8 ms·
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.
by omnee 1y ago
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.
- 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
- evertedsphere 1y agoit's hn greying out the post
- baruz 1y agoHuh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least several months.
- DonHopkins 1y agoIt looks like his MIND=BLOWN, then popped and re-inflated in Theme Hospital. It just goes to show how dangerous it is to think about such big numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M
- maratc 1y agoAh, the source of "hey girls, take my number" meme.
- not_kurt_godel 1y agoSometimes 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 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.
- HPsquared 1y agoMy brain says that's only 4 times as many.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- philsnow 1y agoUnrelated, 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, the tree has to put energy and mass into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories / kcal, so that’s 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5 billion calories per year per acre. 7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of 1kW. It’s incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States alone.
- dredmorbius 1y ago1 acre is about 4,050 m^2, and incident sunlight has an average intensity of 1kW/m^2. 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.
- wnevets 1y ago> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
- lovecg 1y agoThe 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.
- echelon 1y agoSpeaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E
- jstanley 1y agoIt took me a while to understand this comment, because I imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are scaling up the individual atoms. What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth. I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller.
- tadfisher 1y agoNow consider that most of that volume is empty space. Scaling up an atom such that a nucleus is the size of the Sun, you'd end up with an electron cloud about the size of the planetary solar system.
- deepsun 1y agoBut that comment is about atoms, while ALICE is talking about nuclei, which are way smaller than atoms. Not sure what would be the analogy there.
- xanderlewis 1y ago> I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much smaller. Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?
- chrisweekly 1y agoYeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference between a million and a billion is... about a billion."
- cestith 1y agoA tenth of a percent is often a rounding error. So the difference between a million and a billion truly is about a billion. When the above isn’t enough to light a bulb, I like introduce that as analogous to pennies. 1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000 pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000 pennies is $10,000,000 Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above, point out that the relationship is the same if everything starts 100 times as large. There’s also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1 million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoRan the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
- bgirard 1y agoOnly 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.
- jaggederest 1y agoWell, 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.
- dachris 1y agoExcept 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.
- marcosdumay 1y agoYou could do that for decades already! It just doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but I wonder why nobody made fusion art yet.
- HenryBemis 1y agoI 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 previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..
- ozornin 1y agoProfitability is just a matter of time. Uber was not profitable for years, too. Just wait until the economy of scale kicks in. Alchemy is here to stay. Element conversion is only getting started!
- HPsquared 1y agoFinally a real world use for the "factory factory constructor".
- banku_brougham 1y agoDont forget network effects and bandwidth. Once there is an AI MCP the share price will blast off.
- Vox_Leone 1y ago>but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators. The ultimate philosopher's stone.
- koolba 1y agoThe medieval alchemists were correct. They just couldn’t get their furnaces hot enough!
- phkahler 1y ago>> 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. Quick, somebody call nVidia!! They already integrate accelerators into their GPUs and they have scaling better than Moore's law!!
- ugh123 1y agoIf Newton were alive today..
- timcobb 1y agoHave we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?
- hnuser123456 1y agoNo, 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 melting lead and mixing in some gold starter... first, you need to understand superconductors, supercomputers, subatomic physics..."
- dredmorbius 1y agoIrony 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.
- kijin 1y agoGravity 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.
- AngryData 1y agoStick some in a nuclear reactor and it is bound to happen. But it obviously isn't economical to sort out a few specs from the soup of other exotic and probably unstable elements.
- cma 1y agoHave we already done it before with thermonuclear weapons?
- stogot 1y agoShould have called it ALCHEMY instead of ALICE. Missed opportunity
- lurk2 1y agoIs this even news? I remember reading about this ages ago.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoI thought bonbardment like that led to made radioactive gold
- chrz 1y agoyes in this case it collides right after and becomes single protons
- sebastiennight 1y agoGiven the half-life of Gold-198 is 2.7 days, you've got an arbitrage opportunity during which running it to the closest pawn shop might be viable without losing too much of your hair.
- anigbrowl 1y agoConsidering that this was an unlooked-for byproduct, I'm sure those numbers could go way up if they opted to pursue this as a primary goal.
- rurban 1y agoYou forgot that those smaller nuclei only existed for microseconds. It doesnt scale at all, just tricks.
- dheera 1y agoI 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.
- saghm 1y agoI 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 artificial, and for non-utility purposes, it seems unfortunately very common for people to prefer "real" diamond, which fuels the inflated pricing. That's not to say I think this shouldn't be pursued, but I feel like the science and technology side might end up being the easier half of cheap gold from this becoming a reality. I sadly have more faith in humanity's ability to figure out solutions to incredibly difficult technical problems in the long run than I do in our ability to solve the social problems that would benefit almost everyone but require changing the status quo. (As an aside, I personally find the idea of lab-grown diamonds pretty cool just from a science perspective, and the fact that they're cheaper and don't have the same ethical concerns to make it unfathomable that I'd ever want to purchase a mined one, and I'm lucky that my wife felt the same way when we picked out her engagement ring, although she ended up selecting a lab-grown pink sapphire instead).
- kijin 1y agoThere 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!