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.
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.
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.
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 whole concept of "turning lead into gold" is somewhat self defeating. Because turning lead into gold doesn't make lead as valuable as gold, it makes gold as valuable as lead.
This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.
Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.
> The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.
Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).
In a way yes, but(!!) if I know the way and I turn 50gr of lead to gold per month, and I slowly do this (not convert 200 tons of lead into gold and flood the market) then I can have a rich and easy life without destabilising the price of gold. But that's just me.. Someone else may play this differently.
I presume you're referring to the concept of alchemy in the middle ages?
The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.
And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.
It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?
So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.
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.)
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."
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?
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.
> space and time swapping roles once you cross the event horizon
This is a common misunderstanding. Space and time don't swap roles. It's just that there's one rather popular coordinate system (Schwarzschild coordinates) whose coordinates t, x outside the horizon correspond to temporal (timelike) and spatial (spacelike) directions, respectively, and inside they correspond to spacelike and timelike directions. What we mean by "timelike" and "spacelike", however, does not change.
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 does not become part of the singularity once it crosses the event horizon. The event horizon is actually rather uneventful as far as any particular piece of matter crossing it goes - it only means that this matter can never leave the boundary defined by the horizon, but it doesn't change it otherwise. The singularity (if it even exists) is the thing at the center of the black hole, far below its event horizon.
Technically yes. But also, things that enter the event horizon are compelled to hit the singularity on a very tight timescale. I forget the exact fraction of a second, but even for a supermassive hole it's very small. So it's not crazy to think of stuff entering the event horizon as immediately becoming part of the singularity (if it exists, as you mentioned. My bet is that it doesn't, but as far as our current understanding goes...)
The precise formula, assuming that object was at rest at the event horizon, is:
τ = (2√2)·R/3c
So "fraction of a second" is only true if you're talking about relatively small black holes. For a supermassive one, it can take hours or even days for the largest ones.
But note again that this assumes no orbit, just falling straight towards it from rest. For orbiting objects it could take much longer depending on their velocity.
Also, this all is from the perspective of the observer who is undergoing the fall. From the outside, time dilation means that objects never actually cross the event horizon at all - no matter how long you wait, you'll see them as they were getting closer and closer to it, but never the actual crossing.
>> 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.
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.
Hard to say because if you wanted to cook it properly but still apply the energy of the vaporized oceans the size would have to be so massive that it would collapse upon itself due to its own gravity and initiate nuclear fusion
as I have thought with the other numerous "boiled earth" comparisons i've read in the past few weeks : who cares? In what case is this a useful way to describe something to anyone? since when does a laymen comprehend the size of the earth in any meaningful way?
aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
This makes more sense to me shrinking down instead of sizing up: "Hold a golf ball. Imagine you're looking at the Earth with its own golf balls. Those smaller golf balls are the same size as atoms in the original golf ball you're holding."
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.
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.
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).
Well the ratio of the strong force, vs electromagnetism and the speed of light define the size of the atom. Life requires machinery to self replicate and the distance between a DNA base pair is a sugar molecule attached in a chain so that's about as small as possible. Intelligence requires a certain amount of complexity of something like a brain, and it has to be made of cells and doubtful it could be made more than an order of magnitude smaller.
Could intelligent life exist based on some other physical phenomena than a self-replicating string of atoms? Maybe some unknown quantum phenomena inside neutron stars or something big and slow on galactic scales or something new which fills the dark matter gap...
But otherwise it's physics driving where units of "stuff" can exist, and the correct scales for long term complexity/turbulence can happen, like the thin film of goo on the outside of the frozen crust of a molten rock we are.
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.
>> 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!!
I 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.
Basically, pick something with no value as a store of value. If we want to do that, we can just stick with fiat currency in a database. No reason to pick a material.
If we want a physical store of value, I actually think something of use that can easily be subdivided and combined is ideal. It doesn't even have to be as valuable as gold is today, this makes just as much sense if gold is cheap and plentiful. The natural inflation from creating more of it even helps cut down hoarding. It just gets harder to carry around enough to buy coffee (which of course brings us back to databases).
I 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).
There 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!
Given 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.
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..."
Gravity 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.
Stick 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.
Profitability 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!
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.