In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Jokes aside, that’s actually beyond amazing for the future. They’re documenting photon to photon and photon to nucleus interaction from near-misses, that can eject a small number of neutrons and protons. And they create gold from lead on lead nucleus near misses for a split second.
Although I can already see the pop-science headlines about how they’ve discovered “Matter conversion” and they’ll be “printing gold”. And then buried at the bottom of the article there’s some line about how it would take two centuries or so to reach that point.
Jokes aside, that’s actually beyond amazing for the future. They’re documenting photon to photon and photon to nucleus interaction from near-misses, that can eject a small number of neutrons and protons. And they create gold from lead on lead nucleus near misses for a split second.
Although I can already see the pop-science headlines about how they’ve discovered “Matter conversion” and they’ll be “printing gold”. And then buried at the bottom of the article there’s some line about how it would take two centuries or so to reach that point.