ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
248 comments
·May 9, 2025omnee
CGMthrowaway
Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
bgirard
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.
cenamus
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
jaggederest
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.
pier25
hard to compete when stars do it for free
smcin
Tariff Alpha Centauri!
HappySweeney
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.
highwaylights
Shhh keep that to yourself. He might even fund science again!
onlyrealcuzzo
How many years of inflation til that's realistic?
10,000?
pipo234
I just saw the price for lead jump up!
HPsquared
You'd probably need to build another facility to actually extract the gold.
genghisjahn
Sounds like a factorio expansion pack.
kashif
lol, and this is deflationary for gold...
sebmellen
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.
lovecg
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.
jstanley
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.
dpkirchner
That's actually how they chose the size of a golf ball.
echelon
Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of the spectrum:
chrisweekly
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."
cestith
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.
Benjammer
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...
not_kurt_godel
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.
Geee
Avogadro was a weird looking guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
null
wnevets
> The scale here is absolutely nuts to me.
Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
Vox_Leone
>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
The medieval alchemists were correct. They just couldn’t get their furnaces hot enough!
anigbrowl
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.
phkahler
>> 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!!
rurban
You forgot that those smaller nuclei only existed for microseconds. It doesnt scale at all, just tricks.
timcobb
Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?
hnuser123456
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..."
ugh123
If Newton were alive today..
mattheww
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.
jonny_eh
Well, if they had swithced to lead maybe they'd have generate multiple milligrams of gold by now?
steamrolled
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).
elashri
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)
liamYC
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?
izzydata
It would probably also cost more to produce gold than you get out of it so it is effectively infinite time.
davrosthedalek
No, negative time!
bitmasher9
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.
cookingmyserver
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.
Legend2440
> 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.
tim333
> 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.
glenstein
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.
DrScientist
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 )
BuyMyBitcoins
If you’re worried about your funding getting cut, transmuting lead into gold is one way to get around that.
nolok
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 ?
BuyMyBitcoins
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
bhaney
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)
jonny_eh
But if you did succeed, wouldn't it instantly lose its value?
olalonde
The one trick VCs don"t want you to know...
subscribed
No, this is fun.
It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)
DrScientist
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.
chuckadams
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.
dylan604
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?
orsenthil
> 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
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.
qbxk
Surely it's the Anunnaki taking a hail mary approach to their colossal atmospheric gold project
EA-3167
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.
bee_rider
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’…”
EA-3167
Hahaha! Yeah imagine trying to explain to Paracelsus that if you accelerated him enough he'd have an apparent wavelength.
codr7
It's more the other way around, scientists realizing physical reality isn't.
dclowd9901
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.
John23832
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?
bad_haircut72
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.
55555
Today we turn carbon into diamonds by doing exactly that! Very interesting, thanks for sharing this information. I had no idea.
bad_haircut72
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 !
herodoturtle
[flagged]
rad_gruchalski
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.
Antipode
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.
bee_rider
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.
mattdeboard
You can tell the difference bc if it's lead eventually you'll die
nchallak
Lead tastes a bit sweet.
hnuser123456
So that you can see the interior of the coin and ensure it's not lead painted over with gold.
MatmaRex
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.
John23832
So the answer is, yes, because they're two heavy soft metals.
guestbest
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.
rdtsc
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.
marcodiego
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.
cgriswald
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.
mariusor
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.
jrvieira
no, alchemists didn't know about protons
SoftTalker
Yes they were closer to thinking that everything was fundamentally made from earth, wind, fire, and water.
hasmanean
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.
hinkley
Sort of like how witches weren’t maiming newts for their potions. Eye of newt is mustard seed.
andrewshadura
The proposed etymology of gibberish is interesting, but unfortunately untrue :)
hasmanean
It was declared untrue in 1818 by Johnson’s dictionary.
But that’s just 1 vote. ;)
foxyv
Lead iodide looks almost exactly like gold. It may be related to that somewhat.
725686
So, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle collider. They were way ahead of their time.
leshenka
who knew the philosopher’s stone needs to have a ring shape and buried deep under ground
lubujackson
One ring to rule them all! And in the darkness - bind them!
yieldcrv
we 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
BuyMyBitcoins
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.
monster_truck
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
comrade1234
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.
ReptileMan
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.
datadrivenangel
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.
_alternator_
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.
cschmid
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... )
pfdietz
Spallation on a lead target will produce a wide range of elements, including gold.
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.