to bring with him. It ends up being so much gold that it would crash the earth’s economies…<p>But what stuck with me was this idea of ordering elements on demand.

This is specifically a new way of converting lead into gold (in sub-microscopic, radioactive quantities) from the near-misses at CERN, not just direct target bombardment inside a particle accelerator.

There&#x27;s something glibly poetic about having finally found a way to convert lead into gold, but it turns out it&#x27;s much more efficient and lucrative to build tons of graphics cards and power them and consume tons of water to create digital currencies for what is essentially numerous pyramid schemes.

So it turns out the Philosopher&#x27;s Stone is real, it just involves a 10,000-ton detection apparatus, a 17-mile-diameter accelerator tube as a source of prima, and a quark-gluon plasma.<p>Alchemists just had a skill issue.<p>(ETA: technically, so do the physicists if one wanted to actually get gold <i>out</i> 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&#x27;t use the gold if you can&#x27;t slow it down to human-hands speed. Of course, at the energies and quantities we&#x27;re talking about, it&#x27;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 <i>really</i> want a bunch of gold).

Sorta buried in there, but they do note that this is not the first time the transmutation of lead to gold has been accomplished, just the first time it’s been accomplished as near misses in a particle accelerator.

There&#x27;s a lot of folks doing financial calculations in this thread, but keep in mind that this produced an unstable isotope of gold with a half-life measured in seconds. This has been done before. Even before you get to any economic calculus, you need to find a way to make that one stable isotope (out of about 40 known).

Alchemists are vindicated.

Believe it or not, this sort of thing is actually relevant to far-future galactic colonization.<p>The view we have from science fiction is largely of colonizing planets (eg Star Wars) but this makes almost no sense. Alien worlds are likely to be hostile. Just look at any rocky world in our Solar System other than Earth. Gravity wells are incredibly inconvenient. So if you have to live in a habitat anyway because of a hostile environment, you may as well live in space.<p>And that&#x27;s where we once again return to the Dyson Swarm.<p>In this future, stars become incredibly valuable and planets are little more than a source of raw material. The energy output from a star is almost incompehensibly high. It&#x27;s estimated that human civilization uses between 10^10 and 10^11 Watts of energy. Roughly 10^16 Watts of energy hit the Earth from the Sun. That would be a Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization. But the Earth only gets less than a billionth of the Sun&#x27;s output.<p>If you used all of the Sun&#x27;s output, that would be roughly 10^26 Watts of energy, called a K2 civilization.<p>We simply cannot comprehend what you could do with this much energy. One application is simply to turn that energy into heavy elements that may not otherwise be present around that star in a method that is basically a scaled up particle accelerator.

Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.

Had they been more more optimistic they would have called it MIDAS.

29 picograms.<p>Just need to scale it by 1000000000000x to get a money printer.

So the secret was just making the alchemical circle with a particle collider.

I remember there being an episode of Ancient Aliens (or some similar show) wondering whether the reason Aliens were coming to Earth was for our gold—and then at the end of the entire episode, they spoke to a scientist who said &quot;Yeah, if you want some Gold, they can just <i>make</i> it in a particle accelerator&quot;. I thought it was pretty great—an entire show about something outlandish, and then just blow the entire idea up at the very end.

There are much easier ways to convert lead into gold.<p>If neutrons could be made an order of magnitude cheaper (hello, Helion?), conversion of Hg-196 into gold by neutron capture might even be economical. The isotope would have to be separated but there&#x27;s an interesting way of doing that using magnetic separation of electronically excited atoms. The total gold production would be just a fraction of current global gold production from mines.

Missed opportunity to name the experiment &quot;Multinucleon Induced Dissociation in Accelerator Systems&quot; (MIDAS)

Using this kind of high energy light, here emitted by the near-miss collisions themselves, might be a way to reduce radioactivity in contaminated sites. The photos could knock out a few protons and neutrons transforming the Uranium or Plutonium or whatever into less radioactive nuclei.

fun-fact: kilonovas can produce &quot;earth sized&quot; chunks of gold<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;27&#x2F;world&#x2F;kilanova-gold-2016-scn-trnd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;27&#x2F;world&#x2F;kilanova-gold-2016-scn-...</a>

Nuclear physics wants to move everything towards Iron, right?<p>Lead to gold <i>could</i> be an economically viable target for a fission. Produce a little bit of energy with a final product of gold. Buy the lead, sell the electrons and gold.<p>This is way better than alchemy. We get real gold and a black gold alternative. ;)

If this could be scaled up then I wonder what would happen to worldwide wealth. It&#x27;s amusing that the biggest, I assume, store of gold, Switzerland, would have the tool to make it hypothetically worthless. The stuff of sci-fi novels.

Cool but at this point just farting around (we know we can create gold from lead with colliders and have known than for a long time); but farting around is not so bad either

So we didn&#x27;t need a philosopher&#x27;s stone, after all!<p>jokes aside, how wonderful that the stories we heard when we were growing up are happening(albeit not exactly as was told). Science is cool.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the ability to transform one element into any other element was cheap and readily available. Probably everything would be destroyed in no time.

Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy&#x27;s First Law of Equivalent Exchange.

Are there economists here?<p>If you could make (non radioactive) gold AND keep it secret, how much (oz?) could you produce a year without substantially affect gold&#x27;s market value? Asking for a friend.

So everything is a wave, and it&#x27;s the interaction with a conscious mind that somehow freezes things into reality?

It’s pretty amazing to know that the golden necklace around my neck came from the tremendous force of a star dying!

I have already mentioned that, but such a grandiose waste of money is terrible.<p>We pour billions in these accelerators without any hope of using the findings. At the same time other branches of science (even physics) are scrapping some money around.<p>CERN is a fabulous place (I did my PhD there so yes, shitting my old bed), but this is the fabulous of a First Class or private jet flight around the world without any consideration for others.

Ok, that’s one item on the Alchemic Programme checked off. What’s problem #2? I think it’s immortality.

“Detects”<p>Probably not the amount the aLCHemists expected centuries ago… but hey. It’s something!

So those alchemists of many years ago probably had a collider as well.

Next up on the Leaning Channel, Gold Rush: CERN Edition

F fusion! Alchemy is real. We&#x27;re rich!

I wouldn&#x27;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.

The means have finally justified the end!

Gold-197? The article does not specify.

Finally! Isaac Newton is pleased.

AGI may finally arrive — the long-awaited gold transmutation dreamt of by modern &quot;linear algebra&quot; alchemists.

ALHCemy?

LHC self-funding secured!

HFTs gonna hook up to LHC and do femtosecond gold futures arb. plays.

At what cost?

Trump is going to be all over this - we can turn lead into gold everyone! Our problems are solved!

Now if they could collect antiprotons and store them that would be pretty interesting.

Time to buy bitcoin?

aLCHemy

Now do lead -&gt; BTC

Thankfully no hydrocarbons were made otherwise Switzerland may have needed some freedom &lt;&#x2F;s&gt;