The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost.
The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run.
Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means.
CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense electromagnetic field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold.
Reminds me of a professor I had in undergrad, who liked to go on tangents. One day he says: “oh, someone remind me to tell the story of how I made gold in a particular accelerator.”
So one day someone asks him, and he starts the story: “well, first you start with platinum…”
Everyone rolled their eyes as platinum cost 3x more…
