Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
Quite fitting actually, alchemists scamming investors with needing a "starting" amount to get their reaction going
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..
The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.
(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)
Comparing a slight tweak to the mix ratio of 304L stainless steel alloy to transmuting elements is a stretch...
This has happened before. Aliminium used to be very scarce, and hence expensive. More expensive than silver. The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
A new process was invented to extract aluminum. So scarcity disappeared and value is negligible. Today we use it for packaging soda.
Turning anything (cheap) into gold means gold is cheap. It doesn't make us all rich.
The problem in that context is test it would have been impossible to keep the process a secret. To be useful (to say the king) it would have to be more than one guy in a castle. And between spies, and traitors who could be materially incentivised), and outright kidnapping and torture, well, I just don't see it staying hidden.
And its not like a King could really even hide the fact that he had a "gold mine" producing endless quantities of gold.
It's kinda like the story of the goose laying the golden eggs. The story fails to elaborate on what they did with the eggs. Presumably they sold them, but to whom? And did that person not get curious as to the source of the gold? And what did he do with all that gold? He'd need to sell enough of it to pay the peasant. Did his customer not notice the increase in volume?
So no, alchemy wouldn't have remained a secret for long. And the king would just be financing wars to protect it.
Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.
Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).
It just doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but I wonder why nobody made fusion art yet.
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?
It's not only a measurement problem. Rather, the laws of physics, as we currently understand them, lead to this singularity. Sure, many physicists may doubt the existence of the singularity. They will need new physics, not only better equipment, to challenge it.
τ = (2√2)·R/3c
So "fraction of a second" is only true if you're talking about relatively small black holes. For a supermassive one, it can take hours or even days for the largest ones.
But note again that this assumes no orbit, just falling straight towards it from rest. For orbiting objects it could take much longer depending on their velocity.
Also, this all is from the perspective of the observer who is undergoing the fall. From the outside, time dilation means that objects never actually cross the event horizon at all - no matter how long you wait, you'll see them as they were getting closer and closer to it, but never the actual crossing.
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
This is a common misunderstanding. Space and time don't swap roles. It's just that there's one rather popular coordinate system (Schwarzschild coordinates) whose coordinates t, x outside the horizon correspond to temporal (timelike) and spatial (spacelike) directions, respectively, and inside they correspond to spacelike and timelike directions. What we mean by "timelike" and "spacelike", however, does not change.
A single LHC weighs 3.6*10^9 grams, so 2.44 sextillion of them would weigh 8.8*10^31 grams, which is about 50 times the mass of the sun.
So in a way, all of those people who were concerned about the LHC creating a black hole would be right.
The Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.4 x 10^21 kilograms of water, which equals 1.4 x 10^24 grams. The average ocean temperature is about 3.5 degrees Celsius, and we need to heat it to the boiling point of seawater at approximately 100 degrees Celsius, for a temperature difference of 96.5 degrees Celsius. Seawater has a specific heat capacity of about 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius. To calculate the energy needed to raise the temperature, we multiply the mass by the specific heat capacity and the temperature difference: 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 3.93 joules per gram per degree Celsius x 96.5 degrees Celsius = 5.3 x 10^27 joules.
After reaching the boiling point, we need additional energy to vaporize the water. The heat of vaporization for water is approximately 2,260 joules per gram. Multiplying this by the ocean's mass gives us 1.4 x 10^24 grams x 2,260 joules per gram = 3.2 x 10^27 joules. Adding these two energy requirements together, we get 5.3 x 10^27 joules + 3.2 x 10^27 joules = 8.5 x 10^27 joules total to completely boil the ocean. Now, for the LHC gold production calculation. The LHC produces gold at a rate of 10^-11 grams per year and consumes about 1.3 x 10^15 joules of energy annually. To produce 1 gram of gold would take 10^11 years of operation, requiring 1.3 x 10^15 joules per year x 10^11 years = 1.3 x 10^26 joules of energy. Comparing this to the energy needed to boil the ocean (8.5 x 10^27 joules), we calculate 1.3 x 10^26 joules divided by 8.5 x 10^27 joules = 0.0153. This means the energy needed to produce 1 gram of gold via the LHC would boil only about 1.53% of the ocean. Conversely, the energy required to boil the entire ocean once could produce approximately 65.4 grams of gold using the LHC process.
aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.
It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances.
Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provides some more tangible if absurd perspective.
If you were to lay them end to then, then bend the them, you'd have a coil of bananas about three to four bananas (bent) in diameter.
What this means is that there must have been quite a few collisions of such before solar system formed, to produce so much of heavy stuff we see in our planet, no? Stars can produce only up to Fe in normal way. Yet it seems such collisions are very rare, and its not like during collision half of the mass converts to a golden blob (or more like atomic mist spreading away at fraction of c).
I know 8 billions of years is a long time, and gold once fused ain't breaking apart to H or He anytime soon, but still it feels like our planet should have way more basic atoms and not all of those rare fused oned. What about super/hypernovae?
The other thing to keep in mind is that the early universe was filled with giant stars, these stars don't last very long. Ironically, the more fuel you have, the quicker you burn through it for stars, so a lot of supernova have happened before our solar system formed.
For additional reading, google "Stellar Population" it's about the amount of metalicity in a star based on how many "generations" old it is
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnet...
10,000?