[1] Newton famously spent around 30 years of his life on alchemy ( the other stuff were really side projects )
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’…”
It was long known it can be achieved, but it's prohibitively expensive :)
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
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.
Edit: this was a joke, in case it wasn’t clear.
Just a tidbit.
Just need to scale it by 1000000000000x to get a money printer.
> 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.
But what stuck with me was this idea of ordering elements on demand.
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).
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.
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.
[0] https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-100/gold-production-...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
But as the sibling poster states, no, they didn't know.
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.
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.
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...
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.So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.
But that’s just 1 vote. ;)
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.
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. ;)
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.
1,000 billion billion gold nuclei per gram of gold.
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.
Being able to detect these tiny amounts is nuts to me.
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.
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?
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.
Or consider the humongous fungus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae
One of my favorite episodes of Love, Death, & Robots is “Swarm”. Worth a watch.
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.
They're small but not impossibly so.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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?
The ultimate philosopher's stone.
Quick, somebody call nVidia!! They already integrate accelerators into their GPUs and they have scaling better than Moore's law!!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/27/world/kilanova-gold-2016-scn-...
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.
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.
Probably not the amount the aLCHemists expected centuries ago… but hey. It’s something!
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.
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.
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.
Pah. The singularity is scheduled for around next Tuesday and we haven't even made a Dyson sphere yet.
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.
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)
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
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.
datadrivenangel•8h ago