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.

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

Well, 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.

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.

You 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.

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 previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..

The same mechanism that lets you convert gold-197 to mercury does in fact work to convert the equivalent isotope (that is, 1u lighter than gold) of the element left of gold on the periodic table to gold.

The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.

(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)

Start with Tungsten?

Wouldn’t that be platinum?

Just saw this idea recently -- to add to your list: "Magnetars’ strong flares forge gold and other heavy elements" https://earthsky.org/space/strong-flares-magnetars-forge-hea... "After black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe. A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star collapses during a supernova explosion. Intense gravitational forces compress the core, reducing most of its elements to subatomic particles called neutrons. And magnetars are neutron stars with intense magnetic fields. On April 29, 2025, astronomers said a powerful flare unleashed by a magnetar, named SGR 1806–20, created large amounts of heavy elements including gold, strontium, uranium and platinum. They think magnetar flares could produce as much as 10% of the heavy elements in our galaxy."

Radioactive elements probably have something to say about that.

> 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.

>> it's just the best mathematical model we have for physics that are too extreme for us to measure

It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.

What happens inside a black hole is basically unknowable. We can only ponder the math which leads to ideas like space and time swapping roles once you cross the event horizon.[0] The only thing that comes out is hawking radiation, which is sort of like... half of nothing.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=KePNhUJ2reI

Kind of a one way path though - unless you count the gamma radiation and split pairs. I'm no expert either but it's pretty cool stuff.

Well, until they flood the market.

At 10 picograms per year, that'll be a while

They just need to build a few billion LHCs to scale up production

There are about 2.44*10^11 grams of gold in circulation. Let's say the LHC would need to produce 10% of that per year to "flood the market." With the current production rate of 10^-11 grams per year, we'd need 2.44*10^21 (2.44 sextillion) LHCs operating simultaneously to flood the gold market.

A single LHC weighs 3.6*10^9 grams, so 2.44 sextillion of them would weigh 8.8*10^31 grams, which is about 50 times the mass of the sun.

So in a way, all of those people who were concerned about the LHC creating a black hole would be right.

With this process we could produce about 65.4g of gold with the energy needed to boil the entire ocean once to full vaporization.

The Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.4 x 10^21 kilograms of water, which equals 1.4 x 10^24 grams. The average ocean temperature is about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and we need to heat it to the boiling point of seawater at approximately 100 degrees Celsius, for a temperature difference of 96.5 degrees Celsius. Seawater has a specific heat capacity of about 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius. To calculate the energy needed to raise the temperature, we multiply the mass by the specific heat capacity and the temperature difference: 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius x 96.5 degrees Celsius = 5.3 x 10^27 joules.

After reaching the boiling point, we need additional energy to vaporize the water. The heat of vaporization for water is approximately 2,260 joules per gram. Multiplying this by the ocean's mass gives us 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 2,260 joules per gram = 3.2 x 10^27 joules. Adding these two energy requirements together, we get 5.3 x 10^27 joules + 3.2 x 10^27 joules = 8.5 x 10^27 joules total to completely boil the ocean. Now, for the LHC gold production calculation. The LHC produces gold at a rate of 10^-11 grams per year and consumes about 1.3 x 10^15 joules of energy annually. To produce 1 gram of gold would take 10^11 years of operation, requiring 1.3 x 10^15 joules per year x 10^11 years = 1.3 x 10^26 joules of energy. Comparing this to the energy needed to boil the ocean (8.5 x 10^27 joules), we calculate 1.3 x 10^26 joules divided by 8.5 x 10^27 joules = 0.0153. This means the energy needed to produce 1 gram of gold via the LHC would boil only about 1.53% of the ocean. Conversely, the energy required to boil the entire ocean once could produce approximately 65.4 grams of gold using the LHC process.

How big of a burger could you sizzle with that energy?

I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x 10^27 joules is too abstract.

It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances.

Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provides some more tangible if absurd perspective.

And remember, 1 AU is about 997.3 billion bananas laid end to end.

How do you define the major axis of a banana?

The longest dimension.

In a straight line?

Yes, laid end to end, after they've been bent.

If you were to lay them end to then, then bend the them, you'd have a coil of bananas about three to four bananas (bent) in diameter.

Glad they didn't subscribe to "move fast, break things"..

With that kind of potential, you could get an OpenAI-sized valuation!

Wait a sec… ok I’m back. Had to go short $GLD.

hard to compete when stars do it for free

Tariff Alpha Centauri!

Gold is exempt from tariffs

Agreed, down with Alpha-Centaurian gold!

The stable isotope of gold is produced by the collision of two neutron stars, which is unlikely to happen in our stellar vicinity any time soon.

We don't have to wait for any new collisions. Plenty have already happened and left their debris on the "cosmic floor", so to speak.

Can't the s process produce gold too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process

Sure, but even that article shows that it's a small fraction.

This is something I don't get - solar system is say 5 billions years old (a bit less I know). Universe is roughly 13 billions, and our Milky way almost the same.

What this means is that there must have been quite a few collisions of such before solar system formed, to produce so much of heavy stuff we see in our planet, no? Stars can produce only up to Fe in normal way. Yet it seems such collisions are very rare, and its not like during collision half of the mass converts to a golden blob (or more like atomic mist spreading away at fraction of c).

I know 8 billions of years is a long time, and gold once fused ain't breaking apart to H or He anytime soon, but still it feels like our planet should have way more basic atoms and not all of those rare fused oned. What about super/hypernovae?

In what appears to be a fairly recent discovery, it seems that flares on magnetars can produce gold and other heavy elements, and these are likely more frequent than neutron star collisions.

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnet...

Stars produce beyond Fe during supernova.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the early universe was filled with giant stars, these stars don't last very long. Ironically, the more fuel you have, the quicker you burn through it for stars, so a lot of supernova have happened before our solar system formed.

For additional reading, google "Stellar Population" it's about the amount of metalicity in a star based on how many "generations" old it is

There's also a lot of open questions about how stars and galaxies form and our current models are known to be extremely incomplete based on the JWST data and our knowledge of the upper bound of how old the universe is from repeated measurements of the CMB & other data. So there's definitely a lot unknown about the state of stars in the early universe and how everyday elements we know & love actually came to be in the quantities they did.

Shhh keep that to yourself. He might even fund science again!

How many years of inflation til that's realistic?

10,000?

I just saw the price for lead jump up!

You'd probably need to build another facility to actually extract the gold.

Sounds like a factorio expansion pack.

lol, and this is deflationary for gold...

On the other hand, it's only doing this accidentally, right? It could probably be optimized further if the goal were just transmutation. Who knows, maybe we could get all the way down to only 10 trillion per ounce! /s

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.

It 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.

The analog is no good because it assumes people have an intuitive understanding of the volume of the Earth, which basically 0 people do because it's stupidly absurdly counter-intuitive (like volume in general). So let's go for something way smaller. Imagine we take just one little 'cube' of Earth that's just 1 mile on each side. And let's start placing boxes in it that are 1 cubic foot in size, so about the size of a micro microwave. How many of these boxes would it take to fill our little cube? The math is simple, but the answer is no less stupefying or counter-intuitive. It's more than 147 billion!!

Ok. Imagine we take those cubes that filled our 'little' cube of earth and taped them in one giant stack. That stack would not only reach to the Moon, but reach to the Moon 116 times over! In fact you'd be nearly able to reach Mars at its closest approach (34.8 million miles, vs 27.8 million miles for our box stack). And that's in 1 cubic mile of volume. The volume of Earth is about 260 billion cubic miles. To wrap up by getting back to golf balls - you can fit about 700 golf balls in 1 cubic ft.

------

Actually a somewhat macabre example came to mind. How many humans could we fit in our little cubic mile? And the answer is literally all of us, many times over in fact! And that's in just one cubic mile of the 260 billion total on Earth.

Hate me all you want for the last part of my comment, but I was trying to follow along. And then... non-metric :-[

Is this going to be on the test, Professor?

We’d fit, but it sounds uncomfortable.

> 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?

The relationship between time and distance is presumed to be a system constant, which we named c.

So, a galaxy-sized lifeform would take a very long time to experience stuff. It takes a tiny but measurable amount of time to go from your brain choosing "Press button" to your muscles all that distance away firing to cause the button press, and then for the button press to have effect - at galaxy scale these periods would be much larger than all of human recorded history.

It'd have to be much more distributed in its ability to react, like octopuses arms being semi autonomous. They'll continue to pass objects towards the body even after being severed.

Or consider the humongous fungus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae

Sure, but it's not clear in this case whether say the human species should also count as a single "organism". We don't understand very much about the octopus, which is a healthy reminder of why I shouldn't even speculate about alien life which would almost unavoidably be much stranger than an octopus - but we feel comfortable asserting that the "semi autonomous" limbs of the octopus are not distinct in the way that say, my friends Chris and Caroline are distinct people. So if this galaxy sized organism consisted of smaller units with similarly distinct properties, I think we'd say that's not a galaxy sized organism that's a culture of individuals.

Good point. Of course this presumes that we understand the physics at that scale, and that there's nothing akin to a quantum tunneled nervous system, etc.

think it's relative upward and downward in scale. an entity at universe scale might be moving similar speed to us in our 3d space

No, I assure you that the constant is not concerned with scale, we're easily able to check that. A bigger device does not make this constant larger or smaller, you may be able to get more accurate results but that scale is unaltered.

There is a great classic sci-fi book that explores this: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Cloud-Fred-Hoyle/dp/0140014667

Maybe as an eventually consistent life form using extremely slow message passing. Though gravity becomes a major factor that would limit the size unless it’s incredibly sparse.

One of my favorite episodes of Love, Death, & Robots is “Swarm”. Worth a watch.

Not so early in the universe age, but who knows what happens in 10^10^10^10 years. Also organisms consume energy, but mechanism of consumption of some ultra massive central quasars is beyond my imagination (I know Marvel has Hunger character but thats not the level of detail and logic I mean).

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)

But 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.

Now 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.

Atoms are relatively large and relatively dense in solids, atomic nuclei are small.

How do you draw a distinction? The nucleus is the part of the atom that occupies space.

The electrons are far better at occupying space. Or at least at keeping out other atoms, which is what counts.

That's actually how they chose the size of a golf ball.

Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E

Yeah. 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."

A 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.

Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms are really small...

Sometimes 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). Seems like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.

Unrelated, 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.

1 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.

My brain says that's only 4 times as many.

It takes a bit to accept your (10^0 m) place in the universe on the length scale between the Planck length (10^-35 m), the width of a proton (10^-15 m) and the diameter of the observable universe (10^27 m).

I wonder if there's any reason we're roughly in the middle.

Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png

Aren't we all a bit weird looking? I'm more entertained that URL was already in my browser history

Huh. 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.

it's hn greying out the post

Ah, the source of "hey girls, take my number" meme.

He was obviously an alien.

It 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

> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me.

Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.

>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.

The medieval alchemists were correct. They just couldn’t get their furnaces hot enough!

Considering 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.

>> 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!!

You forgot that those smaller nuclei only existed for microseconds. It doesnt scale at all, just tricks.

Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?

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 melting lead and mixing in some gold starter... first, you need to understand superconductors, supercomputers, subatomic physics..."

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.

I thought bonbardment like that led to made radioactive gold

Have we already done it before with thermonuclear weapons?

Is this even news? I remember reading about this ages ago.

Dont forget network effects and bandwidth. Once there is an AI MCP the share price will blast off.

Finally a real world use for the "factory factory constructor".

If Newton were alive today..

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.

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, 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.

Well, if they had swithced to lead maybe they'd have generate multiple milligrams of gold by now?

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'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)

It would probably also cost more to produce gold than you get out of it so it is effectively infinite time.

No, negative time!

So we don’t need to worry about diluting the gold supply from LHC, it’s the asteroid mining that’s going to do it.

You’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?

As 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.

> 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.

Strong disagree. We have only scratched the surface of material science and chemistry; we are typically working with the bulk properties of relativity simple materials.

There’s a very wide design space of metamaterials and molecular machines that we have not explored.

Material science is still largely an art consisting of educated guesses, formulation followed by exhaustive (and exhausting) testing of very tiny variations in composition and process. This is mainly because while we have good theoretical frameworks, mathematical techniques and computation capabilities that works angstrom scale downwards (kinda... I think first principles computation of properties of collections of atoms beyond a few light ones is still difficult) or milli scale upwards (think FEM and similar used in mechanical engineering), nano to micro scale where all material properties arise is basically un-computable. Not being someone gifted with intuition of advanced math & calculus that could tackle inventing such, the nature of graduate work in the field did not appeal to me personally. You can see how Semiconductor Fabs & catalyst labs for instance have nevertheless successfully used the systematic exhaustive iterative experimentation approach to deliver massive progress.

Solving for computability of the nano-to-micro scale will absolutely drive a massive transformation in the world much like the industrial and information technology revolutions. Biological revolution i believe requies basically the simila computability to manipulate proteins though there seem to be shortcuts leveraging bacteria. In recent years that I occasionally have seen papers that hint at progress on math and computability at a nano to micro scale. So I'm quite hopeful we'll have massive progress technologically

> approaching is more a limit... of resources and engineering

Pah. The singularity is scheduled for around next Tuesday and we haven't even made a Dyson sphere yet.

I 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.

It 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 )

If you’re worried about your funding getting cut, transmuting lead into gold is one way to get around that.

CERN'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 ?

I’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

If 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".

The 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.

If they can keep up this gold generation every year, you'll only need to pay 4.999999997 euros! (assuming all the proceeds specifically go towards your contribution)

But if you did succeed, wouldn't it instantly lose its value?

The one trick VCs don"t want you to know...

No, this is fun.

It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)

More 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.

Particle 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.

So 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?

> 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?

The 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.

Surely it's the Anunnaki taking a hail mary approach to their colossal atmospheric gold project

The 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.

It 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’…”

Hahaha! Yeah imagine trying to explain to Paracelsus that if you accelerated him enough he'd have an apparent wavelength.

It's more the other way around, scientists realizing physical reality isn't.

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're two heavy soft metals?

The leading theory at the time was that metals were grown in the earth, starting as base metals and transmuting over time/under certain conditions into the higher metals, eventually ending up at gold, which they thought was the end point because it never tarnished. It was actually not a terrible theory given the information they had, all metals come from the ground after all - the idea of turning lead into gold wasn't some magical thinking, they were trying to reproduce natural conditions in the lab and speed it up, just like we do today in hundreds of other ways today. If someone had succeeded it would have been like doing the double slit experiment of it's day, a complete proof that alchemical theory was right.

Today we turn carbon into diamonds by doing exactly that! Very interesting, thanks for sharing this information. I had no idea.

replyming to my own comment here but for this audience in particular, consider that given this reasonable train of thought (that alchemy was like an advanced science which, if cracked, would have this really cool financial upside of providing infinite gold) - consider how many companies must have been created, raised money to do R&D, built working prototypes, rewrote the books & sometimes even made money by accident. If you were someone balancing their portfolio in 1700s Amsterdam, from a risk management perspective you would have invested at least a little bit on AlchemyTech just incase it really doesn turn out to be a real thing. People had lifetime careers wrapped up in it !

Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you’re dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.

I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from lead? They're both soft.

I found a little discussion on the topic:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8810/is-biting-...

They found a paper which apparently (I didn’t dig into their sources) says:

> concludes that the coin biting is most probably a cliche in literature and movies.

> The manuscript points out that there are many references to coin biting form early 20th century but not from older (contemporary to the setting) sources e.g. […] They put a possible origin to the cliche to 19th century gold prospectors distinguishing pyrite from gold nuggets by biting.

So, it may have been 19’th century authors speculating about to-them long past history, based on current events.

The relative softness of different widely circulated alloys bounces around quite a bit over the ages, but the author only has to come up with something that is plausible to their audience, after all. Biting a coin is sort of trope of an expert at adventure, right? In some sense it is plausible enough that there’s some difference the property of widely circulated alloys, so whatever that difference is, the expert knows how it feels. Maybe the common fakes of the era are softer lead, maybe they are some harder silver alloy, but the expert pirate knows.

But my original write up makes fora good story ;)

Apparently alchemists thought of gold to be a noble pure metal while lead was thought to be an immature version of gold that could be purified into the noble version of gold.

Hey, I think it is plausible enough!

You can tell the difference bc if it's lead eventually you'll die

Lead tastes a bit sweet.

So that you can see the interior of the coin and ensure it's not lead painted over with gold.

This 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.

So the answer is, yes, because they're two heavy soft metals.

If one wanted to fool someone into accepting gold painted lead as genuine gold, it is easier than trying to pass off pyrite. Golds much higher melting point is a giveaway, though. I don’t think it was the idea of atomic properties that was attempted to be changed but the selection of certain properties that alchemy was attempting to transmute to lead from gold, such as melting point and color to make a cheaper gold in a lab.

Maybe because the weight was "close enough", at least closer than iron, so they figured they must be closely related. So we just need a "little bit" of work to it make shiny and beautiful and 40% heavier or so.

And I am sure they tried to change silver to gold as well. It's even closer in weight so an even a smaller changer is needed.

A 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.

Those would iridium, platinum, mercury, and thalium. For varying definitions of "early", these alchemists only knew about mercury and maybe platinum (there was platinum in Egyptian gold, but it isn't clear they knew it was in there or thought of it as anything more than an impurity). Mercury they did try to turn to gold. They thought of it as an ur-metal from which all other metals came.

But as the sibling poster states, no, they didn't know.

I think that Gold/Platinum alloy is one of the plot points of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it's in relation to Newton's alchemical experiments.

no, alchemists didn't know about protons

Yes they were closer to thinking that everything was fundamentally made from earth, wind, fire, and water.

Electrons=Water

Photons=Wind

Neutrons=Earth

Protons=Fire

Clearly gold is just lead with a little bit of extra elemental fire, I mean, look at the colors.

Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish.

So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.

Sort of like how witches weren’t maiming newts for their potions. Eye of newt is mustard seed.

Unlikely.

https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/1ge48sq/macbeths...

The proposed etymology of gibberish is interesting, but unfortunately untrue :)

It was declared untrue in 1818 by Johnson’s dictionary.

But that’s just 1 vote. ;)

Lead iodide looks almost exactly like gold. It may be related to that somewhat.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F8VYpIJjkoI

The first ones to discover this would have been rich though. I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the long run.

One has to remember that alchemy was as much a religious and spiritual pursuit as anything resembling proto-science, and understand that occultists were working from a worldview which was nominatively deterministic - meaning the names and properties of things in the natural world held inherent power and reflected a higher, divine nature ("as above, so below")

The transmutation of metals in alchemy is a metaphor for the transmutation of the soul, from its base and sinful nature ("lead") to divinity ("gold".) The means of purifying one was the means of purifying the other, and the "philosopher's stone" alchemists often sought to achieve this was credited for doing both.

Also... it was often an easy grift to get room and board (and money) from wealthy patrons.

Here is a good /r/AskHistorians thread about this[0].

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114vo4m/alch...

Thank you for this. Here's a pull quote from the linked article:

    Broadly speaking, alchemical writings are not just concerned with the 
    manipulation of physical matter; rather, alchemy can be viewed as a 
    philosophy that synthesizes chemistry and spirituality. A common overarching 
    idea is that transmuting materials is directly analogous to the purification 
    of the soul - alchemists were, in general, trying to advance *spiritual* 
    enlightenment as well as *intellectual* enlightenment. It's important to 
    understand this mindset in order to grasp what they were trying to achieve 
    with metallurgy.

There'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.

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

who knew the philosopher’s stone needs to have a ring shape and buried deep under ground

One ring to rule them all! And in the darkness - bind them!

I 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.

This 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

I actually can’t think of anything I’ve watched with that has exactly that plot, but I suspect the progenitor of that sort of Geomancy in anime is the novel series Teito Monogatari. (One or two adaptations were released in English under the name Doomed Megalopolis).

Just a tidbit.

Recurring theme in Full Metal Alchemist / Brotherhood

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that most of your downvotes are from people who didn't find your joke funny, not from people who believe you sincerely but incorrectly identified the parent poster.

There'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).

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…

But what stuck with me was this idea of ordering elements on demand.

It 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.

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.

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.

Well 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.111.0... )

Spallation on a lead target will produce a wide range of elements, including gold.

Alchemists are vindicated.

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

29 picograms.

Just need to scale it by 1000000000000x to get a money printer.

It’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.

Aaaaaaaaand it's gone.

God help us if South Park made a sequel to the bank episode based on this.

A $0.000000003 saved is a $0.000000003 earned!

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

Such a huge investment. You could say that the whole endeavor cost an arm and a leg.

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

Someone already bagsied that acronym in particle physics.

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 not explicit as it could be)

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

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.

If 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.

Humankind 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.

Nuclear 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. ;)

So 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).

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

Missed opportunity to name the experiment "Multinucleon Induced Dissociation in Accelerator Systems" (MIDAS)

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

And for that matter, so did a lot of you.

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

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 "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.

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

The means have finally justified the end!

Finally! Isaac Newton is pleased.

Gold-197? The article does not specify.

Au-203 (it's in the article).

Believe 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.

LHC self-funding secured!

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

F fusion! Alchemy is real. We're rich!

At what cost?