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SCIENTISTS ACCIDENTALLY TURN LEAD INTO GOLDSir Isaac Newton is one of the most famous and important scientists the world has known, making fundamental discoveries in the worlds of mathematics and physics. He was less successful at alchemy, trying and failing again and again to formulate a recipe for turning lead into gold. He later took a government job as master of the Royal Mint, where he turned his skills to fighting counterfeiters. Maybe he was just ahead of his time - modern physicists have finally stumbled on a (very expensive) way to turn lead into (a teeny tiny amount of) gold. -Editor 
Bicycling through the Large Hadron Collider during its hiatus in 2020 Medieval alchemists dreamed of transmuting lead into gold. Today, we know that lead and gold are different elements, and no amount of chemistry can turn one into the other. But our modern knowledge tells us the basic difference between an atom of lead and an atom of gold: the lead atom contains exactly three more protons. So can we create a gold atom by simply pulling three protons out of a lead atom? As it turns out, we can. But it's not easy. While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram. The ALICE scientists calculate that, while they are colliding beams of lead nuclei, they produce about 89,000 gold nuclei per second. They also observed the production of other elements: thallium, which is what you get when you take one proton from lead, as well as mercury (two protons). Once a lead nucleus has transformed by losing protons, it is no longer on the perfect orbit that keeps it circulating inside the vacuum beam pipe of the Large Hadron Collider. In a matter of microseconds it will collide with the walls. This effect makes the beam less intense over time. So for scientists, the production of gold at the collider is in fact more of a nuisance than a blessing.
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Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: Subscribe All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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