11 ms·
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
- datadrivenangel 1y agoThis 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.
- Bluestein 1y agoALHCemy?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hbarka 1y agoAlchemists are vindicated.
- DrScientist 1y agoIt does make you wonder whether the physicists obsession [1] of turning base metals into gold - is the real reason for the LHC :-) [1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
- EA-3167 1y agoThe Ars Magna abides I suppose? I really do think that alchemists would find the modern age of chemistry fascinating, if they could get over the horror of realizing that their religious theories of nature would require immense modification.
- codr7 1y agoIt's more the other way around, scientists realizing physical reality isn't.
- bee_rider 1y agoIt would sort of be funny to see the best alchemist get the explanation. “Oh dang, I was not even close.” It is somehow radically simpler in terms of fundamental underlying rules, and radically more complex in terms of… I dunno, emergent complexity or something. Edit: imagine, Alchemist, “But then we were right, it is made up of a small number of tiny discrete elements at the lowest level?!?” Modern physicist: “Oh man… ah, yeah, but here’s the thing about ‘discrete’…”
- EA-3167 1y agoHahaha! Yeah imagine trying to explain to Paracelsus that if you accelerated him enough he'd have an apparent wavelength.
- subscribed 1y agoNo, this is fun. It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)
- dylan604 1y agoSo they were just waiting for the price of gold to reach a value that made lead=>gold justifiable? I'm expecting a Discovery TV show about the new Gold Rush. Maybe Parker will go all in?
- DrScientist 1y agoMore seriously you could argue that the whole reason for the LHC is to turn matter/energy of one form into matter/energy ( stuff ) of another. Though rather than lead into gold, it's known stuff into unknown or previously unseen but predicted stuff. So it is, in fact, a giant Alchemy machine. Newton would have been proud.
- chuckadams 1y agoParticle accelerators smash together stuff we know about in order to make stuff we don't know much about so we can study it. There's an ELI5 for ya.
- orsenthil 1y ago> It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :) Really? I thought, it was one of the Newton's doom which couldn't be achieved. When did humanity know alchemy is a real science?
- DrScientist 1y agoThe knowledge about the possibility comes from nuclear physics ( not sure about dates here - 1900-1940s? ) - however there is a difference between theoretical possibility and can actually be made to happen in the lab - I think that wasn't experimentally shown until the 1970's or 1980s.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoIf you’re worried about your funding getting cut, transmuting lead into gold is one way to get around that.
- nolok 1y agoCERN's budget has not really had a budget cut or a need to justify its budget. Nor does it have extra money flowing, mind you. It's also really cheap for member states all things considered, I think as a french citizen I "pay" 5 euros per year or something like that for CERN ?
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoI’m just being glib. As an American I admire the EU’s commitment towards funding scientific endeavors. I still lament that our government abandoned the Superconducting Supercollider in the early 90’s to save money… right around the time our economy was about to boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- nolok 1y agoIf I'm being entirely fair here, we're not exactly super good at funding research compared to the growing cost of pensions and healthcare in France, but for some reason I don't know - but am very glad of - neither CERN nor ESA has even been a subject matter politically money wise, not even to defend their funding, it's just a "duh".
- mrguyorama 1y agoThe SSC was an utterly failed project, and would have had difficulty finding the things that the LHC has found, partially because it had really bad Luminosity of the beam. The program was famously badly run, with talented physicists utterly refusing to work with the administrators to keep a ballooning budget under control, and was an example of utterly failed project management. It used a magnet design that had numerous problems, including really severe project management oversights, like deciding to update the magnet design, and accidentally forgetting to update a significant portion of the magnets. Killing the SSC was the correct call. It was going to cost over $12 billion just to build. The LHC eventually cost about $5 billion, and had much more success in the world of project management. It's a lot easier to get science funding when you can demonstrate that you can manage a several billion dollar project, and don't fuck up basic things like accounting.
- dcminter 1y agohttps://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magic-shows/miscellany/alchemy-and-nobel-prizes https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magic-shows/miscellany/alch...
- qbxk 1y agoSurely it's the Anunnaki taking a hail mary approach to their colossal atmospheric gold project
- 725686 1y agoSo, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle collider. They were way ahead of their time.
- yieldcrv 1y agowe just need a bigger transmutation circle bro, trust me, just one more transmutation circle, and we’ll finally turn organic material into gold, bro, just around the whole city bro, one more time
- linotype 1y agoOK Elon. Edit: this was a joke, in case it wasn’t clear.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoI can’t quite put this into words but the idea of a transmutation circle actually being the track of a particle collider is just so funny to me.
- monster_truck 1y agoThis is the plot of countless animes. New magical dude becomes ruler of the city state, constructs 5 new buildings that end up drawing a citywide transmutation circle to harvest all of the souls/etc
- 1970-01-01 1y ago29 picograms. Just need to scale it by 1000000000000x to get a money printer.
- kube-system 1y agoA $0.000000003 saved is a $0.000000003 earned!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 1y agoIt’s not even 29 picograms. It’s zero: > Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second.
- notfed 1y agoAaaaaaaaand it's gone.
- selimthegrim 1y agoGod help us if South Park made a sequel to the bank episode based on this.
- comrade1234 1y agoSomething 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… But what stuck with me was this idea of ordering elements on demand.
- ReptileMan 1y agoIt was 500 tons. And it traded for like half a billion in the 80s dollars. Nice chunk but nothing earth shattering. And he lost all of it.
- shadowgovt 1y agoSo it turns out the Philosopher'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. Alchemists just had a skill issue. (ETA: technically, so do the physicists if one wanted to actually get gold out 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't use the gold if you can't slow it down to human-hands speed. Of course, at the energies and quantities we're talking about, it'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 really want a bunch of gold).
- nnnnico 1y agoTime to buy bitcoin?
- abramN 1y agoTrump is going to be all over this - we can turn lead into gold everyone! Our problems are solved!
- avidphantasm 1y agoHFTs gonna hook up to LHC and do femtosecond gold futures arb. plays.
- bochoh 1y agoThankfully no hydrocarbons were made otherwise Switzerland may have needed some freedom </s>
- tunnuz 1y agoHad they been more more optimistic they would have called it MIDAS.
- fecal_henge 1y agoSomeone already bagsied that acronym in particle physics.
- zingababba 1y agoNow do lead -> BTC
- jayzalowitz 1y agoTakes more power.
- sigilis 1y agoIt's probably been done. Interestingly, the procedure involves bringing a device capable of colliding larger lead particles at lower velocities in the vicinity of someone with BTC. The actual collision is superfluous, and can sometimes be counterproductive.
- fHr 1y agowhatever this guy is on, plz 1
- titaphraz 1y agoAre there economists here? If you could make (non radioactive) gold AND keep it secret, how much (oz?) could you produce a year without substantially affect gold's market value? Asking for a friend.
- dmurray 1y agoThe world gold production is about 3500 tons/year. Order of magnitude, you should be able to add about 10% to that without causing the price to move any more than its normal yearly fluctuations. [0] https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-100/gold-production-over-the-past-and-next-25-years https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-100/gold-production-...
- sailfast 1y agoI’m honestly not sure that the market is looking at supply at all at this point and is focused mainly on gold as a hedge against assets that are part of structured economies (treasuries, the dollar, etc) I would hypothesize that if you doubled the gold supply in the world you might only see a 1/3 decrease in price because of these dynamics - but I’m not an expert in that market.
- xpuente 1y agoAGI may finally arrive — the long-awaited gold transmutation dreamt of by modern "linear algebra" alchemists.
- John23832 1y agoRandom 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're two heavy soft metals?
- RajT88 1y agoMost likely. "If we could just make this shinier... we could be rich" Alchemists probably weren't thinking about the gold economy, in that if they figured out how to turn something common like lead into something more rare like gold, that gold would no longer be rare, and they wouldn't be rich for very long.
- brokencode 1y agoThe first ones to discover this would have been rich though. I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the long run.
- MatmaRex 1y agoThis very article states: > This long-standing quest, known as chrysopoeia, may have been motivated by the observation that dull grey, relatively abundant lead is of a similar density to gold, which has long been coveted for its beautiful colour and rarity.
- John23832 1y agoSo the answer is, yes, because they're two heavy soft metals.
- marcodiego 1y agoA friend of mine who was into alchemy, told me it was because the difference was only three protons. I don't if early alchemists knew that or why not consider metals that are less than three protons different from gold.
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- elashri 1y agoI 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'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)
- izzydata 1y agoIt would probably also cost more to produce gold than you get out of it so it is effectively infinite time.
- davrosthedalek 1y agoNo, negative time!
- bitmasher9 1y agoSo we don’t need to worry about diluting the gold supply from LHC, it’s the asteroid mining that’s going to do it.
- liamYC 1y agoYou’re assuming they would attempt to produce gold exactly the same way. The process would likely evolve to become better. What happens if you add a growth rate?
- riknos314 1y agoSo the secret was just making the alchemical circle with a particle collider.
- h2zizzle 1y agoSuch a huge investment. You could say that the whole endeavor cost an arm and a leg.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thenobsta 1y agoNuclear physics wants to move everything towards Iron, right? Lead to gold could 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. This is way better than alchemy. We get real gold and a black gold alternative. ;)
- omnee 1y agoThe 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.
- sebmellen 1y agoThe 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.
- Benjammer 1y agoAvogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Geee 1y agoAvogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
- dhosek 1y agoHe was obviously an alien.
- frainfreeze 1y agoAren't we all a bit weird looking? I'm more entertained that URL was already in my browser history
- _alternator_ 1y agoSorta 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.
- cschmid 1y agoWell technically, the starting points were always other elements like bismuth, and not lead. I believe the authors checked, and noted that in the paper: https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.054906 https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.0... )
- pfdietz 1y agoSpallation on a lead target will produce a wide range of elements, including gold.
- abetaha 1y agoSo those alchemists of many years ago probably had a collider as well.
- mcphage 1y agoI 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 "Yeah, if you want some Gold, they can just make it in a particle accelerator". I thought it was pretty great—an entire show about something outlandish, and then just blow the entire idea up at the very end.
- jgalt212 1y agoF fusion! Alchemy is real. We're rich!
- ck2 1y agofun-fact: kilonovas can produce "earth sized" chunks of gold https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/27/world/kilanova-gold-2016-scn-trnd/ https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/27/world/kilanova-gold-2016-scn-...
- pfdietz 1y agoThere are much easier ways to convert lead into gold. 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'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.
- agildehaus 1y agoGold-197? The article does not specify.
- Aloisius 1y agoAu-203 (it's in the article).
- moomin 1y agoOk, that’s one item on the Alchemic Programme checked off. What’s problem #2? I think it’s immortality.
- billiam 1y agoJust pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.
- Havoc 1y agoLHC self-funding secured!
- keepamovin 1y agoUsing 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.
- deadbabe 1y agoSometimes 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.
- mattheww 1y agoDid 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, like lead. None of the RHIC representatives knew what to say. I don't remember the exact numbers, but RHIC used something like < 1 milligram of gold over the lifetime of the program.
- jonny_eh 1y agoWell, if they had swithced to lead maybe they'd have generate multiple milligrams of gold by now?
- levocardia 1y agoI 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."
- eternauta3k 1y agoDoes the gold ever get recovered from the chamber wall?
- EricLeer 1y agoJeah, the lab where I worked cleaned the machine on a 1-2 month basis. All the cleaned out metals where then sold to a recycler.
- EGreg 1y ago“Detects” Probably not the amount the aLCHemists expected centuries ago… but hey. It’s something!
- tarkin2 1y agoIf this could be scaled up then I wonder what would happen to worldwide wealth. It'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.
- dclowd9901 1y agoThere's something glibly poetic about having finally found a way to convert lead into gold, but it turns out it'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.
- cookingmyserver 1y agoAs 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 engineering. We have literal alchemy, but we don't have the capability to make useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don'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't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not immediately applicable to technology. 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'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.
- glenstein 1y agoI 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.
- slicktux 1y agoIt’s pretty amazing to know that the golden necklace around my neck came from the tremendous force of a star dying!
- chuckadams 1y agoAnd for that matter, so did a lot of you.
- ziofill 1y agoMissed opportunity to name the experiment "Multinucleon Induced Dissociation in Accelerator Systems" (MIDAS)
- mattxxx 1y agoHumankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange.
- kramer2718 1y agoFinally! Isaac Newton is pleased.
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThe means have finally justified the end!
- zkmon 1y agoAt what cost?
- benlivengood 1y agoNow if they could collect antiprotons and store them that would be pretty interesting.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago[flagged]
- danielovichdk 1y agoI 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.
- dukeofdoom 1y agoSo everything is a wave, and it's the interaction with a conscious mind that somehow freezes things into reality?
- ineedasername 1y agoNext up on the Leaning Channel, Gold Rush: CERN Edition
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoI have already mentioned that, but such a grandiose waste of money is terrible. 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. 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.
- vladms 1y agoI 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 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 not explicit as it could be)
- BrandoElFollito 1y agoDon'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
- saagarjha 1y agoI think CERN would be very pleased if they formed a black hole.
- jmyeet 1y agoBelieve it or not, this sort of thing is actually relevant to far-future galactic colonization. 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. And that's where we once again return to the Dyson Swarm. 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'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's output. If you used all of the Sun's output, that would be roughly 10^26 Watts of energy, called a K2 civilization. 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.
- crypto_is_king 1y agoaLCHemy
- steamrolled 1y agoThere'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).
- eternauta3k 1y agoJust quickly sell it, lend the money with interest, and buy the gold back before it decays.
- GuB-42 1y agoNote 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.
- lloeki 1y ago> mercury-203 (also radioactive) What a horrible combination, mercury is poisonous enough by itself, it truly has no business being radioactive.
- GuB-42 1y agoAnd if that's not enough, mercury-203 decays into thallium-203 (stable) with a half-life of 46.6 days. Thallium is even more toxic than mercury. You really don't want that gold-203.
- niuzeta 1y agoSo we didn't need a philosopher's stone, after all! 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.
- leoh 1y agoCool 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