Comment by DrScientist
7 days ago
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
2 replies →
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.
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.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magic-shows/miscellany/alch...
Surely it's the Anunnaki taking a hail mary approach to their colossal atmospheric gold project