The medieval alchemists were on to something. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:
I just wanted to bring this story to everybody’s attention…not because it is weighty or scary, just because it’s interesting.
The Independent reports:
Scientists mimicking the Big Bang accidentally turn lead into gold – Physicists have made an unexpected breakthrough
The headline is actually inaccurate, the development is neither a “breakthrough” nor entirely unexpected. Scientists in America turned bismuth into gold back in the 1980s. Rumoured reports of nuclear reactors changing lead into gold go back to at least the 1970s, when Soviet scientists found some lead shielding on a nuclear reactor had turned into gold.
The science is relatively simple as nuclear physics goes, a lead atom differs from a gold atom by 3 protons. If you can remove these protons from lead, you get gold. That is apparently what happened during an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider:
While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold.
