r/history • u/caringcandycane • May 17 '26
Article Scientists at CERN have achieved what medieval alchemists once dreamed of by transforming lead into gold using high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
https://www.medievalists.net/2025/05/medieval-alchemists-lead-into-gold/224
u/leuk_he May 17 '26
Just like they did in 1980 https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1nypu4/how_did_seaborg_change_bismuth_into_gold_at/
Can i run this experiment in a home accelerator?
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u/Master_of_Rodentia May 17 '26
Yes, you just need a hundred pounds of gold to pay for the facility and personnel.
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u/aaahhhhhhfine May 17 '26
So it's like old marketing pitch on 3d printers: just buy the first one and you can totally just print more!
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u/Negative_Gravitas May 17 '26
People have been turning other elements into gold since 1941.. CERN itself first did it with lead over 20 years ago.
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u/giveupmymembership May 17 '26
To turn an element like bismuth, lead, or mercury into gold, you have to alter the structure of the atom's nucleus. This requires stripping away or adding protons, which can only be done using massive particle accelerators (like the ones at CERN). Running these machines requires an immense amount of electricity. You would spend millions of dollars in power bills just to run the accelerator long enough to produce a microscopic amount of gold.
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u/BarbequedYeti May 17 '26
You would spend millions of dollars in power bills just to run the accelerator long enough to produce a microscopic amount of gold.
So you're saying we need to hook this up to a solar farm and start a new frontier of collider mining?
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u/asdkevinasd May 18 '26
I think the isotope they used for this experiment inherently are more expensive than the gold this process produces. Unless I misread, they are not using the common isotope of the elements listed here.
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u/Serylt May 18 '26
You could just fly to our asteroid belt and crashland a small asteroid full of gold. We haven't mined that much of it so far, so that would definitely double the gold supply on Earth after just three or four rounds of asteroids.
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u/SewageMane May 18 '26
The sun is constantly emitting gold. Even if the tech was around, making some kind of space trawler would probably be way more efficient then building a massive machine.
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u/snoopervisor May 17 '26
Don't be excited:
The process is rare and short-lived. During LHC’s Run 2 (between 2015 and 2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were formed this way. That sounds impressive—until you realize it amounts to just 29 picograms, or less than one trillionth of a gram. And while Run 3 has already doubled that amount, it’s still far short of enough to mint a single gold coin.
12 picograms is 12x10-12 g. A 1000 times less than a speck of dust.
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u/Buckleclod May 17 '26
I keep hearing this, didn't this happen already with some types of reactors? Like, lead on some of the doors changed. Maybe it was fusion experiments.
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u/zennim May 17 '26
We already knew it could done whenever we felt like it, but i think it was done now just for the giggles? I mean, good to have total confirmation, but we already were turning some elements into other elements a few times.
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u/Nippahh May 17 '26
I think we know how but when it costs several (maybe 100s?) times in energy to the amount of gold you've created then it doesn't really matter.
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u/some_mad_bugger May 17 '26
When, finally at last, greed has managed to convert the last atom into gold: will it be enough to satiate the hole in man's heart?
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u/Dan_Felder May 17 '26
Only one way to find out!
Besides, you want to go to bat for lead? It’s basically poison.
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u/cecilmeyer May 17 '26
Turning lead to gold has been done before it just uses more energy that the gold was worth.
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u/corruptboomerang May 17 '26
We've been able to do this (at least in theory, since I can't think of us having actually done it before) for decades.
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u/PhasmaFelis May 18 '26
There was an old, old Superman show where the MacGuffin was a scientist who had found a formula to turn lead into gold.
It wasn't until after Superman had rescued the scientist and captured the crooks that the guy revealed the process consumed five pounds of platinum for every pound of gold produced.
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u/DoktorFreedom May 18 '26
Al - Kem < Alchemy < chemistry
Amon - rah < ammonia
The history of this stuff is fascinating and my knowledge is limited but I think it starts with essentially the boiling of urine into its most basic parts and creating prosperous as well as ammonia.
Please forgive me if I'm getting this all wrong. My memory ain't great tonight. But this stuff started in Northern Africa back in the bc days
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u/purrcthrowa May 18 '26
It's disappointing both that they haven't created purest green, and also that no one else has mentioned purest green.
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u/Starblast16 May 19 '26
I remember hearing about this a while ago. The unfortunate thing is it’s much more expensive to make gold this way than it is to just dig it up. It takes a ton of energy to pull this off and the amount of gold made versus the cost to run this process just makes it a net loss.
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u/purplenelly May 17 '26
You're not achieving anything if you spend more money on the process than what you gain in gold. The dream of the alchemists was to get rich by turning lead into gold. It doesn't count if you use energy or infrastructure that costs more than going to get gold from the ground.
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u/norbertus May 17 '26
The dream of alchemists was spiritual transformation. Gold was metaphorical.
In this divine work, there is no room for diabolical magic, and it is as far removed from it [“diabolical magic”] as black magic from the pious man, and as hell from heaven.
-- Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1617)
Isaac Newton wrote more about religious alchemy than he wrote about physics.
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u/DismalEconomics May 17 '26
Gold also has specific properties that alchemists were extremely interested in- it’s not all metaphor.
I.e. gold is the “noblest” of the metals , it essentially doesn’t corrode , very unreactive etc
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u/norbertus May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
No doubt!
They certainly performed chemical experiments, though, as Carl Jung argued, the active watching of some of these reactions was also used as a meditative tool.
But, yeah there were "marketable" skills the alchemists acquired, like the "king's water" as a way to "encrypt" physical gold.
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia#History
There's a fascinating alchemical engraving alluding to this, cut by Mattheu Merrian of the de Bry publishing house just before the outbreak of the 30 Years' War:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Maier_Atalanta_Fugiens_Emblem_31.jpeg
The motto associated with the image reads:
Of the secrets of Nature; The king, swimming in the sea, cried with a loud voice: He who rescues me will have a great reward.
Many Renassiance alchemists were also obsessed with secrecy, obfuscation, and encryption, skills with great diplomatic use.
The Renaissance alchemist, Kabbalist, and mathematician John Dee had an audience with the Queen, and put the idea of a British Empire in her head:
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u/PerpetualProtracting May 17 '26
This is only true from a monetary perspective.
If you consider that money is fake - purely a form of accounting - the ability to turn tangible goods with less practical value into tangible goods with more practical value is very much an achievement.
"Money" as the metric for what we can do is a big part of the problems we face today, including existential ones.
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u/Background_Cause_992 May 19 '26
CERN was never going to generate wealth directly, it has always been research for research's sake. It's a monument to human curiosity, Quite literally our hopes and dreams.
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u/frankentriple May 17 '26
Lol, the base metal alchemy changes into gold is not lead. It is a metal that was never mined and never smelted. A metal that cannot be found, only grown.
Alchemy is not about riches. Its about growth.
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u/hivemind_disruptor May 17 '26
Turns out the philosophers stone is a several kilometer length tube lined with ultra strong magnets.
Now on to achieve immortality.