[HN Gopher] ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at th...
___________________________________________________________________
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
Author : miiiiiike
Score : 450 points
Date : 2025-05-09 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.home.cern)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.home.cern)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| This is specifically a new way of converting lead into gold (in
| sub-microscopic, radioactive quantities) from the near-misses at
| CERN, not just direct target bombardment inside a particle
| accelerator.
| Bluestein wrote:
| ALHCemy?
| hbarka wrote:
| Alchemists are vindicated.
| DrScientist wrote:
| 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 )
| EA-3167 wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| It's more the other way around, scientists realizing physical
| reality isn't.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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'..."
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Hahaha! Yeah imagine trying to explain to Paracelsus that
| if you accelerated him enough he'd have an apparent
| wavelength.
| subscribed wrote:
| No, this is fun.
|
| It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively
| expensive :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| DrScientist wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| orsenthil wrote:
| > 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?
| DrScientist wrote:
| 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.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| If you're worried about your funding getting cut, transmuting
| lead into gold is one way to get around that.
| nolok wrote:
| 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 ?
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| 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_Collide
| r
| nolok wrote:
| If I'm being entirely fair here, we're not exactly super
| good at funding research compared to the growing cost of
| pensions and healthcare in France, but for some reason I
| don't know - but am very glad of - neither CERN nor ESA
| has even been a subject matter politically money wise,
| not even to defend their funding, it's just a "duh".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The SSC was an utterly failed project, and would have had
| difficulty finding the things that the LHC has found,
| partially because it had really bad Luminosity of the
| beam.
|
| The program was famously badly run, with talented
| physicists _utterly refusing_ to work with the
| administrators to keep a ballooning budget under control,
| and was an example of utterly failed project management.
| It used a magnet design that had numerous problems,
| including really severe project management oversights,
| like deciding to update the magnet design, and
| accidentally forgetting to update a significant portion
| of the magnets.
|
| Killing the SSC was the correct call. It was going to
| cost over $12 billion just to build. The LHC eventually
| cost about $5 billion, and had much more success in the
| world of project management.
|
| It's a lot easier to get science funding when you can
| demonstrate that you can manage a several billion dollar
| project, and don't fuck up basic things like accounting.
| bhaney wrote:
| 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)
| olalonde wrote:
| The one trick VCs don"t want you to know...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| But if you did succeed, wouldn't it instantly lose its value?
| dcminter wrote:
| https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magic-shows/miscellany/alch...
| qbxk wrote:
| Surely it's the Anunnaki taking a hail mary approach to their
| colossal atmospheric gold project
| 725686 wrote:
| So, the only thing alchemists needed was a large particle
| collider. They were way ahead of their time.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| _we just need a bigger transmutation circle bro, trust me, just
| one more transmutation circle, and we'll finally turn organic
| material into gold, bro, just around the whole city bro, one
| more time_
| linotype wrote:
| OK Elon.
|
| Edit: this was a joke, in case it wasn't clear.
| c22 wrote:
| I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that most of your
| downvotes are from people who didn't find your joke funny,
| not from people who believe you sincerely but incorrectly
| identified the parent poster.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| I can't quite put this into words but the idea of a
| transmutation circle _actually_ being the track of a particle
| collider is just so funny to me.
| monster_truck wrote:
| This is the plot of countless animes. New magical dude
| becomes ruler of the city state, constructs 5 new buildings
| that end up drawing a citywide transmutation circle to
| harvest all of the souls/etc
| uxp100 wrote:
| I actually can't think of anything I've watched with that
| has exactly that plot, but I suspect the progenitor of
| that sort of Geomancy in anime is the novel series Teito
| Monogatari. (One or two adaptations were released in
| English under the name Doomed Megalopolis).
|
| Just a tidbit.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Recurring theme in Full Metal Alchemist / Brotherhood
| leshenka wrote:
| who knew the philosopher's stone needs to have a ring shape and
| buried deep under ground
| lubujackson wrote:
| One ring to rule them all! And in the darkness - bind them!
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 29 picograms.
|
| Just need to scale it by 1000000000000x to get a money printer.
| kube-system wrote:
| A $0.000000003 saved is a $0.000000003 earned!
| hinkley wrote:
| It's not even 29 picograms. It's zero:
|
| > Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy
| and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points
| downstream, where they immediately fragment into single
| protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just
| a tiny fraction of a second.
| notfed wrote:
| Aaaaaaaaand it's gone.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| God help us if South Park made a sequel to the bank episode
| based on this.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Something from l Ron Hubbard's mission earth scifi series has
| stuck with me for years. Basically in preparation for an
| undercover mission to earth the protagonist (who's more of an
| antagonist really) goes to a place in his city full of fusion
| plants and orders a bunch of gold to bring with him. It ends up
| being so much gold that it would crash the earth's economies...
|
| But what stuck with me was this idea of ordering elements on
| demand.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| It was 500 tons. And it traded for like half a billion in the
| 80s dollars. Nice chunk but nothing earth shattering. And he
| lost all of it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| So it turns out the Philosopher's Stone is real, it just involves
| a 10,000-ton detection apparatus, a 17-mile-diameter accelerator
| tube as a source of prima, and a quark-gluon plasma.
|
| Alchemists just had a skill issue.
|
| (ETA: technically, so do the physicists if one wanted to actually
| get gold _out_ of these interactions; the gold nuclei are coming
| out of the interactions with highly-random trajectories and just
| spalling into the collector or the downstream pipe, where the
| nuclei fall apart under the wild energies of a nearlight-velocity
| interaction. Can 't use the gold if you can't slow it down to
| human-hands speed. Of course, at the energies and quantities
| we're talking about, it'd be cheaper to go into the asteroid
| belt, find a gold-heavy one, tow it to Earth, and dump it in a
| convenient ocean if you _really_ want a bunch of gold).
| nnnnico wrote:
| Time to buy bitcoin?
| selimnairb wrote:
| HFTs gonna hook up to LHC and do femtosecond gold futures arb.
| plays.
| abramN wrote:
| Trump is going to be all over this - we can turn lead into gold
| everyone! Our problems are solved!
| bochoh wrote:
| Thankfully no hydrocarbons were made otherwise Switzerland may
| have needed some freedom </s>
| tunnuz wrote:
| Had they been more more optimistic they would have called it
| MIDAS.
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Someone already bagsied that acronym in particle physics.
| zingababba wrote:
| Now do lead -> BTC
| jayzalowitz wrote:
| Takes more power.
| sigilis wrote:
| It's probably been done.
|
| Interestingly, the procedure involves bringing a device capable
| of colliding larger lead particles at lower velocities in the
| vicinity of someone with BTC. The actual collision is
| superfluous, and can sometimes be counterproductive.
| titaphraz wrote:
| Are there economists here?
|
| If you could make (non radioactive) gold AND keep it secret, how
| much (oz?) could you produce a year without substantially affect
| gold's market value? Asking for a friend.
| dmurray wrote:
| The world gold production is about 3500 tons/year. Order of
| magnitude, you should be able to add about 10% to that without
| causing the price to move any more than its normal yearly
| fluctuations.
|
| [0] https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-100/gold-
| production-...
| sailfast wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure that the market is looking at supply at
| all at this point and is focused mainly on gold as a hedge
| against assets that are part of structured economies
| (treasuries, the dollar, etc)
|
| I would hypothesize that if you doubled the gold supply in the
| world you might only see a 1/3 decrease in price because of
| these dynamics - but I'm not an expert in that market.
| xpuente wrote:
| AGI may finally arrive -- the long-awaited gold transmutation
| dreamt of by modern "linear algebra" alchemists.
| John23832 wrote:
| Random question. Historically, why have Lead and Gold been so
| closely linked? Why did alchemist focus on turning lead into gold
| (and not start with iron, or a rock like quartz)? Is it just
| because they're two heavy soft metals?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Most likely. "If we could just make this shinier... we could be
| rich"
|
| Alchemists probably weren't thinking about the gold economy, in
| that if they figured out how to turn something common like lead
| into something more rare like gold, that gold would no longer
| be rare, and they wouldn't be rich for very long.
| brokencode wrote:
| The first ones to discover this would have been rich though.
| I doubt they cared what would happen to anybody else in the
| long run.
| MatmaRex wrote:
| This very article states:
|
| > This long-standing quest, known as chrysopoeia, may have been
| motivated by the observation that dull grey, relatively
| abundant lead is of a similar density to gold, which has long
| been coveted for its beautiful colour and rarity.
| John23832 wrote:
| So the answer is, yes, because they're two heavy soft metals.
| marcodiego wrote:
| A friend of mine who was into alchemy, told me it was because
| the difference was only three protons. I don't if early
| alchemists knew that or why not consider metals that are less
| than three protons different from gold.
| jrvieira wrote:
| no, alchemists didn't know about protons
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes they were closer to thinking that everything was
| fundamentally made from earth, wind, fire, and water.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Electrons=Water
|
| Photons=Wind
|
| Neutrons=Earth
|
| Protons=Fire
|
| Clearly gold is just lead with a little bit of extra
| elemental fire, I mean, look at the colors.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Those would iridium, platinum, mercury, and thalium. For
| varying definitions of "early", these alchemists only knew
| about mercury and _maybe_ platinum (there was platinum in
| Egyptian gold, but it isn 't clear they knew it was in there
| or thought of it as anything more than an impurity). Mercury
| they _did_ try to turn to gold. They thought of it as an ur-
| metal from which all other metals came.
|
| But as the sibling poster states, no, they didn't know.
| mariusor wrote:
| I think that Gold/Platinum alloy is one of the plot points
| of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it's in relation to
| Newton's alchemical experiments.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead
| covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move
| from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you're
| dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the
| fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.
| Antipode wrote:
| I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an
| indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from
| lead? They're both soft.
| nchallak wrote:
| Lead tastes a bit sweet.
| mattdeboard wrote:
| You can tell the difference bc if it's lead eventually
| you'll die
| bee_rider wrote:
| I found a little discussion on the topic:
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8810/is-
| biting-...
|
| They found a paper which apparently (I didn't dig into
| their sources) says:
|
| > concludes that the coin biting is most probably a cliche
| in literature and movies.
|
| > The manuscript points out that there are many references
| to coin biting form early 20th century but not from older
| (contemporary to the setting) sources e.g. [...] They put a
| possible origin to the cliche to 19th century gold
| prospectors distinguishing pyrite from gold nuggets by
| biting.
|
| So, it may have been 19'th century authors speculating
| about to-them long past history, based on current events.
|
| The relative softness of different widely circulated alloys
| bounces around quite a bit over the ages, but the author
| only has to come up with something that is plausible to
| their audience, after all. Biting a coin is sort of trope
| of an expert at adventure, right? In some sense it is
| plausible enough that there's some difference the property
| of widely circulated alloys, so whatever that difference
| is, the expert knows how it feels. Maybe the common fakes
| of the era are softer lead, maybe they are some harder
| silver alloy, but the expert pirate knows.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| But my original write up makes fora good story ;)
|
| Apparently alchemists thought of gold to be a noble pure
| metal while lead was thought to be an immature version of
| gold that could be purified into the noble version of
| gold.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Hey, I think it is plausible enough!
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| So that you can see the interior of the coin and ensure
| it's not lead painted over with gold.
| krapp wrote:
| One has to remember that alchemy was as much a religious and
| spiritual pursuit as anything resembling proto-science, and
| understand that occultists were working from a worldview which
| was nominatively deterministic - meaning the names and
| properties of things in the natural world held inherent power
| and reflected a higher, divine nature ("as above, so below")
|
| The transmutation of metals in alchemy is a metaphor for the
| transmutation of the soul, from its base and sinful nature
| ("lead") to divinity ("gold".) The means of purifying one was
| the means of purifying the other, and the "philosopher's stone"
| alchemists often sought to achieve this was credited for doing
| both.
|
| Also... it was often an easy grift to get room and board (and
| money) from wealthy patrons.
|
| Here is a good /r/AskHistorians thread about this[0].
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/114vo4m/alch...
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Thank you for this. Here's a pull quote from the linked
| article: Broadly speaking, alchemical
| writings are not just concerned with the
| manipulation of physical matter; rather, alchemy can be
| viewed as a philosophy that synthesizes chemistry
| and spirituality. A common overarching idea is that
| transmuting materials is directly analogous to the
| purification of the soul - alchemists were, in
| general, trying to advance *spiritual* enlightenment
| as well as *intellectual* enlightenment. It's important to
| understand this mindset in order to grasp what they were
| trying to achieve with metallurgy.
| guestbest wrote:
| If one wanted to fool someone into accepting gold painted lead
| as genuine gold, it is easier than trying to pass off pyrite.
| Golds much higher melting point is a giveaway, though. I don't
| think it was the idea of atomic properties that was attempted
| to be changed but the selection of certain properties that
| alchemy was attempting to transmute to lead from gold, such as
| melting point and color to make a cheaper gold in a lab.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| The leading theory at the time was that metals were grown in
| the earth, starting as base metals and transmuting over
| time/under certain conditions into the higher metals,
| eventually ending up at gold, which they thought was the end
| point because it never tarnished. It was actually not a
| terrible theory given the information they had, all metals come
| from the ground after all - the idea of turning lead into gold
| wasn't some magical thinking, they were trying to reproduce
| natural conditions in the lab and speed it up, just like we do
| today in hundreds of other ways today. If someone had succeeded
| it would have been like doing the double slit experiment of
| it's day, a complete proof that alchemical theory was right.
| 55555 wrote:
| Today we turn carbon into diamonds by doing exactly that!
| Very interesting, thanks for sharing this information. I had
| no idea.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| replyming to my own comment here but for this audience in
| particular, consider that given this reasonable train of
| thought (that alchemy was like an advanced science which, if
| cracked, would have this really cool financial upside of
| providing infinite gold) - consider how many companies must
| have been created, raised money to do R&D, built working
| prototypes, rewrote the books & sometimes even made money by
| accident. If you were someone balancing their portfolio in
| 1700s Amsterdam, from a risk management perspective you would
| have invested at least a little bit on AlchemyTech just
| incase it really doesn turn out to be a real thing. People
| had lifetime careers wrapped up in it !
| hasmanean wrote:
| Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their
| recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry
| wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him---gibberish
| or jibberish.
|
| So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their
| names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have
| never been revealed.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| The proposed etymology of gibberish is interesting, but
| unfortunately untrue :)
| hasmanean wrote:
| It was declared untrue in 1818 by Johnson's dictionary.
|
| But that's just 1 vote. ;)
| hinkley wrote:
| Sort of like how witches weren't maiming newts for their
| potions. Eye of newt is mustard seed.
| dcminter wrote:
| Unlikely.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/1ge48sq/macbeth
| s...
| rdtsc wrote:
| Maybe because the weight was "close enough", at least closer
| than iron, so they figured they must be closely related. So we
| just need a "little bit" of work to it make shiny and beautiful
| and 40% heavier or so.
|
| And I am sure they tried to change silver to gold as well. It's
| even closer in weight so an even a smaller changer is needed.
| foxyv wrote:
| Lead iodide looks almost exactly like gold. It may be related
| to that somewhat.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F8VYpIJjkoI
| elashri wrote:
| I just did a funny exercise (details are not interesting) to
| estimate how long would LHC and Alice need (assuming perfect
| conditions and ignoring any limitations) to get enough gold to
| fund FCC (15B CHF assuming today's gold price in CHF) on their
| own. And it would take about 185 billion years of continuous run.
| A reminder that the universe is about 14 billion years (ignoring
| the hubble tension for our purpose here)
| izzydata wrote:
| It would probably also cost more to produce gold than you get
| out of it so it is effectively infinite time.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| No, negative time!
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| So we don't need to worry about diluting the gold supply from
| LHC, it's the asteroid mining that's going to do it.
| liamYC wrote:
| You're assuming they would attempt to produce gold exactly the
| same way. The process would likely evolve to become better.
| What happens if you add a growth rate?
| riknos314 wrote:
| So the secret was just making the alchemical circle with a
| particle collider.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Such a huge investment. You could say that the whole endeavor
| cost an arm and a leg.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Nuclear physics wants to move everything towards Iron, right?
|
| Lead to gold _could_ be an economically viable target for a
| fission. Produce a little bit of energy with a final product of
| gold. Buy the lead, sell the electrons and gold.
|
| This is way better than alchemy. We get real gold and a black
| gold alternative. ;)
| omnee wrote:
| The relevant part: "The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2
| of the LHC (2015-2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created
| at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds
| to just 29 picograms (2.9 x10-11 g)."
|
| Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but
| transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists - is
| now just a by product of particle accelerators.
| sebmellen wrote:
| The scale here is absolutely nuts to me. 86 billion nuclei
| represent only 29 picograms. One gram is 10^12 picograms.
|
| 1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
| Benjammer wrote:
| Avogadro's number has a 10^23 in it to account for this
| atom-->physical matter sort of "scale up" conversion. Atoms
| are really small...
| Geee wrote:
| Avogadro was a weird looking guy
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amadeo_Avogadro.png
| dhosek wrote:
| He was obviously an alien.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Aren't we all a bit weird looking? I'm more entertained
| that URL was already in my browser history
| evertedsphere wrote:
| it's hn greying out the post
| baruz wrote:
| Huh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no
| recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or
| even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least
| several months.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It looks like his MIND=BLOWN, then popped and re-inflated
| in Theme Hospital. It just goes to show how dangerous it
| is to think about such big numbers.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le_znuXcP2M
| maratc wrote:
| Ah, the source of "hey girls, take my number" meme.
| not_kurt_godel wrote:
| Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around
| reconciling that with the estimated number of protons in
| the observable universe which is "only" ~10^80
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number). Seems
| like it "should" be much higher, but orders of magnitude
| are sometimes deceptive to our intuition.
| HPsquared wrote:
| My brain says that's only 4 times as many.
| philsnow wrote:
| Unrelated, but I moved to a more rural area a while back
| and I'm surrounded by orchards and fields a fair amount
| of time, and my mind just can't wrap itself around the
| scale of agriculture.
|
| One avocado tree can produce around 200 avocados per
| year, and the orchards around here are probably around
| 150 trees/acre, so 30k avocados/acre/year.
|
| Each avocado has about 250 calories (and that is just the
| parts that we eat, the tree has to put energy and mass
| into the pit and skin etc). These are food calories /
| kcal, so that's 250k calories per avocado, or ~7.5
| billion calories per year per acre.
|
| 7.5B calories/year is just about exactly 1kW, so that
| orchard is converting sunlight (and water, air, and trace
| minerals) to avocado calories at a continuous rate of
| 1kW. It's incredible. The USDA says that as of 2022 there
| were about 880M acres of farmland in the United States
| alone.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It takes a bit to accept your (10^0 m) place in the
| universe on the length scale between the Planck length
| (10^-35 m), the width of a proton (10^-15 m) and the
| diameter of the observable universe (10^27 m).
| wnevets wrote:
| > The scale here is absolutely nuts to me.
|
| Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
| lovecg wrote:
| The analogy I heard was that if you take a golf ball and
| enlarge it to the size of the Earth, the atoms in the
| enlarged golf ball would be about the size of the original
| golf ball.
| echelon wrote:
| Speaking of scale, this is a fun video at the other end of
| the spectrum:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J_Ugp8ZB4E
| jstanley wrote:
| It took me a while to understand this comment, because I
| imagined that scaling up a golf ball would involve creating
| new atoms, but what you said only makes sense if you are
| scaling up the individual atoms.
|
| What you're saying is that the ratio of the size of an atom
| to the size of a golf ball is approximately the same as the
| ratio of the size of a golf ball to the size of the earth.
|
| I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed much
| smaller.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Now consider that most of that volume is empty space.
| Scaling up an atom such that a nucleus is the size of the
| Sun, you'd end up with an electron cloud about the size
| of the planetary solar system.
| deepsun wrote:
| But that comment is about atoms, while ALICE is talking
| about nuclei, which are way smaller than atoms. Not sure
| what would be the analogy there.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > I'm surprised atoms are so big, I would have guessed
| much smaller.
|
| Me too. Perhaps what we should realise is not how big
| atoms are, but how small we are. I wonder if life can be
| sustained at larger scales. Could we have galaxy-sized
| lifeforms that make us look like bacteria?
| tialaramex wrote:
| The relationship between time and distance is presumed to
| be a system constant, which we named c.
|
| So, a galaxy-sized lifeform would take a _very_ long time
| to experience stuff. It takes a tiny but measurable
| amount of time to go from your brain choosing "Press
| button" to your muscles all that distance away firing to
| cause the button press, and then for the button press to
| have effect - at galaxy scale these periods would be much
| larger than all of human recorded history.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| It'd have to be much more distributed in its ability to
| react, like octopuses arms being semi autonomous. They'll
| continue to pass objects towards the body even after
| being severed.
|
| Or consider the humongous fungus:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
| tialaramex wrote:
| Sure, but it's not clear in this case whether say the
| human species should also count as a single "organism".
| We don't understand very much about the octopus, which is
| a healthy reminder of why I shouldn't even speculate
| about alien life which would almost unavoidably be much
| stranger than an octopus - but we feel comfortable
| asserting that the "semi autonomous" limbs of the octopus
| are not distinct in the way that say, my friends Chris
| and Caroline are distinct people. So if this galaxy sized
| organism consisted of smaller units with similarly
| distinct properties, I think we'd say that's not a galaxy
| sized organism that's a culture of individuals.
| thisisnewnew wrote:
| think it's relative upward and downward in scale. an
| entity at universe scale might be moving similar speed to
| us in our 3d space
| tialaramex wrote:
| No, I assure you that the constant is not concerned with
| scale, we're easily able to check _that_. A bigger device
| does not make this constant larger or smaller, you may be
| able to get more accurate results but that scale is
| unaltered.
| quesera wrote:
| Good point. Of course this presumes that we understand
| the physics at that scale, and that there's nothing akin
| to a quantum tunneled nervous system, etc.
| jajko wrote:
| Not so early in the universe age, but who knows what
| happens in 10^10^10^10 years. Also organisms consume
| energy, but mechanism of consumption of some ultra
| massive central quasars is beyond my imagination (I know
| Marvel has Hunger character but thats not the level of
| detail and logic I mean).
| biot wrote:
| Maybe as an eventually consistent life form using
| extremely slow message passing. Though gravity becomes a
| major factor that would limit the size unless it's
| incredibly sparse.
|
| One of my favorite episodes of Love, Death, & Robots is
| "Swarm". Worth a watch.
| jamesjyu wrote:
| There is a great classic sci-fi book that explores this:
| https://www.amazon.com/Black-Cloud-Fred-
| Hoyle/dp/0140014667
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Atoms are relatively large and relatively dense in
| solids, atomic nuclei are small.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| How do you draw a distinction? The nucleus is the part of
| the atom that occupies space.
| shiandow wrote:
| The electrons are far better at occupying space. Or at
| least at keeping out other atoms, which is what counts.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The analog is no good because it assumes people have an
| intuitive understanding of the volume of the Earth, which
| basically 0 people do because it's stupidly absurdly
| counter-intuitive (like volume in general). So let's go
| for something way smaller. Imagine we take just one
| little 'cube' of Earth that's just 1 mile on each side.
| And let's start placing boxes in it that are 1 cubic foot
| in size, so about the size of a micro microwave. How many
| of these boxes would it take to fill our little cube? The
| math is simple, but the answer is no less stupefying or
| counter-intuitive. It's more than 147 billion!!
|
| Ok. Imagine we take those cubes that filled our 'little'
| cube of earth and taped them in one giant stack. That
| stack would not only reach to the Moon, but reach to the
| Moon 116 times over! In fact you'd be nearly able to
| reach Mars at its closest approach (34.8 million miles,
| vs 27.8 million miles for our box stack). And that's in 1
| cubic mile of volume. The volume of Earth is about 260
| billion cubic miles. To wrap up by getting back to golf
| balls - you can fit about 700 golf balls in 1 cubic ft.
|
| ------
|
| Actually a somewhat macabre example came to mind. How
| many humans could we fit in our little cubic mile? And
| the answer is literally all of us, many times over in
| fact! And that's in just one cubic mile of the 260
| billion total on Earth.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Is this going to be on the test, Professor?
| cestith wrote:
| We'd fit, but it sounds uncomfortable.
| oblio wrote:
| Hate me all you want for the last part of my comment, but
| I was trying to follow along. And then... non-metric :-[
| shiandow wrote:
| Atoms are large enough to have noticeable Brownian motion
| visible with an optical microscope.
|
| They're small but not impossibly so.
| fsckboy wrote:
| mmmm, not exactly. you cannot see atomic brownian motion
| with an optical microscope, what you can see is visible
| brownian motion of otherwise visible particles caused by
| their collisions with molecules/atoms. this says as much
| about the momentum/energy of the collisions as it does
| about the mass (which bears some relationship to the size
| which bears direct relation to optical visibility)
| dpkirchner wrote:
| That's actually how they chose the size of a golf ball.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about
| things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of
| a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference
| between a million and a billion is... about a billion."
| cestith wrote:
| A tenth of a percent is often a rounding error. So the
| difference between a million and a billion truly is about a
| billion.
|
| When the above isn't enough to light a bulb, I like
| introduce that as analogous to pennies.
|
| 1 penny is $0.01 10 pennies is $0.1 100 pennies is $1 1,000
| pennies is $10 10,000 pennies is $100 100,000 pennies is
| $1,000 1,000,000 pennies is $10,000 10,000,000 pennies is
| $100,000 100,000,000 pennies is $1,000,000 1,000,000,000
| pennies is $10,000,000
|
| Most people understand that ten million dollars is not just
| a different amount but a distinct kind of amount from ten
| thousand dollars. The powers of ten seem to become clearer
| with a smaller starting amount. Once they grasp the above,
| point out that the relationship is the same if everything
| starts 100 times as large.
|
| There's also a great one out there comparing 1,000 to 1
| million to 1 billion seconds, converted to years plus days.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Ran the numbers. The LHC would break even if the price of gold
| was $48 trillion trillion per ounce.
| orblivion wrote:
| Well, until they flood the market.
| bhaney wrote:
| At 10 picograms per year, that'll be a while
| Retr0id wrote:
| They just need to build a few billion LHCs to scale up
| production
| bhaney wrote:
| There are about 2.44*10^11 grams of gold in circulation.
| Let's say the LHC would need to produce 10% of that per
| year to "flood the market." With the current production
| rate of 10^-11 grams per year, we'd need 2.44*10^21 (2.44
| sextillion) LHCs operating simultaneously to flood the
| gold market.
|
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| With this process we could produce about 65.4g of gold
| with the energy needed to boil the entire ocean once to
| full vaporization.
|
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| as I have thought with the other numerous "boiled earth"
| comparisons i've read in the past few weeks : who cares?
| In what case is this a useful way to describe something
| to anyone? since when does a laymen comprehend the size
| of the earth in any meaningful way?
|
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to
| vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x
| 10^27 joules is too abstract.
|
| 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.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| And remember, 1 AU is about 997.3 billion bananas laid
| end to end.
| jaeckel wrote:
| In a straight line?
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Yes, laid end to end, after they've been bent.
|
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| How do you define the major axis of a banana?
| nandomrumber wrote:
| The longest dimension.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Glad they didn't subscribe to "move fast, break things"..
| switchbak wrote:
| With that kind of potential, you could get an OpenAI-
| sized valuation!
| bgirard wrote:
| 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.
| cenamus wrote:
| 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
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| dachris wrote:
| 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.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| 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..
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The same mechanism that lets you convert gold-197 to
| mercury does in fact work to convert the equivalent
| isotope (that is, 1u lighter than gold) of the element
| left of gold on the periodic table to gold.
|
| 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.)
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Start with Tungsten?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > 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?
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| svachalek wrote:
| 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.
| smolder wrote:
| 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
| HPsquared wrote:
| You'd probably need to build another facility to actually
| extract the gold.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Sounds like a factorio expansion pack.
| sdsd wrote:
| On the other hand, it's only doing this accidentally, right?
| It could probably be optimized further if the goal were just
| transmutation. Who knows, maybe we could get all the way down
| to only 10 trillion per ounce! /s
| pipo234 wrote:
| I just saw the price for lead jump up!
| highwaylights wrote:
| Shhh keep that to yourself. He might even fund science again!
| pier25 wrote:
| hard to compete when stars do it for free
| smcin wrote:
| Tariff Alpha Centauri!
| dmichulke wrote:
| Gold is exempt from tariffs
| computerdork wrote:
| Agreed, down with Alpha-Centaurian gold!
| HappySweeney wrote:
| The stable isotope of gold is produced by the collision of
| two neutron stars, which is unlikely to happen in our
| stellar vicinity any time soon.
| jajko wrote:
| This is something I don't get - solar system is say 5
| billions years old (a bit less I know). Universe is
| roughly 13 billions, and our Milky way almost the same.
|
| 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?
| malfist wrote:
| Stars produce beyond Fe during supernova.
|
| 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
| vlovich123 wrote:
| There's also a lot of open questions about how stars and
| galaxies form and our current models are known to be
| extremely incomplete based on the JWST data and our
| knowledge of the upper bound of how old the universe is
| from repeated measurements of the CMB & other data. So
| there's definitely a lot unknown about the state of stars
| in the early universe and how everyday elements we know &
| love actually came to be in the quantities they did.
| mannykannot wrote:
| In what appears to be a fairly recent discovery, it seems
| that flares on magnetars can produce gold and other heavy
| elements, and these are likely more frequent than neutron
| star collisions.
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-
| stars/magnet...
| glenstein wrote:
| We don't have to wait for any new collisions. Plenty have
| already happened and left their debris on the "cosmic
| floor", so to speak.
| yibg wrote:
| Can't the s process produce gold too?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process
| to11mtm wrote:
| Sure, but even that article shows that it's a small
| fraction.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| How many years of inflation til that's realistic?
|
| 10,000?
| kashif wrote:
| lol, and this is deflationary for gold...
| ozornin wrote:
| Profitability is just a matter of time. Uber was not profitable
| for years, too. Just wait until the economy of scale kicks in.
| Alchemy is here to stay. Element conversion is only getting
| started!
| HPsquared wrote:
| Finally a real world use for the "factory factory
| constructor".
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Dont forget network effects and bandwidth. Once there is an
| AI MCP the share price will blast off.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >but transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many
| alchemists - is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
|
| The ultimate philosopher's stone.
| koolba wrote:
| The medieval alchemists were correct. They just couldn't get
| their furnaces hot enough!
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Just need to scale it by trillions to make 1 ounce, but
| transmutation of lead to gold - the dream of many alchemists -
| is now just a by product of particle accelerators.
|
| Quick, somebody call nVidia!! They already integrate
| accelerators into their GPUs and they have scaling better than
| Moore's law!!
| ugh123 wrote:
| If Newton were alive today..
| cma wrote:
| Have we already done it before with thermonuclear weapons?
| timcobb wrote:
| Have we transmutated lead to gold in other ways?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| No, but in the Medieval days, it was a common hobby to try to
| figure it out, called Alchemy. They figured lead and gold
| were otherwise so similar, why can't you just... convert it?
| Because it requires nuclear physics instruments, or neutron
| stars. Some suspected it might be complicated, maybe
| impossibly so. Imagine going back to the 1500s and telling
| one of those guys "yes, it is possible, but it's not as
| simple as melting lead and mixing in some gold starter...
| first, you need to understand superconductors,
| supercomputers, subatomic physics..."
| stogot wrote:
| Should have called it ALCHEMY instead of ALICE. Missed
| opportunity
| lurk2 wrote:
| Is this even news? I remember reading about this ages ago.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I thought bonbardment like that led to made radioactive gold
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Considering that this was an unlooked-for byproduct, I'm sure
| those numbers could go way up if they opted to pursue this as a
| primary goal.
| rurban wrote:
| You forgot that those smaller nuclei only existed for
| microseconds. It doesnt scale at all, just tricks.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Sorta buried in there, but they do note that this is not the
| first time the transmutation of lead to gold has been
| accomplished, just the first time it's been accomplished as near
| misses in a particle accelerator.
| cschmid wrote:
| Well technically, the starting points were always other
| elements like bismuth, and not lead. I believe the authors
| checked, and noted that in the paper:
| https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.111.0...
| )
| pfdietz wrote:
| Spallation on a lead target will produce a wide range of
| elements, including gold.
| abetaha wrote:
| So those alchemists of many years ago probably had a collider as
| well.
| mcphage wrote:
| I remember there being an episode of Ancient Aliens (or some
| similar show) wondering whether the reason Aliens were coming to
| Earth was for our gold--and then at the end of the entire
| episode, they spoke to a scientist who said "Yeah, if you want
| some Gold, they can just _make_ it in a particle accelerator ". I
| thought it was pretty great--an entire show about something
| outlandish, and then just blow the entire idea up at the very
| end.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| F fusion! Alchemy is real. We're rich!
| ck2 wrote:
| fun-fact: kilonovas can produce "earth sized" chunks of gold
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/27/world/kilanova-gold-2016-scn-...
| pfdietz wrote:
| There are much easier ways to convert lead into gold.
|
| If neutrons could be made an order of magnitude cheaper (hello,
| Helion?), conversion of Hg-196 into gold by neutron capture might
| even be economical. The isotope would have to be separated but
| there's an interesting way of doing that using magnetic
| separation of electronically excited atoms. The total gold
| production would be just a fraction of current global gold
| production from mines.
| agildehaus wrote:
| Gold-197? The article does not specify.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Au-203 (it's in the article).
| moomin wrote:
| Ok, that's one item on the Alchemic Programme checked off. What's
| problem #2? I think it's immortality.
| billiam wrote:
| Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by
| nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute
| Uranium into Plutonium.
| Havoc wrote:
| LHC self-funding secured!
| keepamovin wrote:
| Using this kind of high energy light, here emitted by the near-
| miss collisions themselves, might be a way to reduce
| radioactivity in contaminated sites. The photos could knock out a
| few protons and neutrons transforming the Uranium or Plutonium or
| whatever into less radioactive nuclei.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the ability to
| transform one element into any other element was cheap and
| readily available. Probably everything would be destroyed in no
| time.
| mattheww wrote:
| Did my thesis research at Brookhaven National Lab, home of the
| Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which is the predecessor
| of the heavy ion program at the LHC.
|
| While there, one of the more senior scientists relayed an
| exchange from an ongoing review of the program. At the time, RHIC
| was colliding gold in the heavy ion program.
|
| One of the reviewers asked if RHIC could save money by switching
| to a cheaper element, like lead. None of the RHIC representatives
| knew what to say. I don't remember the exact numbers, but RHIC
| used something like < 1 milligram of gold over the lifetime of
| the program.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Well, if they had swithced to lead maybe they'd have generate
| _multiple_ milligrams of gold by now?
| EGreg wrote:
| "Detects"
|
| Probably not the amount the aLCHemists expected centuries ago...
| but hey. It's something!
| tarkin2 wrote:
| If this could be scaled up then I wonder what would happen to
| worldwide wealth. It's amusing that the biggest, I assume, store
| of gold, Switzerland, would have the tool to make it
| hypothetically worthless. The stuff of sci-fi novels.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| There's something glibly poetic about having finally found a way
| to convert lead into gold, but it turns out it's much more
| efficient and lucrative to build tons of graphics cards and power
| them and consume tons of water to create digital currencies for
| what is essentially numerous pyramid schemes.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to
| discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the
| argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we
| were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when
| people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there,
| but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a
| limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and engineering.
|
| We have literal alchemy, but we don't have the capability to make
| useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don't know how to, but
| that it is not practical. How much more will material science,
| chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical
| (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think
| our rate of _technological_ advancement will continue in these
| fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not
| immediately applicable to technology.
|
| Where I think there is an absolute abundance of applicable and
| practical knowledge to be collected is in the fields of
| biochemistry and biology. We haven't even scratched the surface
| there. We may never find a way to travel faster than light but if
| we can adapt our bodies to last for hundreds or thousands of
| years in stasis it may not matter. To me, being able to easily
| manipulate biology is so much more dangerous than nuclear
| proliferation. Anyways, not an expert of any of these fields.
| glenstein wrote:
| I agree that there's an interesting question how far we can
| lean into this space of applying the knowledge and technology
| capability we have, because for however far ahead of the outer
| limits of our capabilities get in the outer limits of our
| understanding from that matter, there's a frontier of
| applicability that also has to advance in the wake of those.
| It's interesting to consider if there's any principle that
| articulates the relationship between that frontier and the
| frontier of discovery.
|
| In some senses, I've thought we'd hit a wall in part just
| because of the highly visible challenges to democracy, the wall
| on processing power of computers, how enshittification has
| caught up services and taken them down from the inside, not
| being able to pull off things like high-speed rail, the halting
| progress of self-driving vehicles, or just realizing that the
| buildings that exist in cities are going to stay there for a
| long time and not be subject to any overnight cyberpunk
| makeover.
|
| But I think if our era was not known for the threats to
| democracy, pandemics, and war, we might have otherwise have had
| enough breathing space to remember this historical era as one
| of true, truly major advances in the frontiers of science.
| There's plenty on that front that would have been "enough" to
| mark this historical era as a distinct one. CRISPR and AI, by
| themselves, are enough to be the signature achievements of an
| era. And so far as it relates back to your point, I suppose on
| balance I would say I feel that the advances we have made don't
| yet testify to an imminent slowdown in our ability to translate
| from a frontier of our knowledge into applicability. So I
| suppose I understand your idea but feel a little bit more
| optimistic.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| > How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe
| even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge?
| Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological
| advancement will continue in these fields.
|
| Strong disagree. We have only scratched the surface of material
| science and chemistry; we are typically working with the bulk
| properties of relativity simple materials.
|
| There's a very wide design space of metamaterials and molecular
| machines that we have not explored.
| tim333 wrote:
| > approaching is more a limit... of resources and engineering
|
| Pah. The singularity is scheduled for around next Tuesday and
| we haven't even made a Dyson sphere yet.
| slicktux wrote:
| It's pretty amazing to know that the golden necklace around my
| neck came from the tremendous force of a star dying!
| chuckadams wrote:
| And for that matter, so did a lot of _you_.
| ziofill wrote:
| Missed opportunity to name the experiment "Multinucleon Induced
| Dissociation in Accelerator Systems" (MIDAS)
| mattxxx wrote:
| Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in
| return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is
| Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange.
| kramer2718 wrote:
| Finally! Isaac Newton is pleased.
| macawfish wrote:
| The means have finally justified the end!
| zkmon wrote:
| At what cost?
| benlivengood wrote:
| Now if they could collect antiprotons and store them that would
| be pretty interesting.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I wouldn't buy one. But fun photo at least. Looks like something
| that took a long time to build but yet again showed how incapable
| man really is.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| So everything is a wave, and it's the interaction with a
| conscious mind that somehow freezes things into reality?
| ineedasername wrote:
| Next up on the Leaning Channel, Gold Rush: CERN Edition
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I have already mentioned that, but such a grandiose waste of
| money is terrible.
|
| We pour billions in these accelerators without any hope of using
| the findings. At the same time other branches of science (even
| physics) are scrapping some money around.
|
| CERN is a fabulous place (I did my PhD there so yes, shitting my
| old bed), but this is the fabulous of a First Class or private
| jet flight around the world without any consideration for others.
| vladms wrote:
| I don't think "the findings" are the only thing that comes out
| of CERN. In the end we are communicating (and doing many other
| things) over something that originated as a CERN innovation
| (https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web).
|
| Not to mention the indirect benefits such as education and
| networking of the scientists (which, if you talk with people
| there, seem to be an integral part of the mission even if maybe
| not explicit as it could be)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Don't get me wrong: CERN is fantastic, the summer student
| program is (or at least was) a revelation. The place, the
| people, everything.
|
| But it costs a disproportionate amount of money for what it
| brings to humanity. Budgets in science are tight and CERN is
| a real blackhole
| jmyeet wrote:
| Believe it or not, this sort of thing is actually relevant to
| far-future galactic colonization.
|
| The view we have from science fiction is largely of colonizing
| planets (eg Star Wars) but this makes almost no sense. Alien
| worlds are likely to be hostile. Just look at any rocky world in
| our Solar System other than Earth. Gravity wells are incredibly
| inconvenient. So if you have to live in a habitat anyway because
| of a hostile environment, you may as well live in space.
|
| And that's where we once again return to the Dyson Swarm.
|
| In this future, stars become incredibly valuable and planets are
| little more than a source of raw material. The energy output from
| a star is almost incompehensibly high. It's estimated that human
| civilization uses between 10^10 and 10^11 Watts of energy.
| Roughly 10^16 Watts of energy hit the Earth from the Sun. That
| would be a Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization. But the Earth only gets
| less than a billionth of the Sun's output.
|
| If you used all of the Sun's output, that would be roughly 10^26
| Watts of energy, called a K2 civilization.
|
| We simply cannot comprehend what you could do with this much
| energy. One application is simply to turn that energy into heavy
| elements that may not otherwise be present around that star in a
| method that is basically a scaled up particle accelerator.
| crypto_is_king wrote:
| aLCHemy
| steamrolled wrote:
| There's a lot of folks doing financial calculations in this
| thread, but keep in mind that this produced an unstable isotope
| of gold with a half-life measured in seconds. This has been done
| before. Even before you get to any economic calculus, you need to
| find a way to make that one stable isotope (out of about 40
| known).
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