Comment by bgirard
7 days ago
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.
7 days ago
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.
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
You mean like gas money?
Seed money
They just need to name it AIlchemy.
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.
You could do that for decades already!
It just doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but I wonder why nobody made fusion art yet.
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..
13 replies →
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."
> particle accelerators, stars, and supernovae
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.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=KePNhUJ2reI
2 replies →
Kind of a one way path though - unless you count the gamma radiation and split pairs. I'm no expert either but it's pretty cool stuff.
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.
5 replies →
Radioactive elements probably have something to say about that.